Worlding Platform Urbanism: Digital Informalities in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia
Topics: Digital Geographies
, Urban Geography
, Economic Geography
Keywords: platform urbanism, digital growth machine, Jakarta
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 19
Authors:
Samuel Nowak, University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract
The last decade has presaged a massive re-organization of the global economy around the extraction and manipulation of big data by digital platforms. For cities, this has entailed both managing political fallout over the self-proclaimed ‘disruptive’ effects of platform firms, while simultaneously attempting to attract platform capital investment in pursuit of economic growth—a digital growth machine. Increasingly, however, platform capital investment is shifting outside the Euro-American core, as Silicon Valley venture capital and tech firms seek new sites of data and rent extraction in cities of the Global South. This geographical shift poses not only empirical questions about the variegated forms of urban restructuring and “worlding” practices (Roy and Ong, 2011) aimed at accommodating platform capital, but also epistemological ones about the limitations of extant theories for understanding platform urbanism in post-colonial cities. In this paper, I advance a conceptual framework to address these dual questions, integrating platform studies and post-colonial urban theory. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, I show how the city-region’s digital growth machine has relied upon pre-existing ‘informal’ labor and transport markets, the strategic regulatory inaction of the Indonesian state, and cultural practices of mutual aid. Gig workers, meanwhile, have developed distinct practices of infrapolitics, reshaping platform intermediation for their own purposes of everyday resistance and collective survival. In conclusion, I argue that these findings stress the need for new theoretical frameworks that can extend the current Eurocentrism of the existing platform urbanism literature.
Worlding Platform Urbanism: Digital Informalities in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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