Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
The Smart City in Motion: Food Delivery Apps as Mobile Infrastructure in Seoul
Deeply embedded in cities, digital platforms have become important in coordinating urban processes. Notably, apps and platforms, hailed for playing a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating food delivery for immobilised populations, continue to proliferate. Ordering food using a mobile app is now an everyday urban practice. By generating and governing flows of people, food, money, and information within cities, delivery apps influence urban life. Attending to the contingent and relational ways that food delivery apps operate and remake cities, I consider app-based food delivery as a moving assemblage of humans and more-than-humans that forms a distinct, if fluid, urban infrastructure. With a focus on Baemin, the most used South Korean food app, this thesis explores how the ongoing creation of this emergent infrastructure contributes to a particular version of the smart city. Drawing on critical scholarship of smart cities, infrastructures, mobilities, and digital platforms, I propose that Baemin mobilises urban entities through its infrastructural operations, giving rise to the concept of the ‘smart city in motion’—a mobile and mobilised smart city. This concept foregrounds the smart city as it is activated, sustained, and experienced through embodied and digital mobility practices, which amount to smart city infrastructures in the making. To study the often-overlooked operations of app-based mobility infrastructures, I employ a multimethod mobile ethnography that combines autoethnography as a Baemin courier, walkthrough analysis of the Baemin’s worker-facing app, interviews with Baemin couriers and platform creators, and smartphone GPS tracking of delivery activities. Through empirical analysis, I develop a distinct picture of the smart city in motion, primarily drawn from my on-the-move encounters with urban actors, from couriers, dark kitchens, apps, and doorsteps to delivery robots. My analysis highlights the diverse lived experiences of couriers, many of whom are ordinary urban ...
The Smart City in Motion: Food Delivery Apps as Mobile Infrastructure in Seoul
Deeply embedded in cities, digital platforms have become important in coordinating urban processes. Notably, apps and platforms, hailed for playing a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating food delivery for immobilised populations, continue to proliferate. Ordering food using a mobile app is now an everyday urban practice. By generating and governing flows of people, food, money, and information within cities, delivery apps influence urban life. Attending to the contingent and relational ways that food delivery apps operate and remake cities, I consider app-based food delivery as a moving assemblage of humans and more-than-humans that forms a distinct, if fluid, urban infrastructure. With a focus on Baemin, the most used South Korean food app, this thesis explores how the ongoing creation of this emergent infrastructure contributes to a particular version of the smart city. Drawing on critical scholarship of smart cities, infrastructures, mobilities, and digital platforms, I propose that Baemin mobilises urban entities through its infrastructural operations, giving rise to the concept of the ‘smart city in motion’—a mobile and mobilised smart city. This concept foregrounds the smart city as it is activated, sustained, and experienced through embodied and digital mobility practices, which amount to smart city infrastructures in the making. To study the often-overlooked operations of app-based mobility infrastructures, I employ a multimethod mobile ethnography that combines autoethnography as a Baemin courier, walkthrough analysis of the Baemin’s worker-facing app, interviews with Baemin couriers and platform creators, and smartphone GPS tracking of delivery activities. Through empirical analysis, I develop a distinct picture of the smart city in motion, primarily drawn from my on-the-move encounters with urban actors, from couriers, dark kitchens, apps, and doorsteps to delivery robots. My analysis highlights the diverse lived experiences of couriers, many of whom are ordinary urban ...
The Smart City in Motion: Food Delivery Apps as Mobile Infrastructure in Seoul
Chung, Noel (Autor:in)
30.05.2024
Hochschulschrift
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
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