In Delhi and its surrounding National Capital Region (NCR), ride-hailing taxi platforms Uber and Ola are reshaping urban governance, mobility and labor by authorizing and endorsing a narrowly defined urban technological agenda. My dissertation finds that far from being a story of immaterial intermediaries who simply disrupt urban landscapes, platform-urban interactions become a critical arena where the reshaping of social imaginaries, inflected by class, caste, gender, and religious power and cleavages, forms the foundation for political mobilization. By privileging digital efficiency, platform urbanism not only sets the terms of contestations over urban space, but also neutralizes and depoliticizes these struggles. I unpack the co-constitution of platform capitalism and Delhi’s socio-spatial politics through three interrelated papers.
In the first paper, I examine the dynamics of worker-owned alternatives to digital taxi platforms in Delhi, aptly labeled as “platforms of trust.” I find that these platforms inadvertently place a disproportionate burden of establishing trustworthiness on drivers and delegitimize the wider political struggles for dignified platform work, revealing the complexities of a city marked by profound social inequalities. I argue that platforms of trust remain detached from the locally embedded and spatially significant web of power relations that underlie trust formation. Instead, they bolster the notion of elite and middle-class technological optimism, suggesting that “threats” posed by the urban underclass can be effectively countered through the implementation of digital platforms.
In the second paper, I examine the intricate relationship between the spatialization of taxi platforms and the socio-spatial imaginaries underpinning urban restructuring. Focusing on Delhi, I reveal that taxi drivers strategically distance themselves from low-income, Muslim-majority neighborhoods, framing them as peripheral and antithetical to the burgeoning platform economy. By exploring three ethnographic contexts in which these tensions unfold, I highlight how drivers marshal registers of order, leveraging class and religious biases, concerns for their own well-being and the geographies of fear. This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the co-constitutive nature of the indeterminate rationalities within platform urbanism and urban restructuring.
In the third paper, I delve into the dynamic interplay between competition and collaboration among taxi drivers, highlighting the role of platform urbanism and “people as infrastructure,” specifically within the context of a taxi parking lot at Delhi Airport. I find that the conjunctions underlying human platform infrastructures de-homogenize the contexts and circumstances in which entrepreneurial logics and collaborative impulses emerge as provisional tools for envisioning a transformative future. By shifting attention from the binary view of acquiescence versus resistance, this analysis directs scholarly attention towards the fluid and ephemeral nature of platform labor politics and the contestations within relational infrastructures underlying the production of platform urbanism.
Through these three papers, this dissertation illuminates that the political imaginations enclosed in the contestations between and within different social constellations, rather than the technologies per se, constitute platform urbanism. These political imaginations, prompted by and enacted on platform-urban interfaces, galvanize social consensus for an advanced algorithmic city and establish claims to rightful occupancy within Delhi’s spatial geography, but do not foreclose the possibility of resistance.
