CCRN: Platforms & Infrastructure
Struggles to Embed Food Delivery Platforms in the Communicative City: A Comparative Study of Beijing and Singapore
Prof Jack Linchuan Qiu
National University of Singapore jacklqiu@nus.edu.sg
Dr Sophie Ping Sun
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences sophiesunping@gmail.com
COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality. Among digital companies, food delivery platforms — such as Meituan in China and GrabFood in Singapore — have grown more rapidly than others. Does this mean food delivery platforms would become a new engine for job creation, economic recovery, and communicative urban renewal? Or is the opposite true, when AI-equipped platforms become so powerful that they evade social responsibilities and government regulation, thereby leaving the communicative city in the dust of "platform capitalism”?
We focus on food delivery platforms that have become an indispensable urban infrastructure during the pandemic. Drawing from interview data, news reports, and online discussions, we attempt to demonstrate and explain the parallels between struggles in Beijing and Singapore regarding wages, working conditions, and algorithmic control. Attention will be paid to the differences within this digital labor sector and its varying relationship with deliverers and regulators who have to confront the platforms, while relying on them to put bread on the table, as seen through struggles and debates in Singapore during April-July 2020 and in Beijing following the publication of the contentious article “Food Deliverers Trapped in the System (外卖骑手困在系统里)” in September 2020.
Towards Materialist Approaches to Digital Platforms, Urban Space, and Communication Research
Dr Angela Ke Li
National University of Singapore
cnmlk@nus.edu.sg
This paper revolves around Didi Chuxing’s initiative of volunteer fleets during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. As a timely response to the suspension and reduction of public transportation systems in many cities, this initiative was designed for offering free rides to front-line health workers. By doing so, Didi produced an impression that private platforms can provide better urban mobility than public transportation systems in a time of crisis, which earned it huge social applause. Nevertheless, I suggest that it is nothing more than the latest effort of Didi’s social corporate responsibility campaign, which aims to push corporate interests under the flag of public value and the social good. Through an innovative combination of Marxian materialism and new materialism, this paper makes two theoretical interventions. First, it suggests that the idea of communication needs to be extended to incorporate the material aspects of circulation and mobility of goods and people, which is particularly pertinent to the pandemic time. Second, it highlights that the threats of platform capitalism not only lie in the invasions of private interests into the public sectors, but also how this encroachment is shielded from public criticism through platform capitalism’s immaterial efforts.
How to Collaboratively Research the Future of the Communicative City in a Post-Pandemic Age
Mr Stephan Hawranick Serra
Independent Researcher
thehousinglab@yahoo.com
New technologies add alternative vantage points to existing conditions, processes or systems. They complement, supplement or alter them through projects and conquests. The industrial age of the XIX and XX c. brought new forms of energy, mobility and communication by transforming natural resources and human labor. With it, the rural exodus crammed into dense, unsanitary urban settlements. No wonder disease and virus spread where humans cluster in ever shrinking and promiscuous spaces, alongside our protein-resource livestock, raised in equally dense coops.
The economy of a city, by Greek etymology, is Household Management. The present Smart City concept has exploited surveillance, distribution, gig enterprises and business monopolies. Even if social networking communicated and coordinated some activities, the pandemic heightened livelihood deficiencies for daily human survival, care and income.
After the first decades of the XXI c., our digital age powers of connecting, computing and producing can now allow us to grow and run our cities along rhizome and fractal growth patterns with neuron circuitry distribution analogies using virtual reality panoramas of procedures and effects over time. Cities will continue to thrive as centers of exchange, culture and collaboration. However, now they can also easily multiply and diversify. Architects, designers and planners with social responsibility can visualize new collectively operated, cooperatively managed and ecologically sustained cities of the future better outfitted, tailored and adapted.