Platform urbanism in a pandemic: Dark stores, ghost kitchens, and the logistical-urban frontier

Abstract

As demand for e-commerce surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, investors began pouring billions into start-ups promising to accelerate digitization and automation in small-margin, winner-take-all sectors, such as retail, grocery, and dining. I examine two business models that feature prominently in this swell of financial optimism: dark stores and ghost kitchens. Both sacrifice consumer-facing real estate to create logistical spaces for online order fulfillment, and both are predicted to become permanent fixtures of the post-pandemic economic landscape. However, few have commented on the consequences of this future-in-the-making or who is likely to suffer them. The essay therefore anticipates how “going dark” may impact consumers, workers, and urban geographies. I argue that going dark represents a new threshold in the spatial materialities and financial imaginary of platform urbanism, what I call the logistical-urban frontier. I theorize how this frontier threatens historically disenfranchised urban communities, and I conclude the essay with a reflection on the conflicted temporalities of logistical speculation.

No Time for Rest: An Exploration of Sleep and Social Harm in the North East Night-Time Economy (NTE)

“…Consumer use of take-away apps such as Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats has proliferated and the use of ‘ghost kitchens’ 4 also accelerated during the pandemic as an increasingly popular means by which businesses meet demand (UKTN, 2021 ). Although ghost kitchens have been hailed as a low-cost option where restaurants can share kitchen space, their occupation of a grey regulatory area that relies almost exclusively on flexible labour (Shapiro 2022 ) may well exacerbate some of the existing problems discussed throughout this article.…”

Small cities and smart retail

“…In the case of the smart vending machine, a cluster of associated "smart" innovationsconnected cameras, cashless and/or contactless payment systems, real-time monitoring of operations, and social mediahave enabled a safe automated and contactless vending experience for retailers and customers. Food preparation can now happen in food laboratories (i.e., ghost kitchens) whose activity is spatially and temporally isolated from the retail point (Grewala, Roggeveena, and Nordfältb 2017;Shapiro 2022). As a result, the advent of human-to-machine retail transactions might have profound impacts for social interaction in public and semi-public spaces.…”

“…Not only are these facilities expected to seriously disrupt the restaurant industry, Shapiro (2022) also warns against the "inherently inequitable and exclusionary effects" of "going dark" in the platform economy, the dire consequences for the ambience of cities notwithstanding. Indeed, independently-owned small businesses, especially restaurants, have long been known to play a critical role for the identity of cities and neighborhoods, and for the integration of low-income and ethnic minorities around the world (e.g., Lee et al, 1997;Mehta, 2011;Somashekhar, 2019).…”

Distribution, dis-sumption and dis-appointment: The negative geographies of city logistics

“…Drawing upon work in geography, politics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and philosophy, I will suggest that these assumptions fail to account for a series of conceptual and empirical trends. On the one hand, these trends are associated with the ever-changing nature of city logistics as an ongoing project and ‘piecemeal practice’ (Cowen, 2014: 4, 181), especially the transformations of the ‘logistical-urban frontier’ wrought through ‘platform urbanism’ (Barns, 2020; Shapiro, 2022). On the other, they arise from a growing recognition, among cultural geographers in particular, of the (non-)place of negativity in experiences of space, affect and (im)mobility (e.g.…”

“…Intrinsic to the entanglements of city logistics is a particular relation to negative space . City logistics increasingly leverages value not only from the city’s peripheries, but from its gaps: from the (supposedly) disused, latent or otherwise lacking (Barns, 2019; Shapiro, 2022). City logistics represents itself as ‘void-fill’.…”