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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Geography

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Mazumdar, Anurag

Contributors dc:contributor

• Jefferson, Brian Jordan
• Cidell, Julie
• Sadana, Rashmi
• Butcher, Sian

• Platform Urbanism
• Platform Labor
• Delhi
• Smart City
• Digital Geography
• Urban Restructuring
• Gig Work

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Anurag Mazumdar

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F122216