Food Delivery Couriers and Urban Public Space

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1		Siyuan Shui	--	1598	2022-06-06 02:58:12	\|
2	update references and layout	Amina Yu	-7 word(s)	1591	2022-06-06 04:34:12	\| \|
3	update content	Amina Yu	-11 word(s)	1580	2022-06-09 11:01:47	\|

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su14106238

Food delivery couriers are a new type of worker created in modern cities within the background of a sharing economy. As a form of gig worker, they shuttle through the streets and take charge of order distribution for digital labor platforms. Food delivery couriers use the atriums and streets of their community neighborhood as their places of work and rest, occupying the public spaces that belonged to the original residents. Additionally, this phenomenon sets off a chain reaction which not only creates conflicts with the activities and passage of residents, creating time–space interlinkages, but also exerts profound influence on the economic and population structure of the region.

ood delivery courier space-time behavior urban public space

1. Introduction

China’s Internet economy has developed greatly since 2015. The State Council proposed actively promoting the development of “Internet plus” in its Government Work Report ^[1]. The development of the Internet economy has spawned a series of new industries using the gig economy as the business model, among which food delivery is a major player. After 2013, it entered a period of rapid expansion ^[2] and became a new labor-intensive industry ^[3]. In 2017, the number of registered food delivery couriers in China exceeded 7 million ^[4], and the market size exceeded 600 billion yuan in 2020 ^[5]. These couriers are representative of the gig workers created by the new economic model and can be seen as a new form of street vendor operating on a large scale.

With the normalization of population migration, mobile populations such as food delivery couriers have brought great convenience to our daily lives. They travel through the streets and alleys of cities to deliver meals, acting as a link between the scattered consumers and restaurants in cities and meeting the new needs of people’s lives. The rapid expansion of food delivery couriers has created a number of development and management issues. The problems associated with food delivery couriers have drawn a great deal of attention in existing research, but more attention has been focused on the profession itself, with studies conducted from the perspectives of economics, management, and sociology. The current research focuses on delivery mode ^[6], salary system ^[7], labor rights ^[8], interest protection ^[9], big data, and intelligent processes ^[10]. This is because the current problems about food delivery couriers are more related to these disciplines.

However, at the same time, it was often neglected the urban environment in which the food delivery couriers work. These couriers “invade” the urban public space, which has been formed in a fixed order, gathering in the marketplaces, streets, and neighborhoods of the city; competing for public space with the original residents; and generating new spatial phenomena. If the city management department ignores this aspect, the impact on the urban space created by food delivery couriers will be underestimated and it will probably fail to update our strategies for the development of cities.

The relationship between food delivery couriers and urban public space, are their behaviors influenced by urban public space, and are they reshaping it? That is, whether such a two-way influence relationship exists and in what way. Additionally, it also hope to explore whether they have corresponding urban space rights and how city management departments should treat them.

2. Gig Economy and Gig Workers

The gig economy refers to workers who operate under flexible arrangements, only completing a particular task or working for a defined period of time ^[11]. With the growth of online platforms, gig work has become a global phenomenon ^[12] and captured public and policy interest ^[13]. At present, relevant ones can be divided into three aspects. The first is the condition of gig workers. Many have found that gig workers experience problems such as difficulties in guaranteeing their contractual rights and interests ^[14], high mobility with low stability ^[15], and uncertain working hours ^[16]. The second theme concerns the impact of the gig work. Flexible employment has broken the stereotype of work ^[17]. The third theme concerns the technology used in gig work, with researchers focusing on the proper use of tools such as social media ^[18] and algorithms ^[19].

Food delivery couriers are typical gig workers that thrive on digital platforms ^[12]. They usually come in two forms: full-time, being strictly regulated by the platform, and crowdsourced, being more flexible and considered “self-employed” ^[12].

