In our research project exploring Amazon’s logistical urbanism we are continually faced with a refusal of the tech company to engage with us, which has required conceiving of research methods as workarounds. Our set of methodological approaches – which aims to think outside the black, or rather, brown box – nevertheless managed to highlight different features of Amazon’s urban operations: e.g., how the US-corporation has constructed urban infrastructures of convenience (and disaster relief), built public-private dependencies, and is regularly testing visions of urban futures on its second biggest market globally, Germany. In our contribution we would like to methodologically reflect on the challenges of researching Big Tech’s infrastructural city interventions in critical registers.

Our research positionality is rooted in critique. However, being publicly critical toward our research subject regulated access to analyzing the platforms’ urban governance strategies significantly. In our talk, we will provide a brief overview of the methods we deployed. Visiting trade fairs, reverse engineering operations, and reading patents allowed us to gain a patchwork of insights into Amazon’s logistical urbanism. It also encouraged us to rethink – or diffract – the production of knowledge toward more public-facing, collaborative modes of ethnographically ‘following infrastructures’, becoming critical of our own academic positionings.