People as platforms digital subjection and resistance among taxi drivers in Delhi, India

Mazumdar, Anurag

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122216 Copy

Description

Title

People as platforms digital subjection and resistance among taxi drivers in Delhi, India

Author(s)

Mazumdar, Anurag

Issue Date

2023-11-17

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Jefferson, Brian Jordan

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Jefferson, Brian Jordan

Committee Member(s)

• Cidell, Julie
• Sadana, Rashmi
• Butcher, Sian

Department of Study

Geography & GIS

Discipline

Geography

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Platform urbanism
• platform labor
• Delhi
• smart city
• digital geography
• urban restructuring
• gig work

Abstract

Ride-hailing taxi platforms Uber and Ola have precipitated changes onto the lives of informal transport workers, simultaneously disrupting urban governance in Delhi and the surrounding national capital region. This thesis examines the social and spatial politics of taxi drivers and ancillary transport actors, as also passengers and policymakers, to frame platform urbanism as a critical arena for reshaping social imaginaries situated within existing contestations of “world-class” urbanism. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Delhi, Gurugram and Noida with taxi drivers, labor activists and passengers between 2021 and 2022, it offers an in-depth analysis of how differing political investments in platform mobility reinvigorate ideas of exclusionary urban citizenship by depoliticizing its material and discursive effects. By engaging with and contributing to literatures in urban geography, anthropology of work, critical data studies, and critical mobility studies, it examines the intersection of platform urbanism with socio-political cultures of trust, urban restructuring, and people as infrastructure. This thesis argues that the fundamental framework underlying the reincarnation of Delhi’s bourgeois environmentalist vision does not rest on the technological intermediation of platforms but depends on their ability to arbitrate social frictions and authorize a narrowly defined agenda for Southern urbanism. Moving away from attending to platform urbanism as an issue of technological affordances or mobility challenges alone, this thesis moves toward theorizing platform urbanism as a site of contentious political imaginations that galvanizes social consensus for an advanced algorithmic city and establishes the centrality of meritocracy in claiming rightful occupancy within Delhi’s spatial geography. However, it does not lose sight of the potential of platforms as a terrain for politically engaging with the idea of just algorithmic and urban futures.

Graduation Semester

2023-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Anurag Mazumdar

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