Cities have always been a crossroads of networks and flows that change their social composition and feed their collective intelligence. Today cities are nodes of the new large industries that govern the functions of collective living, needs: mobility, training and research, health, energy, housing, tourism, logistics, finance, food, distribution, etc. The capitalism of networks and platforms is the driving force behind the global economy of the networked city.
We used to discuss this transformation by looking outside the city walls and dealing with those infrastructural networks that connect metropolitan areas or medium-sized cities such as high-speed trains, changing the space-time coordinates by bringing the cities closer together and thus favoring the creation of large corridors of widespread urbanization. The affirmation of digital platforms, with Covid having become the real fundamental infrastructure that regulates our daily life, sociality and networks of value, has transformed the capitalism of the networks into the true dominus of the functioning of large metropolitan areas. And the essence of these transformations has been the drastic selection of all groups and jobs, from traders to taxi drivers to hoteliers. They are “those of the last mile” who derived their income and their position on the social scale of the cities from the intermediation function. The capitalism of the networks has shifted and concentrated upwards the function of intermediation of the value on which a conspicuous part of the middle classes and the work of the cities has rested in the last two centuries. Hence the importance of the relationship between networks and social balances.
The mobility of people and goods was the first city sector to be affected by tourism fueled by the development of large transport networks and intermediation platforms from AirBnb to Booking. Logistics has grown to become one of the core economies of cities, in its dual component of digital platforms and traditional transportation. Breaking down and recomposing the social composition of work on at least two fronts.
The first is that of the middle classes and self-employment: taxi drivers are an example, but certainly not the only one. In the space of a few years, with a concentrated leap over time, we have gone from a composition of first generation self-employment (taxi drivers to be precise) to the growth of a new third-generation self-employment commanded by the algorithm (Uber ).
The second with the transformation of the subordinate work of logistics and of all the magma of services to urban life which has constituted a sort of neo-proletariat from porters to riders. With the corollary of conflicts between taxi drivers and “app” drivers, between porters and truck drivers.