A city without contact: delivering frictionless urbanism in platform cities
Delivery platforms increasingly cast human contact as friction to be engineered away. This essay considers how the urban ideal of frictionless mobility takes shape through contactless delivery, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as a courier for Baemin, South Korea's largest food delivery platform, in Seoul and Gwanggyo (2021–2022). Dark kitchens, doorsteps, and delivery robots show how contactless delivery infrastructures push human encounters to the margins in pursuit of a smoothly running city. The essay closes by returning to Tsing's notion of friction as the “grip of encounter” that enables motion, asking what more inhabitable cities might look like if friction were embraced rather than eliminated. Weiterlesen →