Turning urban workplaces into assets
Topics: Economic Geography
, Urban Geography
, Digital Geographies
Keywords: Work, digital, urban, asset
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17
Authors:
Lizzie Richardson, University of Frankfurt
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
Workplace flexibility, whether associated with an office or a software platform, is a ubiquitous and mundane characteristic of contemporary cities such as London with digital technologies. Flexible office space and urban “q-commerce” platforms - the rapid delivery of low order goods from a local “dark store” – serve as examples to consider the place of such urban labour in capitalism with digital technologies. If historically analyses of capitalist growth and the associated emergence of societal inequalities focused on the commodification of labour and extraction of surplus value, contemporary understandings place more agency in the expansion of capitalism through financial and logistical operations. Digital technologies can be understood as central to this as an apparatus for and subject of finance, as well as their foundational role in processes of data-based calculation underpinning contemporary logistics. Yet even if labour is no longer the central agentive point for capitalist growth, it nonetheless remains a stubbornly material processes whose observation can provide significant insight into contemporary tendencies of capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the turning of flexible urban workplaces into assets, which the paper argues articulate a particular confluence of financial and logistical operations through digital technologies. The success or failure of offices and platforms as sites for labour flexibility is governed not by any singular productive logic but at least equally by their “assetization” as spaces of coordination, a process that seeks to ensure workplace capacity for future income, act as collateral and bear debt.
Turning urban workplaces into assets
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides