Working remotely in the city? Regional embeddedness of online platform workers in Indonesia’s secondary cities

This paper investigates how online platform workers are embedded into the local context to reap the benefit of urban agglomeration. By drawing on 50 interviews with online platform workers residing in five secondary cities in Indonesia, this research structures the notion of regional embeddedness into three main mechanisms. First, online workers organise remote tasks ‘on the ground’ by utilising multiple locations of workplaces. Second, online workers actively cultivate face-to-face interactions within their social networks for exchanging knowledge and sharing similar identity. Finally, online workers operate as micro-entrepreneurs who leverage urban density as a business ecosystem to scale up their services.