The Uneven Geographies of Platformised Care: (Re)Shaping Social Reproduction in Sweden

Abstract

Platforms mediating care services are increasingly reshaping the geographies of social reproduction, offering care fixes to some, while exacerbating the crisis of care for others. In this paper, we draw on research on healthcare, deliveries and cleaning platforms in Sweden to argue that platforms reinforce and redistribute flows of care privilege and care poverty between the Global North and the Global South, between urban and rural locations, and within cities, thus deepening the uneven geographies of care. These uneven geographies apply to those performing social reproductive work as well. While the working conditions of migrant platform cleaners have clear repercussions for their own social reproduction, other segments, such as healthcare professionals, may experience platform work as a fix to both working conditions and work–life balance. Ultimately, we propose that the political economy of social reproduction unfolds as a spatially uneven process, making life easier for some and harder for others.

Introduction

Bernadete, a Brazilian woman in her early 30s, is having her lunch, a sandwich and a soda, on the bus between gigs. Bernadete negotiates both space and time in her daily life: as a migrant worker she has crossed national borders, and as a gig cleaner she must travel from one part of Stockholm to another to clean private homes. Her contract with the cleaning platform company says she must work 20 h per week, but the distribution of hours depends on demand and therefore varies from week to week, and she is also to be on call for bookings made at short notice. Bernadete is only compensated for the hours of cleaning. The many hours that she spends standing by, waiting, or travelling between gigs in different parts of the Stockholm Metropolitan Area, are unpaid. Consequently, there are weeks when she is out of the house – her home – for 45 h, despite the number of hours stated in her contract. Of the 45 h, she is compensated for 20, sometimes 25. In those weeks, she barely has a life: she eats, and then goes to bed, only to wake up early the next morning to show up at the client's door on time.

The vignette above draws on several interviews ¹ with migrant gig cleaners in Stockholm, Sweden, and is meant to illustrate and give life to the key contribution of this paper, namely the conceptualisation of the uneven geographies of platformised care. This concept, we argue, can be utilised to denote how digital labour platforms’ expansion into the sphere of social reproduction (re)shapes who can access care, where and under what conditions. We aim to show how the uneven geographies of platformised care help us analyse how this process unfolds at various geographical scales, ranging from the global to the ‘caring’ body of the individual gig worker. As such, this paper is not intended to present empirical detail or in-depth analysis of one specific platform or sector, but rather to take a helicopter view across multiple sectors to explore and discuss the uneven geographies of platformised care.

While Bernadete performs work that ensures the social reproduction of others, insecure employment, an unstable income, systematic time-theft, and the fact that she is a Global South migrant worker on Global North, Swedish soil, makes it hard for her to manage her own social reproduction and simply to have a decent life. What is more, Bernadete's situation reminds us of the workings of time-space compression (Harvey, 1990) and time-space expansion (Katz, 2004). That is to say how some people must extend their reach across the globe to sustain themselves and their dependents, while others can organise their lives in a much more spatially compressed way, sometimes by having others use their time to overcome distance (space), to make their labour power available just in time (Butler et al., 2024; Lee & Pratt, 2016). This relational understanding of space (Massey, 2005) enables us to incorporate two important aspects analytically: first, and as indicated by Bernadete's story, the global assembly (McDowell et al., 2008) of care labour, which requires the constant supply of migrant workers from the Global South. Secondly, we pay attention to what the rise of platforms in urban areas might mean for places where platforms are, by and large, absent.

