The Fordist model of production had a specific set of temporality which was shaped by the rhythm of factory production.
The present phase on the other sets in motion processes which are volatile and fluid, whose temporality shapes everything including the City and its rhythm as well. This temporality is intrinsically linked with digitality and its encompassing spread. ‘Digitality’ not only involves interconnectedness of individuals with each other within space-time that is fundamentally different from the analog, human-scale version of spacetime. Digitality as a sum total of advances in both information technology (speed and precision) and the hardware technology (affordable devices) affects and shapes all spheres including production, circulation, and consumption of commodities in capitalism. Since, cities are agents as well outcomes of capitalism; cities of today can neither be understood nor be critiqued without understanding the ways in which digitality intervenes in the daily life of the cities.
Migrants are an integral part of the working class forming the ‘surplus population’ that’s central to profit maximization and surplus generation. The denial of Right to City hence is no longer an individual denial in the Lefebvrian sense, but it’s a denial for the entire segment of the ‘surplus population.’ This section of the workforce represents the ‘hunters and gatherer’ of the present phase of capitalism who are willing (rather compelled) to sell their labor power at every possible node of production, circulation, and consumption. The expansion of platform economy presents a specific form of nodal points for these ‘hunters and gatherers.’
The manner in which platforms operate in the urban spaces is directly linked to the manner in which capital shapes the urban space and allocates specific segments for the specific purpose. Hence, we have islands of prosperity (gated societies, malls) surrounded by concentric seas of relative gentrification. Workers in the platform economy who are fashionable termed as gig workers criss-cross within this maze depending on the data points generated and controlled by big capital and dictated by the algorithms controlled by the platforms.
The Right to City in such a scenario wherein the ‘gig workers’ are reduced as automated, individuated entities waiting to spend their labor platforms at the diktats of the algorithms isn’t at all an individual question. Rather, it’s an expression of the sum total of capitalist processes (not limited to the particular urban space, but also encompassing data centers and algorithm-generating processes elsewhere) and the social processes as an outcome of it. This is where the question of giving organizational form to this aspect arises—the organizational form which can encompass, shape, and mold the surplus population in ways which can resist and fight back the various visible and invisible forms of denial of the basic rights.
1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRANT LABOUR IN THE PLATFORM …
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