TY - JOUR
AU1 - Gibbings, Sheri L
AU2 - Taylor, Jessica
AB - Abstract This paper investigates the sociotechnical imaginary surrounding Uber’s supposedly imminent arrival in Winnipeg, through an examination of communication in the public sphere. We examine how actors mobilized their communicative resources in efforts to either bring ride-hailing or keep it away. For some advocates, ride-hailing technology was less important than Uber’s symbolic value of building Winnipeg’s image as an innovative city. Media coverage contrasted innovation and Uber with Winnipeg’s anxieties about being behind other cities and its taxi industry’s reputation as stuck in the past. These visions of Winnipeg’s future addressed an unspoken White, middle-class city dweller. While Winnipeg’s transportation industry was shaped by the socially located experiences of racialized immigrant men as taxi drivers and Indigenous women as passengers, these actors had less power to shape the imaginary. Our analysis suggests that cities like Winnipeg view Uber as an image-making product as much as a beneficial service for their citizens. What does a new technology like ride-hailing mean to a city before it even arrives? In the fall of 2017 in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada), discussion of the arrival of ride-hailing company Uber was at its height. Since 1935, taxis in Winnipeg had been regulated by a provincial body, the Taxicab Board (TCB). By 2014, the media was speculating about Uber’s potential arrival. Following lobbying by Uber and a desire to cut budget deficits, in the spring of 2017 the newly in power Progressive Conservative provincial government tabled the Local Vehicles for Hire Act (Bill 30), which devolved taxi regulation to the municipality. If the bill went through, Winnipeg would soon have a new arena of regulation on its hands. The taxi industry’s lobbying body, the Taxi Coalition, was mobilizing taxi license owners and drivers to attend hearings at the provincial legislature to have a say on their industry’s future. Uber, as the main ride-hailing company working on entering Winnipeg, had also been mobilizing support, but using slightly different tactics. Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Data visualization provided by Uber for Emmerson (2017). Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Data visualization provided by Uber for Emmerson (2017). On 18 September 2017, the Winnipeg Free Press published “Uber Eager to Roll into Manitoba Market” (Emmerson, 2017). The centerpiece of this article was a data visualization provided to the newspaper by Uber: a map of Winnipeg with dots representing, according to the image caption, “the location of the first time a unique user opened the app in Winnipeg from January to June 2017” (see Figure 1). In the graphic, the city disappears under the desire for Uber, as roads and rivers are covered by dots. This graphic was part of Uber’s efforts to influence the form of a developing sociotechnical imaginary: that is, “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 4). The graphic transformed the everyday activity of opening up a smartphone app into an image that argued individuals in Winnipeg desired a future that included Uber. A savvy use of Uber’s symbolic capital, this method was particularly effective because although there were 30,000 dots on the map, the representation seemed to suggest that all of Winnipeg, a population of just over 700,000, was in support. Uber had used this technique in other Canadian cities, such as Vancouver, where Global News published a similar image (Zussman, 2018), intervening in public discourse at crucial moments to show governments, businesses, and residents the public’s desire for Uber. This replication suggests that the practice is part of a broader strategy that Uber uses when trying to sway public opinion and policy in its favor: engaging with news media by providing them with catchy images framed in such a way as to suggest widespread support. As Uber and other similar companies have expanded globally, developing sociotechnical imaginaries have surrounded the new joining of labor arrangements and the logistics technology of ride-hailing. These imaginaries have centered on the idea of Uber as a disruptive innovator because of its easy-to-use technology (Dudley, Banister, & Schwanen, 2017) and its provision of flexible work (Rosenblat, 2018). Yet these imaginaries alone do not explain how a desire for Uber played out in Winnipeg’s public sphere during 2014–2017, nor how regulators seemed to rush to welcome Uber in 2017, at the same time that jurisdictions such as London were refusing to renew Uber’s license (Butler & Topham, 2017). The development of the sociotechnical imaginary in Winnipeg was shaped by Winnipeg’s specific social, political, and economic context. We argue that for some of the players in Winnipeg, the details of Uber as a company and ride-hailing as a practice were less important than Uber’s symbolic value of building Winnipeg’s image as an innovative city. As Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff (2017, p. 784) argued, “it seems as if all governmental functions must cater to a discourse of innovation in order to appear economically defensible, politically legitimate and suited to this historical moment.” In this paper, we argue that Winnipeg’s self-perception as a city behind the rest of Canada, as well as persistent complaints about local taxi services, meant that the framing of regulatory changes as opening the way for innovation in the form of a globally successful company was more successful in building the sociotechnical imaginary than the taxi industry’s critiques concerning fairness or safety. The form of this developing sociotechnical imaginary depended on the players’ access to resources, both financial and symbolic (Bourdieu, 1991). In Winnipeg, the municipal government’s city-making project ultimately centered on middle-class city dwellers, aiming to innovate in the arena of transportation whilst the provincial government was freezing public transportation funding. Ultimately, this process exemplified what Graham and Marvin (2001, p. 33) have called “splintering urbanism,” a process where infrastructures are being “‘unbundled’ in ways that help sustain the fragmentation of the social and material fabric of cities.” While ostensibly speaking for all, the sociotechnical imaginary that took shape papered over significant issues of class, race, migration, and gender in Winnipeg’s transportation sphere. The dots in Uber’s image are simply users, not socially located people. Yet, in Winnipeg, as visible in some media coverage, women—particularly Indigenous women—were concerned about their safety in taxis (CBC