In Sweden, platformised services such as cleaning, food deliveries and healthcare, are distinct regarding the spaces of provision and consumption. Consumer demands for platform-mediated, social reproductive services and (migrant) labour supply converge in cities (Lata et al., 2023; Zampoukos et al., 2024), where local service provision entails both an online and offline presence (Sadowski, 2020). It is thus no coincidence that we find people like Bernadete in the Stockholm Metropolitan Area. By contrast, other areas – such as rural communities – remain underserviced. And while domestic services such as cleaning for obvious reasons take place in customers’ homes, food delivery work happens in public space, at least until riders reach their destination. Healthcare services can be consultations at distance via an app, and thus become accessible to rural populations, but they can also be in-place when care is provided at localised healthcare centres. These are commonly found in metropolitan areas. It is against the backdrop of such spatial patterns that we see a need to integrate both urban and rural locations into the analysis of the uneven geographies of platformised care. While much of the platform urbanism literature has a relational view of urban space (e.g. Barns, 2020; Graham, 2020; Hodson et al., 2025), other scholars have advanced platform ruralism (Wang et al., 2022) and sometimes the attention to the specificities of rural geographies is also coupled with a call for a relational understanding of space (Zhang & Webster, 2024). However, the tendency to focus on either urban or rural environments entails the risk of reproducing and reinforcing the urban–rural binary. This is why, in this paper, we maintain that to gain more insight into how the platform economy unfolds in space, we must consider urban and rural locations as analytically distinct yet interconnected parts of this uneven geographical development. Thus, global care chains (Parreñas, 2005; Schwiter & Steiner, 2020), the working and living conditions of those performing the social reproductive work, as well as the unequal spatial distribution and access to social reproductive services all make part of what we term the uneven geographies of care.

In this paper we use the concepts of social reproduction and care interchangeably ² , to denote the broader processes, activities and social relations involving human sustenance that are foundational for societal continuity over time (Katz, 2001; Meehan & Strauss, 2015; Mitchell et al., 2004; Winders & Smith, 2019). Both concepts are concerned with what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something. As indicated above, social reproduction and care can be disaggregated into finer parts to distinguish between various aspects (such as domestic work and care work for instance) and may direct our attention to social processes (such as privatisation), activities (such as cooking and cleaning), and social relations (such as consumers and providers). Furthermore, social reproduction and care can be differently organised in time and space. Indeed, as observed by Katz (2001, p. 711), social reproduction may be secured ‘through a shifting constellation of sources encompassed within the broad categories of the state, the household, capital, and civil society’. Platform companies mediating social reproductive services represent precisely such a shift in the constellation of sources on which daily life and social continuity depend. Platforms offering services that previously fell within the domains of either the Swedish welfare state or the individual household add to an ongoing process of marketisation and re-/semi-privatisation with socio-spatial repercussions (Enlund, 2020; van Eerbeek, 2025). Special attention is therefore paid to how the geographies of care are (re-)shaped by platform mediated cleaning services, healthcare services (primary care in particular), and food deliveries. Thus, in line with Strüver (2024), we include the externalisation of cleaning, grocery shopping and the deliveries of cooked meals in what we term ‘platformised care’. Platformised care also denotes the particular role played by platform companies in this context (compared with other, non-platformised ways of outsourcing these tasks).

The article is organised in three main parts. First, we lay out some of the roots to the platformisation of care in Sweden by briefly accounting for the ideological shifts, and legal as well as tax reforms that healthcare and domestic services have been subjected to from the 1950s and onwards. These legal shifts and reforms have laid the grounds to noticeable socio-spatial care divides in Sweden. We then move on to outline the platformisation of care more specifically, and how it has played out in a variety of welfare states. After this, we turn our attention to the uneven geographies of platformised care, to tease out more carefully how this unfolds in the Swedish context. This is followed by a discussion on the dialectics of time-space compression and expansion, drawing on the work of Katz (2004). We conclude by suggesting that the political economy of social reproduction occurs as a spatially uneven process, making life easier for some and harder for others.

From Private to Public Care – and Back Again?

Sweden is often characterised as a social-democratic welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1998) where de-commodification of social rights and universalist programmes were intended to crowd out the market. During the 1950s–1970s, healthcare, social services, and childcare were socialised, and equal access to social services was perceived to be fundamental to the political project of the welfare state (Wikman & Mohall, 2022). Despite redistributive policies promoting social and spatial equality, inequalities remained, and amid the 1970s global ideological and economic shifts, the policy goal of social, economic and territorial cohesion was abandoned (Westholm, 2013). Criticism of the welfare state focused on shifting power structures and bureaucratisation (Hasselbladh et al., 2008). By the 1990s this resulted in a range of reforms opening up for tax-financed welfare services by private providers, which over time has created what (Skyrman et al., 2023) calls a welfare-industrial complex, where private for-profit companies gain in importance and compete with public providers in quasi-welfare markets.

