Piattaforme digitali e distribuzione ineguale dell’accesso al cibo: leggere i divari dei servizi di food delivery durante la pandemia

Digital platforms and unequal food accessibility: reading the gaps in food delivery services during the pandemic. Digital on-demand food delivery platforms (known in the literature as OFD, Online Food Delivery) have helped to ensure access to food during the Covid19 pandemic, while catering establishments underwent closures or scheduling and some commercial food complexes became difficult to reach and usable due to the limitations imposed 273 on movements and accesses. This work is part of the geographical debate on OFD platforms and intends to focus on how they represent opportunities, but also factors that create margins, as well as other tools made possible by the fourth revolution (Lazzeroni and Morazzoni, 2020). More precisely, the goal is to observe the situations of inequality that seem to have emerged in this area during the pandemic (Bissell, 2020) due to two types of barriers to access to services: the presence/absence of the service in the different areas and the lack of digital infrastructure in some areas of the country. The context of the Italian OFD will be studied through a micro-biopolitical lens that connects the power relations, the market relations (capitalist and techno-capitalist), and the governance/smart-mentality processes through which the OFD is disciplined and managed in the cities.