News, 2016b). At the same time, the mostly immigrant men who were taxi license owners and taxi drivers, in part because of racist labor markets (see Gupta, 2006), were concerned about their own work safety and investments (Martin, 2017). Those within the taxi industry mostly did not address aspirational city-making in their efforts to oppose regulatory changes, instead addressing what they saw as the realities of Winnipeg. This mismatch, we argue, was at the center of arguments about the role of government and the value of various existing and possible transportation infrastructures in Winnipeg. The technology itself was never the only issue being addressed. Instead, it was the social value of the technology as a marker of the kind of city Winnipeg could become. This paper is largely an analysis of the discursive realm, part of an ongoing ethnographic project on the impact of ride-hailing on the organization of cities. We are concerned with how sociotechnical change was represented and debated in public discourse. The first author, Sheri L. Gibbings, conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Winnipeg during August–December 2017. With the help of an undergraduate research assistant, Brooke Dietrich, both authors gathered newspaper articles about ride-hailing in Winnipeg from the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC, CTV, Metro News, and Winnipeg Sun. This article also draws on a 2016 report by consulting firm MNP on taxicabs in Winnipeg, transcripts of the provincial legislature’s hearings on Bill 30, and notes taken at the Winnipeg City Council’s Executive Policy Committee (EPC) meetings. We bring discourses made central in the newspapers into conversation with other public, yet less-circulated, discourses in hearings to demonstrate how, in the local context of Winnipeg, a sociotechnical imaginary emerged that privileged innovation over other values. While public discussions ranged from innovation and safety to arguments about level playing fields, speed of service, and taxi license owners’ loss of their investments, we focus on safety as the counter-discourse that was both most successful and most disrupted the image of the featureless driver and passenger addressed in the developing sociotechnical imaginary. Winnipeg, ride-hailing, and a sociotechnical imaginary in formation Taxicabs have a long history in Winnipeg, beginning shortly after the Métis Red River Resistance in 1869 and the 1870 incorporation of Manitoba as the fifth province in the Canadian Confederation, with the first street cab appearing in Winnipeg in 1872 (Beattie, 1998, p. 37). Since the so-called taxi wars of the 1920s and 1930s (Davis, 1998), the taxi and limousine industry in Winnipeg has been regulated by the TCB. Before Bill 30 passed, in order to own and operate a taxi, one needed to purchase a taxi business license from a previous owner and receive TCB approval for this transfer. Entirely new licenses were possible, but were rarely approved by the TCB. Each driver, whether an owner or not, needed a taxicab driver’s license, requiring criminal checks and specialized training. By the mid-1990s, many of the older owners had gotten out of the business, selling their business licenses and shares to individuals of South Asian descent (Harry, personal communication, 3 November 2017).1 Two main taxi companies, Duffy’s and Unicity, continue to be run as co-ops of owners with centralized dispatching. During the early 21st century, the public complained about the taxi industry’s service: in particular, long wait times and unreliable service (MNP, 2016, p. 2). Indigenous and non-Indigenous women (as well as a trans man) also made serious allegations about sexual assault and violence perpetrated by drivers (see CBC News, 2016b; Pauls, 2016). In 2015, the provincial New Democratic Party government commissioned MNP to conduct an independent review of the taxicab industry. It was in this context of widespread dissatisfaction with the industry, and Uber’s expansion in cities across North America, that discussions of Uber started to surface more regularly. While Uber is not the first company to use smartphones to manage personal transportation, it has been the most successful and has dominated the conversation about industry changes. Launched in San Francisco in 2010, Uber’s current business model links drivers using private cars with passengers using smartphones, who “hail” the drivers and pay fares through the Uber app. Uber considers itself a technology rather than a taxi company (Rosenblat, 2018, p. 5), and argues that it does not employ drivers and thus does not have to adhere to local employment regulations (Hawkins, 2018). Uber has been enormously popular, but has also consistently flouted regulatory efforts (della Cava, 2017) and has a history of framing any opposition as a dislike of innovation. Uber’s business model has only recently been legal in many Canadian cities, with early adopter Edmonton legalizing ride-hailing in March 2016 (The Canadian Press, 2016). As of early 2018, Uber operated in 17 cities in Canada (Uber Estimator, 2018). Scholars have begun exploring the experiences of drivers working for Uber and other ride-hailing companies such as Lyft and Didi Chuxing in China (e.g., Chen, 2017; Malin & Chandler, 2017). A significant focus has been on how the arrival of ride-hailing companies shifted labor relations through the introduction of the smartphone-enabled mediator (Rosenblat, 2018). Frost (2017), for instance, argued that companies like Uber devalue human labor by fetishizing the agency of technology. Hua and Ray (2018) argued that ride-hailing companies effectively created a scenario where male, immigrant drivers worked full-time, in comparison to the more privileged (often White) part-time drivers. Other scholars have examined how the digital mediation of work shapes ride-hailing, as the design and use of apps is used for both controlling drivers and for drivers’ resistance (Chan & Humphreys, 2018; Chen, 2017; Rosenblat & Stark, 2016). While most research has focused on the effects of the arrival of Uber or similar companies, in the period under examination in this paper, no ride-hailing companies were operating in Winnipeg. In fact, despite eventual changes in municipal bylaws allowing for ride-hailing companies, Uber in 2018 still did not operate in Winnipeg due to Uber’s dislike of Manitoba Public Insurance’s insurance requirements (McGuckin, 2018). Thus, we examined a different moment of technological (and social) change: one in which change had happened elsewhere and actors had mobilized to either bring it to the city or keep it away. Ranchordás (2017) and Dupuis (2018) have looked at moments like this elsewhere, examining, respectively, Uber’s successful use of online petitions and how discussion in city council meetings has shaped cities’ final decisions on ride-sharing services. We took a closer look at the media and public political discussions to examine the emergence in Winnipeg of a sociotechnical imaginary that embraced the idea of Uber as an icon of innovation, and embraced innovation as key to the future of cities. A key aspect of our argument is the notion that the meaning of a technology—in this case the smartphone-enabled labor arrangements of Uber—is made within and through its social context. New media, therefore, can mean something in a city even when they are not there. Drawing on Taylor’s (2002) concept of social imaginaries,Jasanoff and Kim (2009) proposed the idea of sociotechnical imaginaries. Sociotechnical imaginaries tie visions of science and technology with visions of how society ought to be organized (Jasanoff, 2015, pp. 4–5). These visions encompass discourses, regulations, actions, and material technologies (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 20). Although sociotechnical imaginaries sometimes originate with single individuals or small collectives, they often gain momentum through the building of relationships or networks (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 4). Imaginaries are not singular, however. There can be multiple and competing imaginaries, and bodies such as courts, legislatures, and the media can reinforce and support some imaginaries while others fall to the side (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 4). As Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot (2014, p. 13) stated, technologies may appear stable but “must be made and remade in every instance.” In this paper, we examine the interplay between face-to-face and mediated public discourses in the formation of a sociotechnical imaginary. As Gordon (2010, p. 2) argued, the American city has “always been a mediated construct.” The understanding of a city, and practices within it, he argued, are shaped by the media technologies used to represent it. Urban politics is done through and mediated by different communication infrastructures in the city (Georgiou, 2017, pp. 262 & 265). While there are different modes of communication in the city (Georgiou, 2017, p. 262), we suggest that the local newspapers (both paper and digital) provided a powerful forum for mobilizing people around a sociotechnical imaginary. This was done in part through the production and circulation of resonating frames. As Entman (2004, p. 5) described it, framing is the process of “selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution.” Entman (2004, p. 6) stated, “those frames that employ more culturally resonant terms have the greatest potential for influence.” In Winnipeg’s case, Uber’s arrival was strongly associated with innovation, and it meant that the counter-narratives sought to engage with this overarching frame. These frames were not produced in isolation, but were embedded in power relationships, with the actors’ abilities to shape the frames being dependent on their economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991). Uber, innovation imaginaries, and city-building Innovation has become a central policy-making and institution-building discourse across the world, as a way to achieve “a common (and hopefully better) sociotechnical future” (Pfotenhauer & Jasanoff, 2017, pp. 784 & 788); therefore, it is unsurprising that it is also a key frame used by Uber to justify its presence in cities across the globe. This framing was particularly effective in Winnipeg, because of Winnipeg’s sense of itself as behind other Canadian cities and, thus, in particular need of innovation. Winnipeg’s mayor, Brian Bowman, was elected in 2014 and was by far the most vocal supporter of Uber. In public statements in 2015, Bowman touted his desire for innovation in Winnipeg with regard to Uber: “I have long been a champion for increased innovation, new technologies and crowdsourcing” (Cash, 2015, para. 13). In 2017, Bowman responded to the province’s move to assign taxi regulation to the city, again drawing on the concept of innovation: “I believe this is an opportunity for customers and the City of Winnipeg to be presented with new options and with innovation” (Cash, 2017, para. 8). This discourse of innovation was also strategically employed by Winnipeggers, with Uber’s support.2 Uber organized a letter with the signatures of well-known Winnipeggers to be sent to the Manitoba Legislature and Winnipeg City Council in October 2017, as the provincial and municipal governments were deciding on the new policies. Innovation was central to the letter. One passage reads: “in order to continue to build Winnipeg as a hub for entrepreneurship and innovation, we must welcome new technologies that push the boundaries of traditional business operations and ensure Winnipeg is not only keeping up with innovation, but is a leader in Manitoba and Canada” (de Le Rue, 2017, para. 8). Innovation was used here to conjure up an image of an undesirable future (see Pfotenhauer & Jasanoff, 2017, p. 787), in which Winnipeg risked sliding even further behind other cities. Winnipeg required “new technologies” and the “pushing [of] boundaries” to “keep up.” Innovation was portrayed by government and the media as coming from outside of Winnipeg, and indeed Canada, rather than within. Many people were surprised when, rather than Uber or Lyft, two Canadian companies started operating after the municipal bylaw was passed in December 2017. Discursively, Uber, not local companies and initiatives, represented this move toward innovation and, therefore, wielded disproportionate power in the discussions. Uber had symbolic value because of its status as a successful technology company from Silicon Valley. It was not technological innovation alone that was at issue, but rather its role in building the city’s image. The folk category of technological innovation was, in practice, a moving target. Despite the taxi companies’ efforts to convince people otherwise, the mobile apps developed by the taxi companies did not count as technology in the media coverage, nor did the technologies of safety, such as shields and cameras, nor the basic required technologies of the car, the taximeter, and the infrastructures of dispatch. Newness and originality were considered essential aspects of innovation. Yet despite Uber not being the first company to mediate personal transportation, its app was considered original and highly functional, and the taxi apps were seen only as poor copies. Framed as innovation, Uber became one way to measure Winnipeg’s progress in relation to the global economy. Smith (2002) noted