Looking Through the Hidden Abode's “Window”—Platform Urbanism, Precarity, and Everyday Social Reproduction

Gig platforms mediating domestic services related to social reproduction are increasingly acknowledged as urban infrastructures. While critical scholars have discussed the related working conditions, profitmaking, and problems resulting from digital mediation extensively, there is no broader debate about the reorganization of reproductive work due to platform‐mediated services. As a possible (techno‐)fix for the crises of social reproduction and care, platforms seemingly offer a convenient way to deal with domestic care work. The crises, though, are not discussed as a structural phenomenon, but are shifted to individual households. Applying a feminist perspective combining materialist and poststructural approaches, this paper understands urban platforms mediating food delivery (groceries and meals) as commodified domestic service labor and takes such platforms as point of departure to discuss the reorganization of social reproductive activities in the face of both people's precariousness and precarity. Challenging the straightforward distinction between “convenient clients” and “precarious platform workers”, we claim that food delivery platforms rest upon the human need for care (precariousness), which they transform into precarity for the ones carrying out platform‐mediated gigs. As a result, food delivery as commodified social reproductive labor manifests long‐lasting characteristics of such work in capitalism, for example feminization, racialization, and invisibility. Therefore, we claim that food delivery platforms, far from merely pertaining to the sphere of exchange or to labor exploitation, they are also immanent to the expropriation of SR, by shifting it to expropriable “others”. Following up on this claim, and acknowledging the scarcity of studies on the clients' side regarding food delivery in Continental Europe, we conclude by suggesting further research areas connecting food delivery platforms and the reorganization of social reproduction.