Digital Geography and Society最新文献

The evolution of the collaborative economy depends on market-specific prerequisites, such as a consumer base with purchasing power, accessible Internet connectivity, digitised payment mechanisms and new regulatory frameworks. However, countries located in the Global South, such as Ecuador, face challenges in adapting to these requirements due to the presence of infrastructure deficiencies, shortcomings in the local financial ecosystem and regulatory gaps, which impede the maturation of digital industries. However, the unprecedented global economic upheaval stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the imposition of international lockdowns and social distancing mandates, has precipitated the unbridled proliferation of digital platforms and the gig economy. In this unregulated environment, platform workers face intricate labour rights dynamics, marked by income volatility, scarce benefits and an environment rife with precarity and exploitative conditions.

This paper aims to answer how the gig economy was installed and developed in Ecuador before and during the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. More specifically, we will try to answer the question of what have been the main challenges and barriers faced by platform workers and platforms in adhering to Fairwork principles in an unregulated context. Based on more than seventy semi-structured interviews and ethnographic material collected between 2020 and 2021, we provide an overview of Ecuador's gig economy and an in-depth examination of the institutional, regulatory, and organisational landscape characterising this country in order to identify the main challenges and obstacles to establishing and enforcing fair work standards. This analysis helped us understand the difficulties in implementing Fairwork principles and come up with practical suggestions for policy and regulation improvements in Ecuador and similar situations.

The growing literature on housing financialisation and particularly the financialisation of private rental sector residential housing offers nuanced analysis of how international financial actors increasingly shape housing markets and systems across the globe. Drawing inspiration from Maalsen’s (2022) work on the hack, this paper suggests that corporate landlord investment in the private rental sector can be understood as a process of disruptive consolidation. Disruptive consolidation is introduced as a useful conceptual lens for connecting a) the disrupted urban contexts which institutional investors target for speculation, b) the practices of consolidation that institutional investors pursue in establishing their portfolios as corporate landlords, and c) the ensuing disruptive impacts for housing policy, urban space, and tenants’ lives. While post-crash housing financialisation and the disruption of the private rental sector are often connected to the application of digital technologies to screen, surveille, and assetise tenants, I suggest that the digital/material dynamics of housing financialisation also afford ambivalent opportunities for both research and resistance. The paper applies a combination of desktop-based digital research methods to document how private rental sector consolidation has unfolded in Dublin and the role that the state has played in setting this dynamic in motion. I make use of digital research methods as a tactical appropriation of digital technologies to show how post-crash Dublin is an emblematic example of disruption through consolidation, demonstrating how this framework can be applied to connect urban and political economy approaches to housing and its financialisation. I conclude by briefly signposting how disruptive consolidation raises pressing questions for housing policy in Dublin and elsewhere.

This paper proposes and explores the idea of incidental governmentality. We argue that incidental governmentality offers a creative context to critically scrutinise the changing rationalities of government in the age of Big Tech and digital surveillance. Incidental governmentality exhibits the same pastoral character as biopolitics: as governmental power is realised through the provision of life affirming public goods and services including improved public health, financial security, and social connection. However, incidental governmentality is incidental to the extent that its governmental reasons are secondary to that of its corporate rationalities. This paper charts the historical origins of incidental forms governmentality and the value of applying this theoretical perspective to emerging governmental forms. Analysis outlines the nature and critical implications of incidental forms of governmentality and draws out its distinctions with corporate governmentality, corporate social responsibility, and algorithmic governmentality. This paper utilises the idea of incidental governmentality to make sense of the “governmental” interventions of Big-Tech companies such as Facebook and Google in response to COVID-19 in the UK. Through this case study analysis considers the processes that enabled the rapid mobilisation of Big Tech within public health initiatives and what this can tell us about the political and geographical implications of incidental governmentality.

Millions of workers are employed in Indonesia's gig economy, with evidence of both benefits and problems. This paper provides a first systematic collation of evidence using the five Fairwork principles of decent gig work. Based on data from interviews and secondary sources, it focuses on transportation-related gig work. It finds positives in terms of gross pay levels, action by platforms on work-related risks and harassment of women workers, and some recognition of some worker groups. But it also finds action needed on below-minimum-wage net earnings, long hours, lack of employee status and social protections for workers, inadequate processes for appeal of disciplinary decisions, and constraints on worker voice. The paper ends with recommendations for actions to be taken by government, platforms and consumers in Indonesia.

With the spread of digitalization, the spaces and imaginaries of healthcare are fundamentally changing, due, in part, to an increasing uptake of immersive technologies. Building on previous ethnographic work on the nature of placed care (Ivanova, 2020a; Simonsen, 2020) this paper explores two cases of immersive technology advances in the Netherlands and Denmark to better understand contemporary developments in digital healthcare, the virtual environments they afford, and the immersive experiences they seek to evoke. First, we offer ‘immersive imaginaries’ as a heuristic for exploring how ideas of immersion, placeless-ness, and futurity intersect as key stakeholders in the healthcare innovation industry articulate socio-technical solutions to healthcare problems, and to what effects. Second, and in drawing inspiration from feminist STS on care, we build on Ivanova's (2020b) conceptual work on ‘post place care’ to analyse the relations between place, technology, and care in experiences of immersion. These two points form the contribution of the paper and its ambition to engage with ongoing discussions in the field of digital geography about how to analyse and theorise digital spaces of care.

