Mid Sweden University

This paper takes Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (1999) as its starting point to discuss how the rhythms of the globalized, digitized and all the more ”gigified” city impact on and become manifest in and through the bodies of service workers, and the ways that this largely migrant workforce reproduce the city, while concurrently struggling to subsist. For this task, we will draw on in-depth interviews with gig workers performing app-mediated service work, mainly within deliveries and domestic services.

While the couriers has become an indispensable and highly visible part of the city infrastructure, other categories of workers (e.g. cleaners, baby-sitters and care workers) perform their work in the private spaces of other people’s home. Nevertheless, they are all essential to the (re)production of the city and, concurrently, they are all subject to, as well as sustaining, the ebb and flows of the city’s everyday rhythms. Even so, they may not enjoy the same opportunities to reproduce themselves, because the amount, distribution and intensity of work as well as the size and regularity of income, is difficult to predict. 

In this paper we will argue that everyday rhythms of the city, such as peak traffic and peaks in demand of certain services, are interlinked with and  reinforced by the algorhythms of the apps, dictating the intensity, scheduling and hours of work. There is however an apparent risk of arrhythmia (Lefebvre, 1999; Reid-Musson, 2018) with gig workers sometimes suffering physically violent outcomes (e.g. traffic accidents), and at other instances experiencing being deprived of the right to a full and decent (working) life. The main contribution with the present paper rests in thinking the (algo)rhythms of the city and the migrant service workforce together.