that many cities compete with each other to improve their rankings in global hierarchies, in order to attract tourists, residents, and global capital. Harvey (1989) has also described this shift in governance as cities increasingly emphasize efficiency and competitiveness. In this environment, government must increasingly act like the private sector and engage in what Spirou (2011, p. 47) called “image-building activities.” This entrepreneurial approach can be seen through city branding strategies, where cities try to create unique images or brands to sell their city globally (Broudehoux, 2001; Rivke & De Koning, 2016, p. 132). Some of these branding discourses include the smart city, tech city, and creative city (e.g., Datta, 2015; Hollands, 2015; Vanolo, 2015). The attraction of a global tech company, like Uber, would allow Winnipeg to participate in these global city-building discourses without having to make financial investments to build Winnipeg’s own technological (or “smart”) infrastructures. Take, for instance, Winnipeg’s 2017 bid to attract Amazon’s new headquarters, another effort to construct Winnipeg as a tech city (Brean, 2018). While this bid may have seemed a hopeless overreach for Winnipeg, others have pointed to the role of such bids in generating visibility for a city, regardless of the outcome (Markusoff, 2018). In Winnipeg, this discourse was particularly powerful, because it addressed a “collectively felt and publicly diagnosed deficit” (Pfotenhauer & Jasanoff, 2017, p. 788) of Winnipeg as being even more behind than other Canadian cities. Stuck in the past, overcoming the present In describing a petition to bring Uber to Winnipeg, the Winnipeg Sun in August 2016 opened with the statement that “a Winnipeg man has seen enough: enough North American cities with ride-sharing options to know it’s about time his hometown got out of the dark ages and provided the same” (Larkins, 2016, para. 1). In the newspapers and in conversations held during the first author’s ethnographic research, Winnipeg was consistently framed as behind other Canadian and global cities. These fears of backwardness played on a persistent anxiety of Winnipeggers beyond the transportation industry. Although Winnipeg was an expanding and influential city at the turn of the 20th century (Melnyk, 2014, p. 170), through the mid-century Winnipeg developed a public anxiety about its status within Canada. As described by Winnipeg filmmaker Shereen Jerrett, “Winnipeg’s a real hole and most Winnipeggers have an incredible insecurity complex about being from Winnipeg” (as cited in Semley, 2007, p. 33). The arrival of Uber, then, was taken as a way to move Winnipeg into the future: a future that was increasingly the present elsewhere. The taxi industry was framed as particularly deficient: a slow, unchanging monopoly. This framing surfaced in content such as repeated statements in the news media that taxi licenses had not increased in number since the 1940s. For instance, in June 2015, Metro stated, “there is almost the same number of cabs today as at the end of the Second World War” (Fast, 2015, para. 5). In the same month, a Winnipeg Free Press editorial stated that “in 1947, for example, there were 400 standard cabs in Winnipeg. Today, there are just 410, despite the fact the city’s population has tripled” (Winnipeg Free Press, 2015, para. 9). These statements drew on a notion of progress that envisioned inevitable growth. If Winnipeg was moving forward in time properly, it should be growing, and so should the number of taxi licenses. Since the number of licenses was not growing, the implication was that the Winnipeg taxi industry was stuck in the 1940s. Looking back to the 1940s can, however, reveal another viewpoint on taxicab regulation in Winnipeg. The taxi wars of the 1920s–1950s centered on an issue of “oversupply,” much like that feared by current taxi owners. Cut-rate taxis, as well as jitneys—cars that drove relatively fixed routes picking up passengers for a nickel (Beattie, 1998, p. 48; Davis, 1998, pp. 12–13)—entered the market, often not using taximeters (Davis, 1998, pp. 12–13) or the relatively expensive standard vehicles. It was this conflict between old and new that led to the development of a system of restricted business licenses, in part to limit supply in order to ensure incomes for operators and taxi companies (Davis, 1998, p. 7). This past was mostly absent from media representation of the issue in Winnipeg (although see Kay, 2015). It was used by some labor advocates, though, to point to both the taxi and ride-hailing industries’ issues with precarious labor (see also Hua & Ray, 2018; Rosenblat, 2018). This circulated in policy reports and in statements at legislative hearings. For instance, in a short policy report written for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba, Moist (2017, Taxicab Industry Issues section, para. 1), a former national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, quoted an early justification of taxi regulation: “regulation of the industry in Canada and elsewhere has historically been rationalized as a means to ensure that workers within the industry can earn a living wage, one that can support a family. The Ottawa Journal spoke to this principle in 1936, saying, ‘No one has a right to expect a taxi ride … at a price that does not permit decent wages and working conditions for those engaged in providing it.’” Here, the past was framed as a source of moral insight, rather than a weight dragging Winnipeg backwards. This framing, however, did not gain much traction in the press and was not able to become part of the collective sociotechnical imaginary, in part, we argue, because the discourse of innovation and the framing of Winnipeg and the taxi industry as “backwards” worked too well together as part of a larger valorization of the new and the future. Innovation did not address the taxi industry’s persistent labor inequalities. Hua and Ray (2018) argued that taxi industries in the United States have been implicated in racialized capital, where those doing the driving work (physically damaging and often not well paid) that enabled the labor of other workers (see Sharma, 2008) were immigrant, racialized men. Similarly, in Winnipeg, both license owners and drivers have been overwhelmingly male, relatively recent immigrants, and often South Asian. In a taxi driver training class the first author took in the fall of 2017, in a room full of 20 people, only the instructor, the first author, and another student were White. The report by MNP pointed to the potential misclassification of taxi drivers as independent contractors rather than employees (MNP, 2016, p. 59), alongside Uber’s persistent issues with this