Urban spaces are increasingly defined by technologies of logistics: online shopping, dark kitchens, food delivery bike riders, traffic routes and industrial storage facilities. Tracing the automation of warehousing in Sydney, Australia, through interviews with corporate actors in property and software development Hristova’s study reveals the emerging interdependencies between large real estate companies, urban data analytics and the rise of proptech in logistics. It shows how the city, seen through the logistical estate gaze, becomes a blank slate for investments and route optimisations, and issues of social reproduction are subsumed under the calculations of efficiency.
Tsvetelina Hristova is a media anthropologist and critical data studies scholar whose research offers critical analysis of the condition of labour and subjectivity in processes of datafication and automation of work and state governance and the development of AI. She is a teaching fellow at the Department of Art Media and Technology, Southampton University and adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.