What are the limits of city power, in the age of smart cities and sharing economies? What are the emerging processes of regulation? How are municipal powers being reconfigured, and by whom? Disrupting DC: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City explores these topics through a detailed analysis of Uber’s activities in Washington, DC, as it rose to prominence over the last decade. Perhaps more appropriately titled “Disrupting Democracy,” this study of modern statecraft outlines the new contours of city power in the age of smart cities and the gig economy, while also identifying the collective anxieties that have enabled this moment.
The impact of transportation technologies on cities has long been a topic of scholarship. From critiques about mechanized technologies in the 19th century (à la Schivelbusch’s Railway Journey (2014)) to a wealth of research on the rise and impacts of the private car (à la Bullard’s Highway Robbery (2004)), it is widely accepted that transportation technologies have had a disrupting influence on social and economic structures throughout time. Too often, however, these approaches center our attention on the technology itself—the car, the train, the app—rather than on the political conditions that enable technology-led solutions to upend and potentially replace existing norms of governance.
Technologies, in practice, are only as disruptive as social and political structures allow. The mechanisms of disruption, while embodied in physical technology such as cars or ride-hailing apps, are not primarily technological. In Disrupting DC, the authors draw attention to how the role of local government is being remade to serve the needs of technology providers over the public good. Following the tradition of detailed explorations of urban governance such as Dahl’s Who Governs? (2005), and recognizing the political limitations to governance created by specific social and economic arrangements, à la Peterson’s City Limits (1981), the book outlines contemporary constraints on policymakers seeking to secure a more egalitarian city.
Grounded in the experiences of Washington, DC, the book traces the evolution of the city’s relationship with Uber from initial antagonism in 2012 to DC’s designation as the best city for transportation start-ups a few years later. Across five chapters, the authors explore how Uber was able to avoid attempts at local regulation by recasting itself as an alternative to local government that could provide solutions to racial segregation and animosity (Chapter 2), as a source of access to new data and mobility knowledge (Chapter 3), as an innovator building the city of the future (Chapters 1 and 4), and as a leader pioneering new and flexible employment arrangements (Chapter 5). It also shows the extent to which Uber failed to deliver on these promises, and the lack of consequences it faced. Based on interviews with more than 50 policy stakeholders, Uber representatives, and gig workers, and interspersed with academic literature, the book makes a convincing argument that Uber’s efforts went beyond traditional lobbying. Indeed, Uber has acted as a “regulatory entrepreneur” making the “rewriting of laws, as opposed to currying favor through traditional lobbying, a significant part of its development plan” (p. 30). Using direct quotes, along with thick description of policy processes, the book helps readers understand how local stakeholders both enabled and contested Uber’s attempts to reshape policymaking in the contemporary American city.
The strength of the manuscript is the broader insights it provides about the state of contemporary urban governance. Reading across specific policy initiatives, the authors provide a clear diagnosis of the social and economic conditions—and the related anxieties of elected officials, workers, and residents—that form the undercurrents of policy debates in the so-called “smart city.” The analysis illustrates how mobility technology companies like Uber use policy narratives and discourses that build off these anxieties to shape regulatory and legislative outcomes that favor corporate bottom lines and disadvantage the public—especially workers.
As articulated by the authors, collective anxieties arise from our inability to solve entrenched problems through democratically accountable processes. Chapter 2 is illustrative, as it explores how troubled relationships with race and segregation—particularly pronounced in the changing demographics of Washington, DC—underlie the rise of Uber. Taxi services across US urban areas have long been criticized for underserving minority riders and lower-income neighborhoods. Leveraging frustration with this problem, Uber responded to local efforts to regulate its activities with a campaign called “Operation Rolling Thunder.” Resulting in more than 50,000 emails sent by Uber users to DC politicians in a 24‑hour period, the success of the initiative in defeating local regulation demonstrated the success of a corporate campaign built on racial grievances. Expanding on this experience, Uber initiated similar tactics when faced with unwelcome regulation in other locales, such as Portland, Oregon. To cast itself as a defender of racial justice, Uber purchased ads on bulletin boards and in media outlets, stating: “If you tolerate racism, Delete Uber. Black people have the right to move without fear.” In DC and beyond, Uber was successful because it offered an account of racial justice that was “just broad enough to land an emotional blow but just narrow enough to seem eminently fixable” (p. 47) with the right technology or incentive structure.