The public healthcare system was re-orientated towards individual consumer choice and privatisation (Fredriksson, 2024). However, different regions adopted diverse attitudes towards privatisation, thus creating a spatially variegated mosaic of privatisation (Dahlgren, 2018). The most significant reforms, introduced in 2010 and 2015, established the patient's right to choose a primary care provider, and the right for private healthcare companies to establish primary care centres without considering geographical patterns of over or undersupply of primary care services (Dahlgren, 2018; Kullberg et al., 2018). While improving primary care access through the establishment of 300 new private primary care centres (Fredriksson & Isaksson, 2022; Sveréus, 2024), these were largely geographically concentrated in urban areas (Anell, 2011; Isaksson et al., 2016). Additionally, digital primary care consultations have grown rapidly during the past decade, predominantly provided by healthcare platform companies (van Eerbeek, 2025). This marketisation and privatisation of the public healthcare system continues and is particularly extensive in primary care (Jordahl & Blix, 2021) and has led to spatially and socially uneven access to healthcare services (Burström, 2025), thus aggravating socioeconomic life and health divides (Haglund et al., 2025).

A parallel pendular movement of crowding out and later re-commodification has happened in domestic services. Platzer (2006) describes how the supply of workers willing to work in domestic services decreased from the 1930s and onwards (despite high demand). By the end of the 1960s paid domestic work had almost disappeared as working class women preferred other employment, including jobs created by the expansion of the welfare institutions (Östberg & Andersson, 2013). However, the 1980s–1990 s saw demand for domestic services increase again, due to women's high labour market participation and cutbacks in public welfare services coupled with increased labour supply through high unemployment (Platzer, 2006). The introduction of tax deductions ³ in 2007 (Nyberg, 2015) aimed once again to create a formal labour market for domestic services. Tax deductions purportedly also aimed to increase gender equality by turning informal, female dominated jobs into formal dittos, and to increase the labour market participation among targeted groups, that is, refugees, people with low levels of education, and the long-term unemployed (Hellgren & Hobson, 2021; Nyberg, 2015).

Domestic services in Sweden are thus a highly gendered and all the more racialised affair as immigrant women perform the bulk of state-subsidised domestic work (Calleman, 2015; Gavanas, 2006). A study on gig work and workers in Sweden, which also included cleaning services, showed a complex mix of (im)migrant backgrounds (Zampoukos et al., 2024). Meanwhile, the demand for domestic services is particularly pronounced in the urban regions of Stockholm, Västra Götaland and Skåne, with some of the Stockholm Metropolitan Area's more affluent suburbs topping this list (Swedish Trade Union Confederation, 2023). The prevalence of cleaning and gardening services indicates that the bulk of the market consists of the maintenance of houses and villas. At the bottom of the list, we find municipalities in the sparsely populated and relatively poor northern inland. The Swedish Trade Union Confederation further warns that subsidies like RUT effectively undermine the provision of publicly funded, equal and need-based, care. Privatised and tax subsidised services, such as cleaning, shopping, laundry and care essentially overlap with those provided by the publicly funded, municipal services of home care and childcare. In effect, then, there are two parallel systems, both of which depend on public funding entirely or partially: one based on the logic of need, and the other based on purchasing power ⁴ . Resourceful citizens might thus recourse to private companies for their social reproductive needs. Concurrently, their interest in contributing to general welfare and high-quality care for all may decrease, ultimately leading to a divided welfare state (Lapidus, 2019).