same problem (MNP, 2016, p. 25). This report also cited results from an MNP survey, in which “88 per cent of standard taxicab drivers reported earning under $35,000, compared to 51 per cent of the Winnipeg population” (MNP, 2016, p. 58). Although this information was circulating in the city, it didn’t become an essential framing of the issue in the media coverage. Uber’s own PR relentlessly promised “a flexible income earning opportunity” for potential drivers (e.g., CBC News, 2016c, Uber Welcomes Report section, para. 2). Yet, it seemed like part of the appeal of Uber, although never explicitly stated, was the perception that those driving part-time would be of a different demographic than the full-time drivers of the taxi industry. For instance, one of the few early media interviews with potential drivers was with “Winnipeg carpenter Robert Chubaty” (Macdonell, 2016), whose family name was of Ukrainian origin and whose photograph appeared in the article. A 2014 Metro article (Fast, 2014; see Figure 2) opened with an image of an Uber-sponsored post recruiting drivers, which featured a young woman with light skin and blonde-streaked hair holding up the keys to her car. As Rosenblat (2018, p. 77) wrote in her analysis of a similar recruitment ad, “Uber gentrifies a job typically associated with people of color from immigrant communities in the major metropolitan areas where ride-hailing has grown, like New York City, by depicting the driver as a fashionable, White male millennial dressed in soft pink and wearing a scarf.” Innovation was not explicitly marketed as White, yet Whiteness also undergirded innovation’s appeal, despite the fact that Uber drivers elsewhere are not exclusively White (see also Hua & Ray, 2018, p. 277; Malin & Chandler, 2017, p. 397; Rosenblat, 2018). City-building was not focused on innovating with current drivers, but on leaving them behind. Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Uber recruitment image as published in Fast (2014). Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Uber recruitment image as published in Fast (2014). This powerful frame of a movement forward in time shaped even the counter-narratives attempting to challenge Uber. In the October 2017 provincial hearings surrounding Bill 30, taxi owners sometimes presented a direct counter-narrative to the imaginary of innovation, arguing that allowing Uber would move the industry backwards, not forwards. For instance, taxi owner Bhupinderted Mangat stated: “we are keeping up with the times, but if you think Uber is about modernizing the taxi history, you are dead wrong. Uber would set us back in terms of the kind of service we can provide. It is not only that we leave 1,600 jobs, all for the supporting of our families, you will be replacing that with Uber jobs which are part-time, poorly paid and don’t even provide the service all Manitobans deserve” (Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development, 2017a, p. 210). Likewise, at the same hearing, Tarlochan Gill stated that “what the city is doing is not moderniz[ing] the industry. It is going to put us back in time” (Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development, 2017a, p. 208). Drivers and license owners were well informed through their own newspaper reading, as well as through conversations with family members and friends in the industry elsewhere, about the pitfalls of Uber’s entry into a market, such as precarious labor opportunities and low incomes for drivers (as also noted by researchers like Rosenblat, 2018), as well as job losses. That the industry should be moving forward was not questioned; instead, Mangat and Gill argued that welcoming Uber was instead a movement “back in time.” They worked within some of the terms of the sociotechnical imaginary in an effort to challenge it. As we have shown, the framing of Uber as innovative succeeded in shaping the terms of the discussion, as it was picked up by powerful actors, including the mayor, who had an interest in constructing Winnipeg’s image as a city moving forward into the future. “Our city is not very safe for driving a cab” As innovation was touted as an opportunity for Winnipeg without much attention to social location, the taxi industry instead pointed to the realities of working in Winnipeg and began advocating for tighter safety regulations that might also act as barriers to new entrants into the industry. Safety was a common discourse in discussions of ride-hailing across the United States (see Dupuis, 2018) and Canada. While public safety has often been used “as a racial narrative frame” (Hua & Ray, 2018, p. 277) to call for increased policing of racialized men (see also Sharma, 2010, p. 190), in Winnipeg discussions of safety were not a straightforward call for a public panic about racialized male drivers. Instead, taxi drivers and Indigenous women passengers brought attention to the dangers of the taxi space from their particular social positions. Yet their calls for driver and passenger safety were never brought together in a way that acknowledged the complicated intersections of inequality surrounding gender, race, and indigeneity. While the majority of taxi drivers were immigrants who faced daily racism and occasional physical violence from mostly White customers and some Indigenous men,3 a few of these same drivers also perpetuated gender and racial discrimination against Indigenous women. One Indigenous woman interviewed by the first author had been thrown out of a moving vehicle by a taxi driver, which she never reported to the police (Tina, personal communication, August 17, 2017). Unable to rely on the state for support,4 Indigenous women and men, as well as non-Indigenous women, have created both social and technical solutions to this problem, in the form of organizations aimed at women riders. In 2016, Indigenous artist and activist Jackie Traverse began Ikwe, an organization that uses a closed Facebook group to match passengers with approved drivers (CBC News, 2016a). Other Facebook groups where community members offer rides, often for free or for a small donation, have also emerged, such as Winnipeg Safe Rides and Circle of Sisters. Drivers and passengers can see each other’s often personal photos before they take or accept rides. These organizations use the preexisting technology of Facebook for their own purposes, in part because they lack access to the funds to create their own apps (CBC News, 2016a). Unlike companies like Uber, these organizations address the social gaps (gender, class, and racial) of the preexisting taxi industry outside of the system of capital. They are not intended to be profitable (although drivers are often motivated to make money on the side), but to keep