The new urban spacialities of platform capitalism: contributions to Geography from iFood insertion in São Luis (MA)

• Grant number: 23/18029-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: January 01, 2025
• End date: January 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Lindon Fonseca Matias
• Grantee: Lucas Pinto Seixas
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências (IG). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The Amazon biome historically emerges multiple socio-spatial struggles due to numerous conflicting interests projected in its space. The state of Maranhão had its territorial formation marked as peripherical, and the studies dedicated to understanding the urban space in Maranhão's Amazon had few advancements, even with the core role played by São Luís in the dynamic of importation and exportation of Brazilian neo-extractivist agribusiness commodities. In globalizing neoliberal capitalism, with technology shaping multiple aspects of the production of space the current research project has as its objective to evaluate the urban spacialities shaped by the restructuring in the food production, distribution, circulation, and consumption in São Luís (MA), promoted by the integration of iFood as agent producer of urban space. To reach this objective, the project includes compiling, correlating, semantic, and normative activities. Fundamental steps are also building a georeferenced database, cartographic representations, a series of field-works, and a chorematic approach as a tool to assign new spatial meanings in urban space in São Luís (MA). Based on these elements, the current project aims to create more in-depth knowledge of the dynamics and contradictions shaped by platform capitalism in urban contexts, mainly in the periphery of capitalism, grounding the theoretical, methodological, and conceptual geographic framework.