To sum up, Swedish healthcare and a range of other social reproductive services, are presently constituted by a mix of public and private (mostly for-profit) provision of care services. As suggested by the above, the demand for, and access to, these services seem to follow a north-south, rural-urban divide within Sweden. What is more, these socio-spatial patterns of care privileges and care poverty also contain a relational element: First, domestic services rely on the presence of (im)migrant, female labour, thus pointing us in the direction of global care chains. Secondly, well-to-do citizens opting for privatised and state-subsidised services to ‘fix’ their care needs, but who simultaneously pull away from publicly funded services indispensable for the care of others, may cause these services to erode.

The latest stage in this development towards privatisation has been the advent of platform companies, aiming to reap the benefits of both tax deductions, public healthcare funding and the proliferation of domestic and care services. It is to this ‘platformisation of care’ that we now turn.

The Platformisation of Care

Platforms aim not only to transform the spaces of capitalist production (Sadowski, 2020), but also the spaces of social reproduction. Moreover, ‘[p]latforms are redrawing the boundaries between the two, while experimenting with new ways to capture value from both’ (van Doorn, 2022, p. 2). Studies of platforms that provide care and domestic services were first in showing the important links between social reproduction and the platform economy, highlighting the need to move beyond the dominant Uber narrative, and pay attention to the heterogeneity in digital labour platforms and platform work across different sectors and services (Ticona & Mateescu, 2018). Platforms focusing on care and domestic work have received most scholarly attention in debates on the platformisation of care and how it unfolds in different (welfare) states and urban contexts (Blanchard, 2022; Gruszka et al., 2024; Lentz et al., 2025; McDonald et al., 2021; Pais & Zanoni, 2024; Rodríguez-Modroño et al., 2024; van Doorn, 2020). Exactly how the platformisation of care plays out depends on the historically and geographically specific trajectories of the welfare states in question and their subsequent restructuring, that is, how it redraws or even dissolves the boundaries between capitalist production and social reproduction is path dependent (Mezzadra et al., 2024; van Doorn et al., 2021).

An important component of domestic and care platform business strategies is attracting customers by offering individual fixes to manifestations of the care crisis, and to acquire legitimacy by ‘a pervasive discourse of normalization’ (Lentz et al., 2025, p. 2). Moreover, the platforms frame their services as solutions to the care crisis based on ‘a problematic imaginary of commodified care’ (Lentz et al., 2025, p. 3) that links the emancipation of women to paid work by outsourcing social reproductive labour to other (often migrant) women. Similarly, Pais and Zanoni (2024) find that platforms mediating care and domestic services attract customers based on the flexibility in outsourcing social reproductive labour, that is, on-demand services, thereby contributing to devaluing unpaid care work and patriarchal divisions of labour at home.

The platformisation of care takes place across several distinct sectors in which different platform companies operate. Some platform companies mediate or provide a broad array of services, whereas others are more specialised. Next to ride hailing, the delivery of meals via digital labour platforms has been studied extensively, showing how a predominantly migrant workforce navigates national borders, cities and algorithmic management and surveillance to deliver meals just in time (Heiland, 2021; Lata et al., 2023; Veen et al., 2020). While delivery workers quite literally ‘put bread on the table’ to revive urban citizens, several studies at the same time attest to riders facing harsh and precarious working conditions, being at risk of bodily harm and even loss of life (Orr et al., 2023; Wang & Churchill, 2025). Studies of gig workers delivering food in Sweden point to workers being disadvantaged yet not without power (Weidenstedt et al., 2024), coping with gig work's harsh demands by considering gig work as transitory (Newlands, 2024) and by seeking work-arounds to algorithmic management (Öborn et al., 2024). Analysing the delivery of meals and gig cleaning as outsourcing of social reproduction, Zampoukos et al. (2024) argue that this involves the redistribution of time to more affluent people while compromising the time migrant gig workers have for their own social reproduction. Again, this stipulates that platforms mediating social reproductive services tend to reinforce flows of care privilege and care poverty as to accentuate the uneven geographies of care.

