The Smart City in Motion: Food Delivery Apps as Mobile Infrastructure in Seoul

Deeply embedded in cities, digital platforms have become important in coordinating urban processes. Notably, apps and platforms, hailed for playing a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating food delivery for immobilised populations, continue to proliferate. Ordering food using a mobile app is now an everyday urban practice. By generating and governing flows of people, food, money, and information within cities, delivery apps influence urban life. Attending to the contingent and relational ways that food delivery apps operate and remake cities, I consider app-based food delivery as a moving assemblage of humans and more-than-humans that forms a distinct, if fluid, urban infrastructure. With a focus on Baemin, the most used South Korean food app, this thesis explores how the ongoing creation of this emergent infrastructure contributes to a particular version of the smart city. Drawing on critical scholarship of smart cities, infrastructures, mobilities, and digital platforms, I propose that Baemin mobilises urban entities through its infrastructural operations, giving rise to the concept of the ‘smart city in motion’—a mobile and mobilised smart city. This concept foregrounds the smart city as it is activated, sustained, and experienced through embodied and digital mobility practices, which amount to smart city infrastructures in the making. To study the often-overlooked operations of app-based mobility infrastructures, I employ a multimethod mobile ethnography that combines autoethnography as a Baemin courier, walkthrough analysis of the Baemin’s worker-facing app, interviews with Baemin couriers and platform creators, and smartphone GPS tracking of delivery activities. Through empirical analysis, I develop a distinct picture of the smart city in motion, primarily drawn from my on-the-move encounters with urban actors, from couriers, dark kitchens, apps, and doorsteps to delivery robots. My analysis highlights the diverse lived experiences of couriers, many of whom are ordinary urban inhabitants, as they participate in the platform-regulated urban flows that contribute to the infrastructural functioning of Baemin. As this research shows, Baemin continuously puts the city into motion, enabling certain types of connections and movements, while also generating disconnections and frictions. By reflecting on how delivery apps such as Baemin shape urban space and sociality towards optimised movement, this project seeks to contribute to reimagining infrastructures for a more liveable city.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Chung, Noel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gabrys, Jennifer

• Delivery robots
• Frictionless urbanism
• Infrastructure studies
• Mobile ethnography
• Mobilities research
• On-demand delivery platforms
• Platform labour
• Smart urbanism

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/61749448-a00e-4b96-b4eb-20ae590b9917/download
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0003-0665-5545

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/377954