Are There Any Delivery Workers In Your Neighborhood?

What is this project about?

This website is a research project that focus on a group of food delivery workers who works for the platform Meituan in Gaoxin District, Anshan City, China. The daily range of movements of delivery workers are usually fixed within a certain area and thus they have established intimacy with the landscape. On the contrast, the delivery time and route planning are largely controlled by the algorithm of the application, which left them little initiative to choose the way to interact with the neighborhood. 

In this project, I will explore how these food delivery workers experience the neighborhood. To answer this question, I will further investigate how these delivery workers define the boundary of a neighborhood, their how they interact with the materiality(includes the built environment and human actors, such as the users of Meituan, and the local businesses) within the neighborhood under the influence of algorithm. 

Methodology

Due to Covid 19, I conducted this research chiefly online. The methods that I have adapted is online interview and observation without any face-to-face interactions with others.

When looking for participants, my first instinct is to turn my eyes on the application, Meituan. Since I am a heavy user of this platform, I directly went to the “order” page and managed to find the phones number of the delivery riders who had delivered takeaways to me. I then sent messages to six of them, in which I identified myself as a researcher, expressed my desire for them to participate, and attached my WeChat number. Five delivery workers added me on WeChat, three of whom I interviewed later. Other than interviewing, I also asked my informants to produce screenshots, photos, and videos, in order to give us a thick description of their daily engagement with the neighborhood.

In fact, observation was not in my initial plan. However, during the interview, two of the informants emphasized the importance of participant observation to understand the work of a delivery worker, and one of them even invited me to work with him for a day. Due to Cover19 , this could not be realized. This was when Daming suggested that I could observe the delivery workers in Wanda Plaza where a lot of delivery works come and go during its open hours, according the heat map of this district.

This is an example of the heat map. Red means that the restaurants in this area get a large number of orders.

To protect the identities of the participants, all names of the participants are anonymised. Besides the names, I have tried to use materials where faces are not recognized and the human voice is altered.