Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -28
Platform capitalism, platform coops, local delivery alternatives, and 3 questions for Ellie Abrons
Well, the markets are still working. Or doing what they were as designed to do, at least. This week DoorDash, a food delivery service, IPO’d and was valued at $66 billion which indicates a strong vote of confidence in the future of instant delivery platforms—by the hand of the market, at least. AirBnb also IPO’d, the US government moved to break up Facebook, the EU threatens to levy major fines on big tech, and Google was in the news after the bungled departure of Timnit Gebru, one of their star AI ethics researchers. By reaching the point of multiple major IPOs and high-profile kerfuffles in the same week, it’s fair to say that the platform economy is now officially middle aged. Is this the platform economy’s midlife crisis?
Hello and welcome to our newsletter about cities, technology, and design. I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students next academic year. While we launch the program, we’re using this venue to explore themes and ideas related to our studies. Thanks for reading.
🥬 Convenience, Choice, Cost, Conscientiousness
As a venture-backed company DoorDash has followed a familiar script: use investment dollars to make the service artificially cheap to gain customers (or in pandemic times, hook them) and then figure out the financial fundamentals later. Restaurants feeling squeezed by the fees from delivery services are jacking up prices in an attempt to earn what they need to survive. And cities, including Chicago, are trying to cap platform fees to protect their citizens, but so far it’s not working. Result: customers are griping about price fluidity or priced out of the delivery services altogether, and restaurants are feeling kicked while the pandemic already has them down and out.
DoorDash may be feeling great, but their service depends on happy customers and willing restaurants. How long will the high last? The stock market’s $66B bet is that DoorDash will be able to resolve the customer and restaurant challenges above. But as a now officially middle-aged platform, will they have their lunch eaten by a future newcomer?
DoorDash, UberEats, and their peers have undoubtedly demonstrated that we humans like convenience ✅ and choice ✅. Most of us also like a good deal and I would venture to suggest that most people do not want to screw anyone out of their fair share. Personally speaking, I would like to optimize for convenience, choice, cost, and conscientiousness in every decision I make, but the market doesn’t always provide the opportunity. Look to the edges of the market, however, or even beyond the market, and there are interesting things afoot.
Earlier this year there was a spate of local businesses launching their own creative alternatives to the big food delivery platforms. I watched this happen in Detroit earlier this year during the COVID lockdown, but the pace of local experimentation seems to have faded a bit as the long-haul reality of the pandemic dawned on everyone. It’s a ton of work to operate a restaurant. Adding a delivery service on top of all that is a lot to ask. What about sharing the load?
In rural areas, groups of restaurants banded together to help each other and their customers by forming delivery coops to get food out into the valleys and across the hilltops of the western united states. In cities, digital platforms like CoopCycle are emerging to provide software that makes it easier for coops to create their own cycle courier delivery services. Services utilizing a platform like this avoid some of the downsides of DoorDash described above, while also creating opportunity to celebrate local difference. It’s cool that in Berlin the Kolyma2 food delivery coop has a totally different vibe from Foodfairies. And both are different from their peers in France, and Spain, and Denmark. Are those delivery options 100% as slick and convenient as DoorDash? Probably not quite. But do they create other forms of value, including community and cultural value? You betcha. ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
The magic of technology is that it helps scales human effort, and DoorDash’s $66B market cap is a testament to how hard (and therefore valuable) it is to achieve scale. As the first generation of platform companies like AirBnb and DoorDash mature and settle into their steady state operations as plain old boring public companies, now we have the chance to think about the next generation of platform technologies and the qualities that will make them unique.
What will allow a future upstart delivery platform to challenge DoorDash? Could it be providing scale and efficiency while enabling local difference, like CoopCycle? Could it be providing scale and efficiency while enabling fair wages and decent work, as advocated by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium? Maybe scale comes from uniting food producers and markets in new ways at regional scale? Or rethinking aspects of urban food systems? Check back in a couple years! These are the kind of things our students will be thinking about when they study Urban Technology at University of Michigan.
🎙 Three Questions for Ellie Abrons
Ellie is a widely-exhibited architect and researcher and Taubman College faculty member in Architecture. She co-edits a group of essays at e-flux under the title Becoming Digital and teaches a course by the same name that examines the impact of digital technologies on our daily lives and the built environment (like the platforms described above). Becoming Digital is required for all Urban Technology students, so let’s learn more about it.
Q. What’s your favorite city and why?
It’s a tie between New York and Hong Kong. I have a visceral response to the density and verticality of those cities. I feel shored up, protected, and invigorated by it. I am continuously awestruck by New York’s verticality (above and below ground) while in Hong Kong, the way the city squeezes between the water and the mountains produces an amazing intensity of both landscape and building. Experiencing these two cities doesn’t rely on a destination, an invitation, or prior knowledge—you can just show up and be immersed in whatever you’re seeking.
Q. You teach a course called Becoming Digital. What do students learn?
The single most important takeaway from that class is the understanding that data is not neutral or objective. This means that all the tools and systems being developed to make contemporary life easier, or safer, or more profitable (such as artificial intelligence, predictive algorithms, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, etc.) are as discriminatory and racist as the society they’re born from. In the classroom, we examine this from many points of view and in many different forms of technology - not simply to raise awareness, but to try and figure out how we can intervene and work towards justice through technology.
Q. What makes you optimistic?
Mutual aid, young people, chosen family, houseplants, and dancing.
🖼 Postcard from Hong Kong on a Rainy Day
Links
🏛 Institute of Diagram Studies is a collection of images and resources on Are.na tracking, you guessed it, all types of diagrams. When it comes to diagrams, the infamous 2x2 is workhorse that can clarify possibilities but will not tell you if the baby is fake or real. h/t Shannon Mattern + Michael Sippey
🧠 Also on Are.na, Rebecca Williams is collecting examples of smart city aesthetics and wow is there room for improvement. Delighted by this Soviet animation from 1973 though. Also check out Rebecca’s Civic Tech Book Club.
🛰 Fictional Starships Size Comparison animation. Set phasers to “chill” and watch this. One of the most important things a designer learns is to understand and work with the concept of scale. Compare this animation to the classic Powers of Ten by Eames Office.
📕 Data Action: Using Data for Public Good is the new book by Sarah Williams. Here’s what’s at stake when it comes to the use of data in cities.
🧍♀️Data comes from somewhere, and Ropot by Honda suggests that it may come from the perspective of children, thanks to a shoulder-mounted robot pal that gives kids traffic advice while walking to school. America has some more fundamental work to do first: namely, increasing walkability by building denser places with lower reliance on cars. h/t Sarah Kaufman
This week: Trading drafts of an animation with Craighton. Finding juuuust the right track to use for background music, with the help of Ghostly. Lots of final reviews as the semester wraps up here at Taubman College. The final Faculty Working Group meeting of the semester. Getting ready to close out the year. 🏃♂️