The platformisation of labour, social reproduction and urban space: Airbnb and coworking in Berlin

Abstract

The paper asks to what extent we can understand the relationship between the reconfiguration of labour and the reconfiguration of urban spatial production through the concept of ‘platformisation’. It is based on my PhD research, in which I analysed the reconfiguration of the home and the ´workplace under the conditions of financialised urbanism, focusing empirically on Airbnb’s operations and coworking spaces in Berlin.

The first part of the paper focuses on Airbnb’s operations in Berlin. It analyses the motivation of home-sharers to offer their home as a service through the platform. It shows how Airbnb hosts turn to home-sharing as an income-generating strategy to compensate for precarious self-employment, rising rents and limited mobility in the housing market due to gentrification processes. Through the way hosts rely on Airbnb and turn their private home into an income-generating asset, the paper identifies a tendency described as the ‘platformisation of social reproduction’. This tendency towards the platformisation of social reproduction interacts with the ‘platformisation of labour’, if understood as a broader shift that goes beyond the gig economy and describes the processual reconfiguration of labour in the context of the crisis of Fordist wage labour, its wage agreement and social reproduction regime, leading to the entrepreneurialisation of labour (Chicchi 2020, Richardson 2020).

The second part of the paper focuses on commercialisation tendencies within the coworking sector. Empirically, it is based on an analysis of independent coworking spaces in Berlin, WeWork as an example of a corporate and venture capital-funded coworking chain, and the growing market for coworking platforms (i.e. platforms that mediate access to a global network of coworking spaces). The paper takes a closer look at the business model of coworking spaces and argues that they offer ‘space as a service’, which is a particular type of service commodity that includes access to office space, but also access to a curated entrepreneurial community. It is argued that access to space is subject to platformisation tendencies. It also shows how this platformisation of spatial access is animated by the platformisation of labour, in that in response to the increasing flexibility of labour - for example, remote work is less spatially bound and start-ups often scale rapidly - office space must also become more flexible.

Platformisation is thus understood as a concept that allows us to understand the restructuring of both labour and (urban) space. However, as the third part of the paper argues, these tendencies must be understood as embedded in a longer shift within the regime of labour, neoliberal social reproduction and the financialised valorisation of urban space.