Recently proliferating ‘smart city’ building efforts have lent themselves well to interpretations through the lens of the policy mobilities literature. Applying this perspective, studies have insightfully shown how policymaking centred around smart cities is at once a messy, networked process stretching across scales, while also manifesting itself in concrete practices shaped by territorial–regulatory contexts. Informed by empirical research on smart city policies in Hungary and the Netherlands, this paper argues that the policy mobilities approach tends to overemphasize the global and the local. Notwithstanding the transnational circulation of smart city ideas, the national scale continues being reproduced by these ideas as a relevant scale of urban regulation, discursive framing and strategy-making under globalization. To acknowledge this, and to move towards a more decidedly multiscalar perspective on actually existing smart urbanisms, it is suggested that we incorporate the national scale, understood as a relational set of practices and discourses, more explicitly into our analysis. Insights from the Hungarian and Dutch case studies are used to illustrate the manifold ways in which the local embedding of the globally mobile smart city concept is shaped by the national scale, as well as how the national itself is being renegotiated in this process.

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The recent rise of gig platforms brings together longer trends of work flexibilisation, digital technology and changing consumer preferences to act as intermediaries between local on-demand via app workers or remote crowdworkers and their respective customers (De Stefano 2015;Woodcock and Graham 2020). On the one hand, gig platforms may generate flexible job opportunities and new ways to make a living (Martin 2016). Their low entry barrier, and for crowdwork access to global labour markets, makes them particularly attractive to disadvantaged groups that lack access to standard employment ). On the other hand, gig platforms have become associated with algorithmic surveillance, poorer working conditions that come with on-demand work (that is, employment uncertainty, irregular earnings and unstable working hours), and fewer social rights and voice for workers (Scholz 2017). According to this perspective, many platforms exploit disadvantaged groups by expanding informalized precarious work (Van Doorn 2017;Webster 2016).In an effort to uphold the benefits and mitigate the risks of gig platforms, discussions about the future of work are on the rise. This chapter builds on insights from sociology and social history to examine how gig workers themselves might strive for more decent work. 1 Since labour market flexibi-1 'Decent work' is a concept introduced by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1999, later also adopted in the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations in 2015, which emphasizes the creation of jobs of acceptable quality (Ghai 2003).

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