Nicolás Palacios Crisóstomo
Nicolás Palacios Crisóstomo
Student / Programme Doctorate at D-BAUG
ETH Zürich
Raumentwicklung und Stadtpolitik
Additional information
Research area
Platform Workers as Infrastructural Labour: Production of Space and Spatial Tactics of Resistance
Nowadays digital platforms have obtained to certain degree an infrastructural role particularly in cities, mediating the provision of a wide range of services and becoming an integral part of our everyday urban experience. Taking this scenario as starting point, the overarching focus throughout this doctoral research project is to understand how platforms produce urban space through different strategies, embedding themselves in urban systems. The second focus is to understand how platform gig-workers “make do” in the platform mediated urban environment. To understand these dynamics, the project focuses on delivery platforms and their workers (riders) in the cities of Berlin and Barcelona.
Nicolás works in the intersections of critical urban geography, urban ethnography, feminist and labour geographies. Regarding methodologies, Nicolás has experience with several qualitative methods, as well as GIS. Furthermore, this is combined with a reflective practice on the limitation and implications of these different approaches.
Nicolás Palacios (*1991) is a Doctoral Student at the Spatial Development and Urban Policy Research group, ETH Zürich. Supervised by Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann, his PhD-project engages with the role that digital platforms, such as delivery services play in the production of urban space.
Nicolás holds an MSc in Human Geography, from the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden, and a BA in Political Science with a minor in Urban Studies, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Before joining ETH Zürich, He was engaged in academic research in Latin American and European institutions. In his master’s thesis, Nicolás explored the role of law and public space regulations, in relation with spatial exclusion, with a particular focus on homelessness in Copenhagen.