Unequal taxi geographies: Antagonisms in platform-driven urban restructuring in Delhi,India

Abstract

This article considers how the relationship of everyday spatial practices of digital on-demand, ride-hailing taxi drivers and social imaginaries of urban restructuring remain imbricated in class and religious antagonisms. Through an ethnographic investigation of the intimate neighborhood geographies of exclusion that govern platform work in Delhi, this article provides a richer understanding of how platform urbanism is undergirded by heterogeneous assessments of the material and discursive dimensions of a “world-class” city and re-centers the locally specific antagonisms that are key to articulating norms of urban platform citizenship. To do so, it empirically exposes the contexts wherein platform work produces constructs of order, cleanliness and safety that socio-spatially vilifies low-income, Muslim-majority neighborhoods of Delhi. I argue that the grammar of such exclusionary practices draws on a nexus of factors, namely individual devaluation of platform workers, the pervasive atmosphere of anti-Muslim and anti-poor hatred in Delhi, and the dangers encountered by platform labor. By attending to the complex agency of taxi drivers, this article contributes to an understanding of how platform urbanism is co-constituted with antagonisms, and how contestations over urban restructuring unfold as taxi drivers realign platforms as political imaginations.