Meanwhile, Van Dijck et al. (2018, p. 98) remark, ‘[t]he sector of health, like the sectors of urban transport, news, and hospitality, is currently undergoing its own platformization’. Digital labour platforms providing on-demand nursing (Dingelstad et al., 2025; Wells & Spilda, 2024) and other categories of healthcare professionals are becoming of increasing importance to the provision of public health, with platforms operating in increasingly marketised public healthcare. The rise and fall of Babylon Health and its GP at hand app in England's NHS is perhaps the most well-known example. According to Dowling (2022), it is predicated on a ‘tech-driven mode of accumulation fueled by the privatization of public cost savings’ (p. 110), driven by a rhetoric of individual freedom of choice, undercutting the NHS's solidaristic underpinnings. Ultimately, Babylon Health went from a unicorn company valued at USD 4 billion in 2021 and being heralded as the poster child for the future of public healthcare to bankruptcy in 2023 (Browne, 2023). In the Swedish public primary care, private for-profit healthcare platform companies have expanded rapidly since 2016, first by offering app-based consultations that match healthcare professionals and patients, later followed by in-place provision through healthcare centres in urban areas. App-based consultations are most frequently used for minor ailments, and their users tend to be younger, more affluent, and predominantly from urban areas (Wilkens, 2024). Thus, healthcare platform companies offer a ‘fast-track’ to healthcare, and especially to urban populations, as in-place healthcare centres tend to be located where the bulk of the market is.

In the subsequent section, we further develop what we have termed the uneven geographies of platformised care: First, by conceptualising these as inherently transnational and stretching across multiple scales. Second, by paying attention to how these uneven geographies feed off and into neoliberal austerity and privatisation, reconfiguring the conditions for social reproduction in diverse ways across urban and rural places.

The Uneven Geographies of Platformised Care

In a 2019 review article published in Progress in Human Geography, Jamie Winders and Barbara Ellen Smith lay out four feminist imaginaries of social reproduction fundamental to the feminist project of valorising social reproduction, materially as well as conceptually. The fourth and final imaginary in their account conceptualises social reproduction as a highly complex, multi-sited, and transnational process. Winders and Smith (2019) align themselves with authors such as Bhattacharya (2017), and the notion that social reproduction is currently re-imagined through the lens of race, postcoloniality, and borders. To exemplify what they mean, we can think of Bernadete and other migrant women from the Global South, carrying out care work in hospitals, care homes, and richer households in the Global North, while supporting their families back home through remittances. Other authors have also pointed to the global care chains that result from such transnational practices, as women who leave their children behind must see to it that their dependents are taken care of by someone else (Lee & Pratt, 2016; Parreñas, 2005; Yeates, 2012). These care chains exemplify the time-space expansion (Katz, 2004) required by some, to realise the time-space compressed and ‘easy lives’ of others.

Feminist geographers are also increasingly attentive to how social reproduction ties various geographical scales together (households, neighbourhoods, regions, nations and so on). This is also the ambition with the present paper. Thinking back on Bernadete, it is clear that ‘home’ can be theorised as the locus where global migration flows concur with local needs of social reproduction, and while it is a site of social reproduction for some, it is a place of production for others. Recasting the geography of production and social reproduction to the global scale also raises questions about what our responsibilities are towards those who ‘may be intimate within our households yet strangers in our land’ (Winders & Smith, 2019, p. 884). But as the authors also observe, both the Global North woman hiring the Global South domestic worker share the condition of paid work being incompatible with their social reproduction needs. Still, their possibilities to satisfy these needs differ significantly.

