Drive to Grow: Spatial Frictions and Struggles in a Chinese Ride-Hailing Platform’s Scale-Making

Abstract

This article develops a space-centered theoretical framework that integrates the assemblage theory, critical spatial analysis, and political economy to analyze platform development. We conceptualize a digital platform as the “platform multiple” constituted by encompassing, parallel, and intersecting assemblages that are empirically and analytically visible. As shifting constellations of heterogeneous constituting elements, each of these assemblages operates within and across socially enacted and power-laden spaces. Platform companies deploy spatial strategies, one common form of which is scaling-up, to form and transform assemblages within and across spaces to achieve the spatial fix of capital. The execution of spatial strategies triggers spatial frictions with existing structural power relations, giving shape to the path and configuration of platform development. We illustrate this framework by examining Didi, China’s largest ride-hailing platform. Using mixed methods to collect empirical information in Xi’an, Guangzhou and beyond, we employ a process-tracing strategy to analyze Didi’s expansion and transformation, the spatial frictions it encountered within, across, and between local and national scales, and the corresponding spatial frictions it encountered on the global scale in the capital’s attempts to achieve spatial fix via IPO. The study debunks spatial imaginaries of platforms’ smooth scaling-up by demonstrating all kinds of spatial frictions they encounter within and across spaces. It extends the discussion of spatial fix by highlighting the capitalization of scale itself, widely seen in the platform economy and among tech firms. It further offers a transferable analytical toolkit for approaching platforms as contingently and practically enacted spatial processes.

Keywords

the platform multiple spatial fix spatial friction ride-hailing the platform economy

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