Platform capitalism in the city: itinerant life, digital rentierism and precarious work

Abstract

This special issue is the result of collaborative research carried out within the framework of two projects: LIKEALOCAL: Sociospatial impacts of Airbnb. Tourism and transformation in four Spanish cities - RTI2018-093479-A-I00 (2019-2021) and ONDEMANDCITY: Platform capitalism, digital workers and the techification of everyday life in the contemporary city -PID2021-122482OB-I00 (2022-2025). The papers in this special issue analyse key issues of the digital turn in urban studies, focusing on the pre-eminence of platforms in the tourism-led economic and social restructuring of our cities. This 'big platformisation of cities' has generated changes in urban lifestyles, consumption patterns and forms of capital accumulation, impacting on trade relations, forms of mobility and labor market shifts in the city. Therefore, theoretical concepts such as 'platform economy', 'platform capitalism' or 'platform urbanism' are being used to explain current shifts in the dynamics of urban capital accumulation, leaving behind innocuous ones such as 'collaborative economy' or 'smart city'. Such conceptual twists reflect the analytical relevance of platform-mediated labor and the mechanisms of surplus value extraction from platforms to fully unveil the spatial and social transformations in the city. Specifically, the papers of this special issue follow three fundamental themes: The role of digital platforms in the itinerant lifes of urban dwellers, the dynamics of tourism rentierism in the platform age, and the precariousness of labour in digital capitalism. Taken together, these multidisciplinary perspectives illustrate the relevance of understanding how digital platforms shape contemporary urban life through their interactions with space, time, landscape and urban societies.