Minor geographies of resistance in platform cities: interstices, intensities, and directions

Abstract

Platform cities is a term that describes the phenomenon of urban spaces becoming increasingly produced through the mediations of digital platforms. Resistance in platform cities is often understood from an antagonistic space, where platform workers resist against the political economic spaces from the outside, such as acts of subversion, insurgency and refusal. Resistance that reproduces antagonistic politics has limited chances in transforming socio-economic inequalities in platform cities. Therefore, I use comparative urban ethnography to reimagine resistance and its spaces based on the grounded experiences of platform workers in Helsinki and Taipei. I introduce a new concept – the minor geographies of resistance – that accounts for interstices built between platform workers’ resistance to political-economic spaces from within and without resorting to antagonism. The comparative method reveals how creative iterations of minor resistance manifest with different political intensities (i.e. individual or collective) in these two platform cities, with implications for urban transformations. Different directions for transformation become possible when we emphasize how the interconnections between workers (and other affected parties) and economic-political spaces can turn contestations inside out rather than through external opposition. Ultimately, this approach offers a new spatial framework for rethinking and practizing resistance and its politics in platform cities.

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ORCID for Yu-Shan Tseng: orcid.org/0000-0003-3728-314X

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