Cecile-Diama Samb

Zero-hour contract workers, emerging from the growth of digital platforms and – more specifically – food delivery platforms, have started to form new types of urban collectives. 

By following their journeys through the city, specific conflicts arise. Although the drivers do sporadically occupy the interior spaces from which they collect or deliver orders, their true working place remains their bike or scooter riding through the city streets. Not being bound to one place allows the drivers a certain freedom to work, however it also creates a set of precarious conditions in which to work.

The physical implications of these new digital labour systems can be used as tools to form new social relationships. 

The dissolving of most of the borders between private and professional time are challenged within this new type of work. These new labour systems can have the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of performance and the suspension of living. However, rest is required to sustain the system’s effectiveness. What kind of new forms could appear in the city in order to provide a moment of release within this form of continuous work and consumption controlled by the server?

How can regeneration, which usually takes place within the enclosed and shaded domesticity, reappear through the form of a new public infrastructure?

By developing a new set of zones based on the basic needs of zero-hour contract workers rather than on the efficiency of their shifts, how might this new form of zoning create new spaces for living?
 
Where does waiting take place in the gig economy? How can it become a form of new social constructs? What new forms of living can develop from the emergence of a zero-hour contract economy?