Friction-free cities and the rise of contactless and robotised delivery infrastructure

On-demand mobility and delivery platforms, hailed as providing essential services during COVID-19, continue to proliferate. In many cities, they have evolved into critical infrastructures that shape urban life, space, and governance. Operating on the technological and urban ideal of frictionlessness, these platforms particularly strive for frictionless mobility. This paper explores how this pursuit of frictionless mobility reimagines and restructures urban space, focusing on Baemin, the most-used food delivery platform in South Korea. Attending to the politics of friction, the paper suggests that Baemin enables certain kinds of circulation and connections while also producing disconnections, which contribute to sanitised spaces and fragmented living, amplified by the deployment of delivery robots. Drawing on fieldwork in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, the paper illustrates how the continuous push for the smooth transport of goods is giving rise to increasingly contactless, automated, and robotised infrastructure, leading to social and spatial changes. It highlights that this transformation involves minimising, controlling, and eliminating human travel and human-to-human contact. Finally, the paper reflects on what a city becomes when it aspires to be frictionless and proposes that the practices of rethinking friction can offer ways to create spaces and infrastructures that encourage encounters and intersections, instead of avoidance and distance.