Abstract
AbstractIn 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.
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