Urban Platform Economies

The emergence of digital labour platforms is changing people`s everyday lives in cities and influencing already existing patterns of social inequalities. Platforms such as Care.com, Mjam or Tophelp reorganise patterns of work, services and consumption and thus the socio-spatial structures of urban spaces. While previous research has primarily focused on crowdwork (e.g. Amazon MTurk), ride hailing (e.g. Uber) and short term rentals (e.g. Airbnb), TICS analyses the transformation of care services. Care services include the cleaning of private households, the care of children and seniors in the home environment, and the delivery of ready-made meals. Using feminist geographies as a theoretical framework, the project investigates the platforms influences on the spatial and social reorganisation of urban societies. It applies a qualitative methodology that combines narrative interviews with mobile digital ethnography. The three European cities of Vienna, Hamburg and Zurich serve as empirical examples.

Within the international research project Transforming Infrastructures of Care in European Cities, the University of Graz focuses on the transformation of domestic cleaning services through digital labour platforms. Parallel to our partner institutions in Zurich and Flensburg, our project examines a field that received little scholarly attention yet remains socially central: domestic cleaning services in private households. At its core, the study asks how platforms reshape existing modes of mediation, what kinds of new structures they establish - and with what consequences for both cleaners and clients. In Austria, domestic cleaning has traditionally been organised through personal recommendations and informal employment. Digital platforms often advertise themselves as a professional alternative, promising to create trust through rating systems and to makeprocesses more efficient. Based on narrative interviews with cleaners, clients, and platform representatives, our findings reveal that platformisation does not overcome precariousness but rather reshapes it in novel forms. Cleaners report unstable incomes, a lack of social protection, heightened flexibility requirements, and mounting pressure from client ratings. Our study of the Austrian platform landscape shows that the sector is dominated by so-called marketplace platforms such as betreut.at or haushaltshilfe24.at. These primarily provide the digital infrastructure for matching, while contracts, payments, and social security remain the responsibility of cleaners and clients themselves. Wages are pushed downwards due to the visual oversupply of labour on the platforms. In practice, most work arrangements remain informal: clients frequently pay cleaners in cash and without documentation. Alongside these marketplace models, a few on-demand platforms also exist. They seek to standardise cleaning services and, to some extent, contribute to formalisation by setting fixed hourly rates, centralising payment processes, or offering additional insurance. For clients, this creates the appearance of professionalism and security, but cleaners are often required to surrender a significant portion of their earnings in hidden fees and commissions. A striking finding is that platforms tend to reinforce, rather than mitigate, existing power imbalances between clients and cleaners. Through algorithmically managed visibility, rating systems, and the ease with which dissatisfied clients can simply book another cleaner, traditional hierarchies are re-inscribed in digital form, without providing institutional safeguards for workers. Moreover, cleaning work continues to be structured along gendered, racialised, and classed lines, with migrant women occupying the most vulnerable positions both on platforms and in relation to clients. From a feminist research perspective, our study demonstrates that platforms do not primarily bring efficiency or transparency to the household cleaning sector. Instead, they reorganise social relations, hierarchies, and evaluative practices within the urban care economy. In their current form, platforms tend to re-establish and stabilise precarious labour relations along axes of intersectional inequality, obscured by broader claims of digitalisation.