communities safe. They respond to the specific context of Winnipeg with a local response, yet one built on Facebook’s Silicon Valley infrastructure. In the fall of 2017, when regulatory changes were forthcoming, these independent organizations were not represented as a transportation solution for the general public, as Uber was. This recalls Hollands’ (2015) argument that smart city rhetoric has prioritized corporate and entrepreneurial initiatives. Within the local communities, these Facebook groups were seen as replicable and, after Ikwe started a few similar organizations, were formed for Indigenous communities and competed with each other. But they were not represented in the media as enabling economic innovation, attracting technology companies, or building the city’s image in the way that Uber was framed. While Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities developed their own solutions, at the provincial hearings in October 2017, drivers and owners talked about the violence and racism they experienced.5 The owners used the safety concerns of drivers as a justification for regulation, and as a moral argument for the value of drivers as individuals who face work dangers every day. Many owners described the threats to their own safety and emphasized the role of mandatory in-car equipment, such as the plastic shield between driver and passenger seats, in protecting their lives. For instance, on 31 October 2017, owner Harjit Sodhi said, “one time, I was driving a cab and I almost got stabbed. But due to the shield, I got—I—saved my life. And, if there’s no shield in Uber car or any other car, it’ll be really hard for drivers. Our city is not very safe for driving cab” (Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development, 2017c, p. 535). On 27 October 2017, owner Daljinder Chahal said, “one driver, midnight, he stabbed in the North End. … The police … took all the pictures, everything from the [in-car] camera. They arrested [the person] the same day because [the camera] is a silent witness” (Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development, 2017b, p. 389). In these narratives, members of the taxi industry emphasized the agency of technologies, such as shields and cameras, in saving their lives. With technologies presented as the solution, violence became a normalized part of the drivers’ work. In these discussions, danger was seen mostly as coming from unspecified (yet generally male) passengers, who seemed to embody the danger of the city itself. On 9 November 2017, the provincial government passed Bill 30. After the bill was passed, the Taxi Coalition continued to push the safety narrative in their very brief consultations with the city. On 1 December 2017, the City of Winnipeg publicly released a draft of the bylaws that would govern the taxi industry and ride-hailing services. In the proposed bylaws, safety regulations (requiring shields, panic buttons, and roof-top emergency lights) continued to apply to taxis, but not to ride-hailing groups. Media articles in November and early December emphasized the potential dangers for future drivers. As a Taxi Coalition spokesperson stated, “horrible things have happened in this city,” again locating the danger in the city itself (Bernhardt, 2017). All of these arguments relied on the centrality of technology as a proposed solution to the dangers of taxi-driving in Winnipeg. Likewise, Uber Canada Public Policy Manager Chris Schafer argued in the media that the app had worked well in providing safety in other Canadian cities (Bernhardt, 2017), assuming that all of the cities were comparable and that Winnipeg was no more dangerous than other cities. At the city’s EPC meeting on 6 December 2017, which the first author attended, Schafer said that requiring a camera or shield would be a “deal breaker” for Uber coming to Winnipeg. At a subsequent EPC meeting on 13 December 2017, when asked if he knew about the murders that had taken place in Uber vehicles in the United States, Schafer said that he was “not aware” and that “walking here [in Winnipeg] presents some risk.” As he went on to say, “you can never eliminate risk. It is not possible.” The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce (2017, Safety section, para. 4) took up Uber’s position, arguing in a submission to the EPC that, “due to the technology ridesharing companies use, if a conflict arises you know exactly who booked the ride.” The perception of the Uber app as safe was informed by people’s engagements with older technologies available in taxis, particularly the practice of having a picture of the driver, their car number, and their name visible. The Uber app, therefore, did not enter an empty stage (see Gershon, 2010, p. 3), but was viewed as an improvement because both passengers and drivers had information about each other readily available on their smartphones. The argument about cameras and shields no longer seemed necessary because the app stood in for a kind of camera and shield, protecting the passenger. Yet when drivers have had conflicts with passengers in other cities, the problem has not necessarily been the app, but Uber’s lack of response to driver and passenger requests to hold perpetrators accountable (e.g. Butler & Topham, 2017). Rosenblat (2018, p. 140) noted that many Uber drivers across the United States and Canada whom she interviewed used dashcams to achieve “accountability they don’t get from Uber.” While the taxi industry tried to contest Uber’s claims of safety by repeatedly telling stories about the 2001 murder of taxi driver Pritam Deol, which ultimately led to the requirement of safety shields,6 one councilor in the mayor’s inner circle, Brian Mayes, also expressed concern about the safety of ride-hailing drivers and passengers. During a break in an EPC meeting that the first author attended, Mayes even called someone in Chicago whose relative had been murdered by an Uber passenger: a story that had recently been covered in the media (e.g., see Wong, Berger, & Cox, 2017). As a result of these concerns, Mayes proposed an ultimately unsuccessful amendment to require ride-hailing drivers to have safety shields (Santin, 2017a). In order to address safety concerns, especially because council members were among those raising the concerns, Brian Bowman made an amendment that required ride-hailing drivers to pay a three-cent-per-ride levy (a first in Canada), with the funds earmarked for a driver safety campaign (Santin, 2017b), the specifics of which were left vague. Unspoken in the public forums was the assumption that Uber drivers would be taking mostly middle-class passengers (not imagined as associated with violence) and that the drivers would probably be White (thus avoiding