Uberising the Urban. Labour, Infrastructure and Big Data in the Actually Existing Smart City of Toronto

This thesis explores how Uber reformats the urban and vice versa. Rather than taking for granted Uber’s success in remoulding the emerging ‘smart city’ in its own image, Uberising the Urban pays close attention to the contradictory, variegated and far from frictionless encounters between Uberisation and urbanisation. The thesis is particularly interested in those neuralgic points of contact where the abstract logics of Uber’s business model – its vectors of data extraction, labour exploitation and platform expansion – hit the urban ground of existing social and physical geographies. The Uberisation of the urban – such is this thesis’s main argument – does not take place in a material and social void; it unfolds in, with and against the dense social and material thickness of existing urban space. This argument is deepened in three case studies. Zooming in from different angles, these case studies show how the vectors of Uberisation have come up against the multiscalar and variously uneven urban grounds of the actually existing smart city of Toronto. While the first case study provides a detailed discussion of the conflictive processes leading up to the legalisation of Uber in Toronto and the parallel ‘regulated deregulation’ of the city’s taxi-cum-ridehail market, the second case study tackles the next subsequent ‘stage’ of Uberisation in Toronto: the proliferation of various public-private ridehail partnerships (PPRPs) between Uber and Lyft on the one hand and local and regional transit agencies in the GTA on the other. The third case study is concerned with Uber’s self-driving car programme and, in particular, the invasive practices of data extraction that Uber has implemented in Toronto – turning the city into a real-life urban data reservoir for the development of its self-driving software. A conclusion, shedding light on a potential reconfiguration of Uber towards more socially emancipatory ends, rounds out the dissertation

Cartographies of violence : postcolonial views on the (de-)construction of space in research and practice

Dualistic spatial allocations of a (peaceful) here and a (violent) there, near and far, global north-south, which bear on the construction of differences, are omnipresent..