Street Fight: Food Delivery Cyclists and Spatial Contestations

Do Lee (Queens College)

Food delivery cyclists in New York City (NYC) speed through city streets all day and night to bring New Yorkers hot food. These working cyclists are often Latino or Asian male immigrants who experience distinct conflicts over space within the city. Through an approach of participatory action research, this work partnered with mostly Chinese and Latinx male immigrant food delivery cyclists in NYC to examine and name the systematic and intersectional conditions, spaces, and oppressions that produce the mobility of food delivery workers. The structural and systematic conditions of cumulative irresponsibility within labor and street environments fundamentally undermine the right to the city for immigrant food delivery workers. These working cyclists must negotiate the neoliberal city’s demand for accelerating capital circulation and heightened security. Accordingly, food delivery work must therefore navigate public and private spaces in restaurants, streets, and buildings through dialectical tensions between path and place, speed and safety, and front stage performance and backstage labor. In the absence of collective responsibilities, these tensions undermine potential solidarities by manifesting conflicts and contestations over space that are resolved by the power wielded by individual bodies. Furthermore, the rise of delivery work through third-party app platforms (e.g. Uber Eats, Doordash, Caviar, etc.) shapes worker mobilities and experiences through big data and the gig economy. These conditions, a regime of cumulative irresponsibility, and power inequalities undermine public safety for marginalized bodies such as immigrant delivery workers while exposing them to accusations of disrupting social order and public safety when workers engage in survival tactics such as riding electric bikes.