Type: Article
Title: The State of Uberisation: Neoliberalism, Smart Urbanism, and the Regulated Deregulation of Toronto's Taxi-cum-Ridehail Market
Authors: Namberger, Fabian 
Issue Date: Jan-2024
Keywords: Uber; Toronto; regulated deregulation; smart cities; platformisation; Uberisation
Abstract: 
In 2016, the City of Toronto legalised the ridehail giant Uber under a particularly Uber-friendly regulatory regime. Rather than understanding this interim outcome along the lines of now widespread narratives of corporate “disruption”, in this article I take up Manuel B. Aalbers’ notion of “regulated deregulation” in order to foreground the state's role as a manically prolific facilitator of early Uberisation. Based on ethnographic research in Toronto, I argue that the three longer-standing state spatial strategies of (1) the common-sense neoliberal state, (2) the labour-averse competition state, and (3) the tech-infatuated smart state were paramount in creating those “on-the-ground” conditions—social, legal, spatial, and other—on which Uber has been able to thrive in many cities across the North American continent.
Subject Class (DDC): 330: Wirtschaft
HCU-Faculty: Geschichte und Theorie der Stadt 
Journal or Series Name: Antipode 
Volume: 56
Issue: 1
Start page: 206
End page: 228
Publisher: Wiley
ISSN: 0066-4812
Publisher DOI: 10.1111/anti.12972
URN (Citation Link): urn:nbn:de:gbv:1373-repos-12006
Directlink: https://repos.hcu-hamburg.de/handle/hcu/931
Language: English
Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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