Governing Spaces of Their Own: Platform Drivers in Bogotá, Colombia

Lozano Paredes, Luis Hernando

Governing Spaces of Their Own: Platform Drivers in Bogotá, Colombia

Lozano Paredes, Luis Hernando

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2023

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Lozano Paredes, Luis Hernando
dc.date.accessioned	2023-10-03T03:34:12Z
dc.date.available	2023-10-03T03:34:12Z
dc.date.issued	2023
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/172433
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.description.abstract	In Latin America, platform technology is a new way in which individuals and communities form practice patterns. In this thesis, I focus on platform-based drivers in Bogotá, Colombia, who have contested traditional ride-hailing platform companies and burdensome government regulations by developing and using platform technologies in a way they can control more fully. This qualitative study applied a digital ethnography approach focused on a community of drivers called Drivers Club Bogotá. It drew on online semi-structured (synchronous and asynchronous) interviews with the city’s drivers, experts and government and corporate representatives. It also developed an analysis of online graphic and written data concerning the public discussions and regulatory evolution around ride-hailing platforms in Bogotá to uncover the structures in which drivers are embedded. I employed the following analytical framework to examine the platform-based practices of drivers and their contestation of both corporation and governmental systems. I used Barns’ (2019b) approach of platform urbanism, which views cities as spaces of dense platform intermediation, to explore platform development in urban settings such as Bogotá. I also drew from Davis’ (2020) affordances approach to agency and social capital around technological artefacts and the people using them and extracted from Edgerton’s (2007) idea of “creole technologies”, which proposes an alternative way to understand technology use in the Global South. Furthermore, I engaged with the concept of “Evasive Entrepreneurship” (Thierer (2020) to address the main idea of this thesis, namely, that in Bogotá, platform drivers are agents of evasive entrepreneurship, circumventing and exploiting institutional contradictions to achieve autonomy – thus governing spaces of their own. Finally, I applied Watson’s (2004) framework of conflicting rationalities to understand institutional contradictions from a southern perspective. My findings indicate that platform-based drivers in Bogotá have developed hybrid guild-like communities that I term “creole platforms”, by mixing and matching platform technologies. My findings also show that despite external and internal institutional contradictions, these communities emerge as spaces that afford innovation, thriving and autonomy for the drivers. I conclude by considering the policy implications of the design process arising from this community of drivers, in particular, how the empirical findings of this thesis and the evidence of other platform-afforded communities can help articulate a new configuration of urban governance open to the co-design of solutions taking into consideration bottom-up processes, where the state is a partner, not a hinderer.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US.UTF-8
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/172433/1/thesis.pdf
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	© 2023 Luis Hernando Lozano Paredes
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/cph
dc.title	Governing Spaces of Their Own: Platform Drivers in Bogotá, Colombia	en_US.UTF-8
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

In Latin America, platform technology is a new way in which individuals and communities form practice patterns. In this thesis, I focus on platform-based drivers in Bogotá, Colombia, who have contested traditional ride-hailing platform companies and burdensome government regulations by developing and using platform technologies in a way they can control more fully. This qualitative study applied a digital ethnography approach focused on a community of drivers called Drivers Club Bogotá. It drew on online semi-structured (synchronous and asynchronous) interviews with the city’s drivers, experts and government and corporate representatives. It also developed an analysis of online graphic and written data concerning the public discussions and regulatory evolution around ride-hailing platforms in Bogotá to uncover the structures in which drivers are embedded. I employed the following analytical framework to examine the platform-based practices of drivers and their contestation of both corporation and governmental systems. I used Barns’ (2019b) approach of platform urbanism, which views cities as spaces of dense platform intermediation, to explore platform development in urban settings such as Bogotá. I also drew from Davis’ (2020) affordances approach to agency and social capital around technological artefacts and the people using them and extracted from Edgerton’s (2007) idea of “creole technologies”, which proposes an alternative way to understand technology use in the Global South. Furthermore, I engaged with the concept of “Evasive Entrepreneurship” (Thierer (2020) to address the main idea of this thesis, namely, that in Bogotá, platform drivers are agents of evasive entrepreneurship, circumventing and exploiting institutional contradictions to achieve autonomy – thus governing spaces of their own. Finally, I applied Watson’s (2004) framework of conflicting rationalities to understand institutional contradictions from a southern perspective. My findings indicate that platform-based drivers in Bogotá have developed hybrid guild-like communities that I term “creole platforms”, by mixing and matching platform technologies. My findings also show that despite external and internal institutional contradictions, these communities emerge as spaces that afford innovation, thriving and autonomy for the drivers. I conclude by considering the policy implications of the design process arising from this community of drivers, in particular, how the empirical findings of this thesis and the evidence of other platform-afforded communities can help articulate a new configuration of urban governance open to the co-design of solutions taking into consideration bottom-up processes, where the state is a partner, not a hinderer.

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