3. Workforce’s Interaction with Urban Public Space

Space is at “the very heart of social theory” ^[20]. Foucault ^[21] analyzes “disciplinary space” and suggests that “[s]pace is fundamental in any exercise of power”. Castells ^[22] states that “space is not a “reflection of society”, it is society”. Regarding the relationship between labor and space, Thompson and Smith ^[23] state that there is a “need to introduce the dynamics of space and time into the study of labor process theory”. Labor is never spaceless; the workspace is an intentionally created object and therefore an instrument of managerial control and resistance. For gig workers such as street vendors and food delivery couriers in the city, the social processes resulting from digitization have not been disconnected from space, but rather have entered a closer relationship ^[24].

More specifically, the spaces that are closely linked to casual workers are urban public spaces. Urban public space has two important functions: the first of these is political, with citizens freely expressing their ideas and opinions ^[25]. The second concerns sociology and urban planning, where public space plays an important role in social interaction and makes urban life healthier ^[26]. People can establish their own identity through repeated spatial practices ^[27], and urban public spaces are places where gig workers in the city construct their sense of identity and daily life. This is the sociological function of urban public spaces for gig workers.

For gig workers in cities such as street vendors and food delivery couriers, public spaces are the places where they work on a daily basis. They interact with the public space and develop their own tactics. Scholars are interested in this interaction between workers and the public space. Due to the long history of street vending, street vendors are the most typical subjects of this research. Street vendors bring us convenience and construct a special view in our city, but at the same time, they are also seen as “invaders” of urban public spaces, and many local governments consider street vendors to be disruptive to the view and order of the city, driving them away and excluding them ^[28]. Due to the highly mobile nature of street vendors’ work and the need to struggle with their managers, their relationship with the public space is constantly changing, with a “dynamic balance” being maintained. On the one hand, the daily work of street vendors is influenced by the public space of the city. The flow of customers in a certain area influences their choice of workplace ^[29]. The city managers’ control over zones and periods also affects their daily work ^[30]. On the other hand, the behavior of street vendors can also have an impact on urban public spaces. They occupy space based on the principle of balance between efficiency and regulation. Additionally, they can form new, flexible spatial boundaries based on the long-term coordination with various users of the public space ^[31]. They can also rely on their vending tools to make rapid spatial transformations or reach agreements with fixed vendors to form shared spaces ^[32]. In summary, the state of street vendors in urban spaces can be described as the collective result of the power, influence, resources, and resolve of property owners ^[33] as well as the tactics used by street vendors.

As it stands, labor processes and spaces remain two variables that are interdependent but usually analyzed separately. The science of labor is not closely linked to the science of space ^[34]. Food delivery couriers can be seen as a new kind of “street vendor” in a gig economy, generating a new relationship with public space and creating their own tactics. It hopes to combine the perspectives of labor and spatial sciences and focus on the interaction between food delivery couriers and urban public spaces.

4. Food Delivery Couriers’ Behavior

The work of food delivery couriers may seem very free in terms of time and space, but they are actually subject to strict regulations by the platform, including requirements for their working hours, work content, and work quality. The platform will designate work areas for couriers according to the size of the city, which creates a fixed, flexible, and non-transparent space ^[24]. The couriers do not know the specific spatial boundaries or working spaces of other couriers, creating great limitations when they are choosing their work. In addition, takeaway platforms have strict limits on the completion time of each order, and couriers who deliver overtime face penalties ^[35].

With such strict regulations, couriers have also created their own tactics. On the individual level, delivery couriers often break traffic rules in order to deliver their orders on time. Their main violations include running red lights, driving on the motorway, and driving in the opposite direction ^[36], which has led to a high volume of traffic accidents being associated with delivery couriers. Many researchers have suggested that the relevant legal system needs to be improved ^[37]. On the group level, the lack of co-location of the delivery labor process makes it difficult to hear workers’ voices because they are so spatially separated ^[38].

This topic have mainly focused on the delivery process of couriers in cities ^[24]. However, relatively little research has been conducted on the “workplace” in which couriers congregate in cities. This gap in research led us to overlook the impact of the mass “invasion” of couriers on the public spaces of neighborhoods, markets, and squares in cities.

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