In cities, the demand for freight transport is increasing considerably. In New York, many of the delivery workers who help supply the city everyday come from the outskirts to meet the needs of the center in tight flow contexts and highly precarious employment conditions: often paid by task, on call, without guarantee of work, providers of their own work tools and funder for their social security charges and insurance in the event of a work accident.
Existing work on the practice of urban delivery trades has most often been carried out about bicycle deliverers or ordering parties and on the basis of interviews (Reme-Harnay, et al., 2014; Saidi, 2017 ; Dablanc et al., 2021). As for in situ observations, more recently developed, they are most often carried out at a fixed location : the storage warehouse or the final delivery location (Benvegnù, Gaborieau, 2017; Chen, 2016). The succession of action sequences leading from one to the other and the concrete conditions of the execution of the delivery are not so often observed.
The movie City tour. The Everyday of Delivery Workers in New York (2019, 92 min.) Is the result of a field survey conducted by filmed ethnographic observation led in 2017 in New York City with the support of Université Paris Est and MetroFreight. This research on the figures of urban delivery aimed to explore, through a visual approach, these key cogs of the urban machine that are the professionals of logistics, by presenting the portrait in action of some of these workers, the practical conditions and the content of their work, the ordinary tasks they perform, and the characteristics of their professional and urban environment in the central New York area. The communication proposal seeks to restore the expertise of these workers in the metropolitan geography of the logistics.
Keywords: Urban Delivery|Workers|Logistics|New York City|Film
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