ONDEMANDCITY

The ONDEMANDCITY project explores the consequences of the progressive digitalization of Mediterranean cities and their subsequent socio-spatial transformation. How does this “platform urbanism” shape urban space? How are digital platforms and emerging technologies reorganizing everyday urban life through the complex rearticulation of time, labor, on/offline spaces, and bodies in the new digital era? Why and how do platform companies and digital workers decide to locate themselves in specific areas? What are the discursive, geographical, and organizational relationships surrounding this urban platform ecosystem?

To address these questions, the project focuses on four specific cities—Barcelona, Lisbon, Madrid, and Malaga—to:

1. Explore and identify the spatial logics of “online platforms” and their urban ecosystems in Spain and Portugal.

2. Examine and characterize the flows of high-tech professionals and precarious digital workers, as well as their relationship to socio-cultural urban shifts (lifestyles, leisure and consumption practices, and the intersections of daily digital and analog life) within the studied cities.

3. Analyze how this triad—platform capital, high-tech workers, and precarious tech workers—interacts with the transformation and impact of socio-spatial practices in the “tech-ified” city as a whole.

These are three key elements to understanding urban digital capitalism as it is currently being imagined, lived, negotiated, and (re)produced.