the racialized violence faced by taxi drivers), as discussed above. While the safe rides group Ikwe was consulted as a stakeholder in the lead-up to drafting the bylaws and started to prepare itself for the regulation changes (e.g., in how they vetted their drivers), most of the other informal ride-sharing organizations remained on the sidelines. These interventions in the developing sociotechnical imaginary over safety reveal the degree to which attempts to frame ride-hailing as simply innovative technology depended on specifically racialized and gendered imaginaries of Winnipeg as White, middle-class, and (mostly) male, as well as the erasure of the fissures of race, gender, and class in Winnipeg’s taxi industry. Conclusion Uber is a strong political force in the cities it seeks to enter. This is no surprise, since it is a billion-dollar company with experienced public policy managers. Yet, the focus on money and savvy political actors is not enough. In order to fully realize the power of Uber in shaping city politics, we need to examine the role of sociotechnical imaginaries in shaping desires and influencing policy outcomes. In this paper, we have described how the class-based sociotechnical imaginary of innovation was a powerful discourse in Winnipeg because of Winnipeggers’ own anxieties about the city’s location in the Canadian and global hierarchy of cities. For city officials and business representatives, Uber became an image-making tool to address the image of Winnipeg as behind other cities. Underlying this idea of innovation was a theory of contagion: the welcoming of Uber could draw similarly-minded companies to Winnipeg. This developing sociotechnical imaginary foregrounded an image of a Winnipeg where the city’s inequalities had been erased and everyone was the same uniform user dot as on Uber’s map. For members of the taxi industry, image-making was less central. Instead, drivers and owners were concerned about their investments and safety. Where does this case study leave us with regard to understanding Uber and its impact on cities? Our analysis complicates the common notion that the meaning of Uber remains the same everywhere. It suggests that Uber and the particular sociotechnical imaginaries surrounding it need to be treated not as universal, but as locally constructed. The social, political, and economic environment are not just modifying narratives about Uber; rather, frames emerge in response to local imaginaries that reflect the cities’ prior ideas of themselves. The development of these frames is only visible by examining media coverage alongside face-to-face interactions in the public sphere. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their financial support of this project, Brooke Dietrich for her work as a research assistant on the project, the editors and anonymous reviewers of Communication, Culture and Critique for their very helpful comments on the article, Tom Cho for his keen reader’s eye, and everyone who commented on the work as we developed it, especially the Ethnography Lab at Wilfrid Laurier University. Sheri Gibbings would also like to thank all the members of the taxi industry, ride-hailing industry, city government, and ride-share community who very kindly shared their time with her. Footnotes 1 All personal communications are cited using pseudonyms. 2 As the first author observed during her fieldwork, Uber’s public policy manager was based in Toronto, but flew regularly to Winnipeg for meetings. 3 Many of the taxi owners and drivers at the legislative hearings discussed the racism and physical violence they experienced. 4 Comack (2012), for instance, argued that Indigenous people’s experiences with police in Canada are often negative ones, shaped by structural racism and the history of colonialism. 5 In contrast, Indigenous women did not speak at these hearings about the violence they experienced. 6 The first author observed these stories being told in both the legislative meetings and the EPC meetings. References Beattie , N. ( 1998 ). The cab trade in Winnipeg, 1871–1910 . Urban History Review , 27 ( 1 ), 36 – 52 . doi: 10.7202/1016611ar Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Bernhardt , D. ( 2017 ). Horrible things happen: Taxi industry demands Uber , Lyft install shields to thwart beheading . CBC News . Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bourdieu , P. ( 1991 ). Language and symbolic power . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Brean , J. ( 2018 ). The ridiculous ways Canadian cities tried to attract Amazon—and failed miserably. National Post . Retrieved from https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto-the-only-canadian-city-on-amazon-hq2-shortlist-maintains-position-as-centre-of-the-universe Broudehoux , A. ( 2001 ). Image making, city marketing, and the aesthetization of social inequality in Rio de Janeiro. In N. AlSayyad (Ed.), Consuming tradition, manufacturing heritage: Global norms and urban forms in the age of tourism (pp. 273 – 297 ). London, England : Routledge . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Butler , S. , & Topham , G. ( 2017 ). Uber stripped of London licence due to lack of corporate responsibility. The Guardian . Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/international The Canadian Press . ( 2016 ). Edmonton approves bylaw allowing ride-sharing companies like Uber to operate . Maclean’s . Retrieved from http://www.macleans.ca OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Cash , M. ( 2015 ). Driving controversy: Uber visits a city divided on ride-sharing . Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cash , M. ( 2017 ). Legislation first step for Uber arrival . Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC della Cava , M . ( 2017 ). Uber admits its ghost driver “Greyball” tool was used to thwart regulators, vows to stop . USA Today . Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat CBC News . ( 2016a ). Winnipeg Facebook group offers safe rides to Aboriginal women. CBC News . Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news CBC News . ( 2016b ). Woman drugged, sexually assaulted after taking Winnipeg taxi, says Indigenous group. CBC News . Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news CBC News . ( 2016c ). Uber with a catch: Review recommends licensed ride-hailing, more cabs in Winnipeg. CBC News . Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news Chan , N. K. , & Humphreys , L. ( 2018 ). Mediatization of social space and the case of Uber drivers . Media and Communication , 6 ( 2 ), 29 – 38 . doi: 10.17645/mac.v6i2.1316 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Chen , J. ( 2017 ). Thrown under the bus and outrunning it! The logic of Didi and taxi drivers’ labour and activism in the on-demand economy. New Media & Society , 1 – 21 . doi: 10.1177/1461444817729149 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Crossref Comack , E. ( 2012 ). Racialized policing: Aboriginal people’s encounter with the police . Halifax, Canada : Fernwood Publishing . