“Fixing” Mobility Platform Research?

Abstract Mobility platforms have been transforming cities for fifteen years now. Research on these platforms is in robust shape, but there are emerging tensions surrounding how we frame and research platforms’ effects. Increasingly, two opposing views are coalescing. On the one hand, platforms are seen through a Marxist lens as part of an urban spatial fix. On the other hand, research grounded in Feminist geographies, Black, and Queer studies, sees a spatial fix approach as a totalizing one that denies the complexity and political possibility of platforms. We argue that these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Paying attention to the relationship between mobility and fixity can help scholars remain attentive to mobility platforms’ political and economic heft, while mitigating a tendency to frame platforms as purely symptomatic of an all-encompassing neoliberalism. We illustrate our arguments by thinking through the relationship between fixity and mobility with respect to capital, labor, and ideas.