The above provides us with a first indication of how the uneven geographies of platformised care unravel, and especially how it brings various geographical scales into play, from the ‘caring’ body of the individual gig worker to the space of the home, national borders and state induced subsidies, and onto global, south-to-north migration flows. As demonstrated by Zampoukos et al. (2024) and Maury (2024) among others, migrant gig workers performing social reproductive services for others concurrently experience that the conditions of work, and the workings of welfare state bordering, complicate their own lives, and their own social reproduction. This, then, points to the uneven geographies of platformised care as deeply and inherently relational. Meanwhile, other segments, such as healthcare professionals, may seek platform work to improve working conditions, in particular when compared with traditional public sector employment (Zampoukos et al., 2018), and thus also to improve the work-life balance (Churchill & Craig, 2019). A nurse or physician who engages in platformised, part-time care work from home and who is thereby able to reduce the stress related to daily activities such as commuting, picking up children from daycare, grocery shopping and preparing dinner, is obviously differently situated compared with a migrant gig cleaner for instance, and is consequently able to navigate space, time and life in ways quite opposite to Bernadete and her peers. For Bernadete, the promise of flexibility is never realised, she must complete her tasks in situ and on demand, meaning she is required to be mobile and show up just in time. For her the prospect of ‘work-life balance’ seems unattainable.

While austerity programmes and the rolling back of the state open space for private for-profit services within the social reproduction realm (including those offered by platform companies), not everyone can access or has the purchasing power to pay others for their social reproduction needs. As mentioned before, the demand for state-subsidised domestic services is particularly prominent in affluent suburbs and municipalities in close proximity to metropolitan areas in Sweden (Swedish Trade Union Confederation, 2023). Well off people in the ‘right’ locations who are opting for private services reduce both the social rationale and financial viability of public services (Lapidus, 2019). Meanwhile, less affluent and/or rural groups may depend on these public services for their social reproduction. So, whenever someone purchases the services of a nanny, a home care taker, or a homework helper, that person may potentially also undermine the opportunities for people depending on public goods (Andersen et al., 2024).

This brings us to the platform urbanism literature, and the question: How do digital infrastructures, currently built into the very fabric of urban environments, impact on social reproduction and (urban) everyday life? We see the contours of this in, for example, the ways that platforms ‘take over core services related to how we live, how we work, how we travel, how we eat and how we shop’ (Sadowski, 2020, p. 1735). In some cases, platforms come simply to replace publicly funded services such as public transportation. Platforms like Uber offers a solution to everyday transportation needs in cities like Washington DC, where public transport has suffered from financial retrenchment and long-time neglect by the local government (Wells et al., 2023). In other cases, platform companies find new ways to extract value by inserting themselves in restructuring welfare state services. For example, van Eerbeek (2025) shows how the rapid scaling of healthcare platform companies in the partially privatised public healthcare in Sweden intertwines with the political economy of restructuring, generating revenue from public funding while offsetting losses by attracting venture capital.

It is precisely through such processes – in part neoliberal austerity and retrenchment, in part back door privatisation – that platform companies ‘claim more users and market share for some services away from other alternatives, whether publicly or privately provided. Before we know it, the platform has grown to a dominant position which can exert monopoly power over its market’ (Sadowski, 2020, p. 1739; but see also Lentz et al., 2025 and Rahman & Thelen, 2019). Thus, local service provision entails both an online and offline presence in cities, where the latter manifests itself in the guise of ghost kitchens, dark stores, digiphysical healthcare centres and Airbnbified neighbourhoods for instance. Digital, physical or both – this is how platforms become imbricated in urban infrastructures for social reproduction. But they do not insert themselves in ways that are socially just. In cities, we find city districts that are well serviced because of their location close to the city centre, but also because of the aggregated wealth and purchasing power of those living in these areas. By contrast, other parts of the city are underserviced due to the opposite socio-spatial characteristics.