We also observe how Uber engages anxieties surrounding the politics of information and knowledge, and the future of employment. The vocabulary of big data and smart cities promises that more equitable and prosperous outcomes will result from cultivating data-rich environments that increase our collective knowledge. While Uber holds up the promise of data-sharing to curry favor with the public and elected officials, it also proactively crafts regulations that prevent data sharing with city officials, as discussed in a chapter titled The Work of Data. Relatedly, Chapter 5, The Uber Workplace, shows how Uber monetized the anxiety of workers looking for extra income in the post-recession economy while offering them minimal employment security. Direct quotes about the experiences of drivers illuminate the ways that Uber actively reduces worker organizing by positioning fellow drivers as competitors instead of coworkers and, like other gig-economy employers, forces employees into “picketing an algorithm” to advocate for their rights.
In the age of smart cities, the anxieties outlined in Disrupting DC undermine our collective capacity and mute our desire to solve problems through difficult processes of democratic governance. By exploiting a political and infrastructural vacuum, Uber and other technology companies are redefining what people expect from cities and the urban public realm, which increasingly involves less regulation and oversight by democratically elected bodies in favor of technocratic solutions developed in Silicon Valley.
Presenting regulation as antithetical to innovation is an old magic trick. Uber’s policy playbook, built and tested in Washington, DC, provides a different strategy of convincing local governments to limit regulatory oversight of mobility services operated in their jurisdictions. In 2014, Uber-backed legislation adopted by city council outlawed regulatory actions that would have enabled elected officials to understand the scope and geography of Uber’s activity in DC. This included limiting the City’s ability to collect or transmit anonymous data about Uber trips, review inventories of vehicles or drivers, or collect fees from the company on a per-ride basis. Blocks on these flows of information made public officials perpetually blind to the harms of Uber’s business model. In DC and beyond, Uber-backed laws preempted the public sector’s ability to perform regulatory duties that could counter those harms. Narratives that Uber offered about the fairness and efficiency of its services—and about the fatal shortcomings of public transportation—were allowed to stand.
A keen observation of the book is that this challenging of democratic authority of local governments by technology companies is only effective in the context of our declining and diminished expectations of the public sector’s ability to deliver on public goods and policy promises of a more equitable society. A second observation is that Uber, and other technology companies, offer technological solutions as a “common-sense” approach, providing easy answers (i.e. more Uber) to entrenched public problems (i.e. racism) in ways that speak to both residents and elected officials. A third observation is that Uber is successful in this last endeavor because it plays on our collective anxieties about entrenched urban problems, and on the insecurity of elected officials who feel pressure to appear innovative in the era of smart cities.
Reminding us that statecraft is malleable, Disrupting DC illustrates the threat to the democratic project by technology companies who have successfully exploited a political and infrastructural vacuum to redefine what we expect from cities and the public realm. By drawing attention to the weaknesses of our current collective consciousness, the book also suggests that pathways to reinvigorating democratic governance lie in rebuilding a new common sense that centers public accountability in a democratic project and challenges the narrow worldview offered by technology companies in the era of the smart city and gig economy.
Bibliography
- Bullard, R., Johnson, G. and Torres, A. (eds.). 2004. Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity (1st ed.), Boston: South End Press.
- Dahl, R. A. 2005. Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in the American City, New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Peterson, P. E. 1981. City Limits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Schivelbusch, W. 2014. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, With a New Preface, Berkeley: University of California Press.
