One of the first tasks carried out in the PLUS project, (lead by Dimmons — UOC Team) has been to investigate and articulate the different types of business models related to the platforms in terms of legal structures, ownership, governance, data and technological policies, growth model and social and economic impact.

The methodology is based on the statistical analysis of a sample of sixty cases present in the seven cities of PLUS project: Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Lisbon, London Paris and Tallinn through the “Star of Democratic Qualities of the Platform Economy”. …

The preliminary results of the Data Policies & Strategies, with a Focus on Short Term Rental Platforms study, conducted by the Dimmons research group from the UOC’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and activist Murray Cox, as part of a framework partnership agreement with Barcelona City Council, shows that in many of the cities surveyed, there is no specific legislation, which means that the platforms are not obliged to share their data (including addresses, owners’ names, number of nights occupied). For this reason, the cities are calling for legislative change which would cover all of the European Union.

The study was…

“ The specificity of PLUS is to go beyond a traditional reading of the work to propose an “urban” approach to the question of platforms, which aims to analyze the different forms of value production (and its possible redistribution) at urban scale and not limited values ​​directly related to the direct exploitation of work.”

The PLUS project will analyze the main economic impacts of digital platforms at work, seeking to fill a gap in the understanding and resolution of the challenges posed by the digitalization of work.

The Portuguese team (directed by the Center for Social Studies) reveals the multidisciplinary…

The platform economy is an emerging and strategic domain of activities in terms of application of digital technologies, business investment and creation of new jobs.

First, digital platforms are changing the structure of the economy and the nature of labour, especially by the erosion of formal rules governing the place and timing of work and the boundary between working and non-working activities. …

Platform economy plays a fundamental role in the transformation of labor markets and the hyper-flexibilization and precarization of labor today. We, The Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, are convinced that by looking at how work is changing in the city, we get a glimpse of what the future of urban space may look like. It is this future, ours, which we see at stake.

We intend to investigate the gig economy not only as a distinct sector of the labor market or as a collection of services distributed via platforms. Rather, we are interested in how relations of production and of social…

Platform Economy refers to the interactions among distributed groups of people supported by digital platforms that enable them to exchange (matching supply and demand), share and collaborate in the consumption and production of activities leveraging capital and goods assets, and labour. Currently, Platform Economy is growing rapidly and exponentially, creating great interest, and has become a top priority for governments around the globe. …

PLUS project represents for SUPSI an important driver to work, through a research-action perspective, on topics of utmost relevance for the institution and for the researchers engaged. Dealing on platform economy framed in urban context allows to inquire into the urban setting itself, shedding light on how the platform economy influences the development of the city, which implications are reflected on the labour market and which aspects of citizenship are entangled in this “structural” change of the urban fabric.

These subjects are nodes in which SUPSI, in particular through the Department of economics, health and social sciences, is particularly devoting…

We, The University of Bologna — Alma Mater Studiorum, are deeply convinced of the relevance of the PLUS project since we have taken the initiative to launch it and we have framed the proposal. The members of our research team have been working for some time now, both individually and collaboratively, on such topics as logistics, urban transformations, and labour.

The drafting of the project has been for us a chance to develop a tentative framework to grasp the connections between such topics. …