The rise of platform capitalism has been instrumental in facilitating capital accumulation at scale through the commodification of previously untradable services and spaces. Digital real estate technology-based platforms or ‘PropTech’ (Property Technology) have transformed how housing is produced, traded, and managed, augmenting existing and creating new housing markets in ways that are still evolving. While ‘home-sharing’ platform Airbnb has become synonymous with ‘peers’ offering residential accommodation online, more traditional forms of house sharing between ‘flat mates’ have also been digitised by global platforms. In this paper we trace the evolution of Australian share housing platform ‘Flatmates.com.au’ from the online equivalent of a campus noticeboard advertising share houses to a sophisticated real estate platform owned by global, PropTech giant Real Estate Advertising ‘REA Group’. In doing so we examine how ‘platform logic’ i.e., converting user-inputted data to information to asset; exponential growth through network expansion and connectivity – has integrated the social practices and relationships defining share households within the global real estate market. The paper contributes to critical literature on the inter-relationships between platform capitalism and housing, focusing specifically on the share housing sector in Australian cities.

Forest monitoring programs have become widespread in Amazon Basin countries. Using GPS artifacts, smartphones, drones, and other technologies, international environmental non-government organizations (IENGOs) propose these programs as tools to control and stop deforestation events—and thus of climate change mitigation. These also seem like ideal initiatives for IENGOs to collaborate with Indigenous organizations, responding to calls to include their knowledge in climate governance. I analyze forest/territorial monitoring programs created by the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) and its member organizations in Ecuador and Peru. Scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and digital geographies has demonstrated how digital environmental technologies and environmental relations and politics can co-produce and shape one another. It has also referred to the historically exploitative relationships that technoscientific projects have enforced towards Indigenous peoples, and the potential of digital tools for emancipatory goals. I argue that forest monitoring programs and technologies co-produce forms of climate and territorial politics in Amazonia. Through forest monitoring programs, Indigenous leaders and organizations imagine and enact territorial defense, or a politics founded on integral territorial ontologies. That is, they see the programs as tools to strengthen their autonomy, to build the capacities of leaders at all scales of political organization, and to support their claims for territorial rights. For them, technologies can make Indigenous cosmovisions or ancestral knowledges visible. However, these programs can also reinforce a politics (of IENGOs) where territories are spaces with strict boundaries and exclusive rights, and which encourages open-access information, thus potentially threatening Indigenous autonomy. Thus, I discuss the intrinsically contradictory impact of monitoring technologies, as the conceptions of territories as lifeworlds, and the embeddedness of ancestral knowledges in them, further exceed their possibilities. Conclusions highlight the importance of attending to Indigenous territorial defense to understand how (new) technologies and society shape each other, and the many implications of climate change responses to justice issues.

This work offers a reflection on children's caring practices as participants of digital fieldwork. I interrogate and illustrate how children might offer a different appreciation of care as a practice in digitally-mediated research. Examining digitally-mediated research with children participants reveals invisible caring expressions during the research process as doing digital fields is complex, overlooking various aspects of care throughout the research process. I propose a paucity to appreciate children's caring practices amidst the uncertainty of digital fieldwork and refresh our cherishing of such agency amidst thinking. Through video calls with slum-dwelling Filipino children (9–12 years old), I narrate how children demonstrated their versions of caring practices. Findings discuss: 1) The audio-visual experience and children's curiosity and criticisms; 2) Children's creative caring practices through symbolic expressions; and 3) negotiated transnational care through digitally-mediated research. This paper emphasises that caring through the digital platforms is a multi-layered practice that is not only demonstrated by adults but also enacted by children in their own means. This study invites further engagement on digital children's geographies in disentangling children's roles in digitally-mediated research.

The values people ascribe to their interactions with and within the environment are essential to inform justice and sustainability transformations. The development of many of these values unfolds through enjoying so-called cultural ecosystem services (CES) such as outdoor recreation, landscape aesthetics or environmental education. A growing body of literature is improving the assessment of the multiple ways that people value human and non-human relations arising when enjoying CES. Yet, the geo-temporal-demographic patterns of values distribution and the lessons that can be derived are to be consistently analysed within this relational framework. Building on a visual and textual content analysis of social media (SM) data geotagged in a peri-urban park of Barcelona, Spain, this research explores the potential of analysing the associated metadata (such as geotag, timestamp and social media users' demographics – i.e., performed gender and residency) in order to develop a better understanding of the linkages between people's values and the situated context of their construction. Our results show trends in relational CES values distribution along and between the analysed spatial, temporal, and demographic dimensions. In particular, despite there being a multiplicity of values revealed across the whole case-study area, to enjoy contemplative CES, such as spiritual or cognitive value, people need to move away from highly frequented areas and prefer specific times of the day, respectively evening or afternoon. Locals show a higher preference to visit the park on weekends compared to non-locals, while women-performing users show a significantly higher drop in their CES benefits uptake compared to men-performing users at night. In addition to providing novel and fine-grained information for transformative practices toward justice and sustainability, this study highlights the importance of complementing CES studies employing SM with metadata analysis to improve our understanding of the relationship between the real and the more-than-real.

Platform labour has established itself as a new form of work in recent years. The platforms themselves advertise the flexibility and freedom of being an independent contractor as beneficial characteristics of their working arrangements. However, existing studies show that these promises do not always correspond to workers' lived experiences. While manifold research discusses the often precarious working conditions of established platform workers, less is known about gaining access to gig work in the first place. This paper draws attention to onboarding processes in the place-based gig economy. From a feminist geography perspective and building on geographies of affect, this paper analyses the process of getting a first paid gig, focusing on how emotions shape platform workers' daily lives. Through autoethnography, I reflect on my own experiences of trying to establish myself as paid platform worker. Contrary to common assumptions, I argue that access to the place-based gig economy is not necessarily straightforward. The paper shows how the labour mediation processes implemented by the platforms create in- and exclusions from the beginning. By letting the workers chase a first gig, the platform capitalises on extended unpaid labour, which is key in maintaining the value production in the gig economy itself.