So much about how platform companies intersect with cities and urban life. But what about the rural? Over a period of 20–30 years, rural communities, particularly in the northern inland of Sweden, have seen all sorts of public and private services, from healthcare centres and schools to general stores and gas stations, disappear (Cras, 2017; Enlund, 2020; Uba, 2010), thus requiring residents in these areas to expand their everyday activities over ever-increasing distances to manage life. Clearly, in such areas, we do not find platform companies offering delivery or cleaning services, and thus they are of little consequence to the social reproduction of the inhabitants. Meanwhile, platform companies offering online healthcare in lieu of the welfare state might entail a partial, and in some ways paradoxical, solution to care needs, particularly to rural populations. While it may facilitate access to certain healthcare services, it may concurrently legitimise the absence of physical healthcare centres, where in-person medical consultations can take place. ‘Individual (consumer/patient) choice’ is only true if there are affordable and accessible alternatives in place. Nevertheless, people living in these areas still need to reproduce themselves, but the scarcity of service points and the long distances that need to be overcome to give birth or buy groceries for instance, means that it comes at a greater cost (Larsson, 2020). These people, in these areas, depend on publicly funded, social infrastructures for their subsistence, along with state subsidies that compensates general stores and gas stations operating in places where market shares are limited and/or diminishing (Tillväxtverket, 2024). What is more, they depend on each other to become the social infrastructure of care in their communities (Cowan, 2021; Simone, 2021). This means that when Lars, who lives in a village of 50 people in the inland county of Jämtland, takes his car for the 40 min long ride (one way) to the nearest town Strömsund to run some errands, he also picks up some things for his elderly neighbour Siri. And when Lars’ heating stops working, he asks his friend Gunnar, who lives in another village 25 min away, to come over with his tools and have a look. Like many migrant gig cleaners and delivery workers, residents in the northern inland of Sweden must extend their reach across space to ensure their social reproduction. Also similar to the experiences of gig cleaners and delivery workers, but contrary to the idea of platformised, on-demand and just-in-time services, inland residents must wait for their care needs to be ‘fixed’. Just as with these gig workers, the price to be paid by inhabitants of the rural inland is spelled time.

Concluding Discussion

Platform companies mediating care services are increasingly reshaping the geographies of social reproduction, offering care fixes to some, while preserving the status quo or, alternatively, exacerbating the crisis of care for others. Platforms reinforce and, to some extent, redistribute flows of care privilege and care poverty across borders, within cities, and between urban and rural locations, thus deepening the uneven geographies of care. This happens because, as suggested by Katz (2004), time-space compression and expansion are shaped dialectically, creating intimate connections between people and places, such as the connections made via global care chains. From a socio-spatial viewpoint, this translates into a missing mother in one location, while on the receiving end that same person becomes a welcome addition to fill the shortage of nurse assistants or to carry out gig cleaning. It is fundamentally these women workers’ mobility and transnational lives that enable others to organise their lives in a more spatially compressed way. Meanwhile, people living in Global South locations, or in remote and neglected areas, must accept to draw on significantly larger terrains to sustain life – concretely by giving up time (and certain aspects of life). Here, again, Bernadete comes to mind, as she must negotiate migration regimes and compress space by time (Butler et al., 2024) for the social reproduction of others, but in the meantime and because of how cleaning gig work is organised and remunerated, she struggles to accommodate her own social reproduction needs.

As the platform urbanism literature affirms, platform companies mainly operate in urban environs. This is particularly salient to geographies such as the Swedish one, where in the sparsely populated northern inland vast areas must often be covered to reach service points, and where both private and public services are thinning out. Clearly, capital invests in certain areas and in certain people, while disinvesting in others (Sharma, 2014). But the same can be said about the (welfare) state when it surrenders still more aspects of social reproduction to the market and ceases to compensate for socio-economic and spatial inequalities ⁵ . Accordingly, ‘individual consumer/patient choice’ seems to apply exclusively to those living in relatively wealthy, urban areas, where service providers, labour power and purchasing power coincide. What is more, this unevenness also seems to have a temporal dimension (Sharma, 2014), as instant gratification – that is having the pizza delivered to your door within 30 min, placing an order for cleaning the next day, and fast-tracking to healthcare – seem to be a lot more ordinary in cities than elsewhere. Consequently, cities – at a general level – come to move faster towards a ‘care fix’, while rural communities in many ways are forced to slow down and, in some respects, even give up certain constituents and/or qualities of care.

We thus argue that attending to the uneven geographies of platformised care can reveal the political economy of social (re)production as an entity where space, time and social difference intersect in intricate and variable ways across various scales, but with one irrefutable result. It makes life easier for some and harder for others.