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Datta , A. ( 2015 ). New urban utopias of postcolonial India: “Entrepreneurial urbanization” in Dholera smart city, Gujarat . Dialogues in Human Geography , 5 ( 1 ), 3 – 22 . doi: 10.1177/2043820614565748 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Davis , D. ( 1998 ). The Canadian taxi wars, 1925–1950 . Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine , 27 ( 1 ), 7 – 22 . doi: 10.7202/1016609ar Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Dudley , G. , Banister , D., & Schwanen , T. ( 2017 ). The rise of Uber and regulating the disruptive innovator . The Political Quarterly , 88 ( 3 ), 492 – 499 . doi: 10.1111/1467-923X.12373 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Dupuis , N. ( 2018 ). Stories of the sharing economy: Policy narratives surrounding the entry of transportation network companies into four mid-sized American cities . Critical Policy Studies. doi: 10.1080/19460171.2018.1437459 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Crossref Emmerson , S. ( 2017 ). Uber eager to roll into Manitoba market . Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Entman , R. M. ( 2004 ). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion, and U.S. foreign policy . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Fast , C. ( 2014 ). Update: Insurance woes may dog Uber drivers in Winnipeg . Metro . Fast , C. ( 2015 ). Taxis: The Uber war is over, get with the times. Metro . Retrieved from https://issuu.com/metro_canada/docs/20150616_ca_winnipeg Frost , S. ( 2017 ). Devaluing human labor . Anthropology News , 58 ( 4 ), e361 – e364 . doi: 10.1111/AN.531 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Georgiou , M. ( 2017 ). Conviviality is not enough: A communication perspective to the city of difference . Communication, Culture & Critique , 10 , 261 – 279 . doi: 10.1111/cccr.12154 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Gershon , I. ( 2010 ). The breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over new media . Ithaca, NY : Cornell University . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gillespie , T. , Boczkowski , P. J., & Foot , K. A. ( 2014 ). Introduction. In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 1 – 17 ). Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gordon , E. ( 2010 ). The urban spectator: American concept-cities from Kodak to Google . Lebanon, NH : Dartmouth College Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Graham , S. , & Marvin , S. ( 2001 ). Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition . New York, NY : Routledge . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gupta , T. ( 2006 ). Racism/anti-racism, precarious employment, and unions. In L. F. Vosko (Ed.), Precarious employment: Understanding labour market insecurity in Canada (pp. 318 – 334 ). Kingston, Canada : McGill-Queen’s University Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Harvey , D. ( 1989 ). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism . Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 71 ( 1 ), 3 – 7 . doi: 10.1080/04353684.1989.11879583 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Hawkins , A. J. ( 2018 ). Uber and Lyft drivers could get employment status under California court ruling. The Verge . Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17308178/uber-lyft-drivers-california-court-classification-dynamex Hollands , R. G. ( 2015 ). Critical interventions into the corporate smart city . Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8 ( 1 ), 61 – 77 . doi: 10.1093/cjres/rsu011 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Hua , J. , & Ray , K. ( 2018 ). Beyond the precariat: Race, gender, and labor in the taxi and Uber economy . Social Identities, 24 ( 2 ), 271 – 289 . doi: 10.1080/13504630.2017.1321721 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Jasanoff , S. ( 2015 ). Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In S. Jasanoff & S. H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (pp. 1 – 33 ). Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Jasanoff , S. , & Kim , S. H. ( 2009 ). Containing the atom: Sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea . Minerva , 47 ( 2 ), 119 – 146 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Kay , J. ( 2015 ). Uber v. taxi: One must die for the other to live . The Walrus . Retrieved from https://thewalrus.ca Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Larkins , D. ( 2016 ). Petition calls for Winnipeg to be Uber-friendly. Winnipeg Sun . Retrieved from https://winnipegsun.com/2016/08/28/petition-calls-for-winnipeg-to-be-uber-friendly/wcm/c5693b4f-70a9-4fa4-99df-2c5cdebe921c Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development . ( 2017a ). Bill 30–The local vehicles for hire act. Second session—Forty-first legislature of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development, LXX(8). Retrieved from Manitoba Government website: https://www.gov.mb.ca/legislature/hansard/41st_2nd/hansardpdf/sed8.pdf Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development . ( 2017b ). Bill 30–The local vehicles for hire act. Second session—Forty-first legislature of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development, LXX(11). Retrieved from Manitoba Government website: https://www.gov.mb.ca/legislature/hansard/41st_2nd/hansardpdf/sed11.pdf Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development . ( 2017c ). Bill 30–The local vehicles for hire act. Second session—Forty-first legislature of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Standing Committee on Social and Economic Development, LXX(12). Retrieved from Manitoba Government website: https://www.gov.mb.ca/legislature/hansard/41st_2nd/hansardpdf/sed12.pdf de Le Rue , J.-C. ( 2017 ). Winnipeggers support Uber and ridesharing . Uber Newsroom . Retrieved from https://www.uber.com/en-CA/newsroom/uber-in-winnipeg Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Macdonell , B. ( 2016 ). Uber ride-sharing service on hold in Winnipeg. CTV News Winnipeg . Retrieved from https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/uber-ride-sharing-service-on-hold-in-winnipeg-1.2771674 Malin , B. J. , & Chandler , C. ( 2017 ). Free to work anxiously: Splintering precarity among drivers for Uber and Lyft communication . Communication, Culture & Critique, 10 ( 2 ), 382 – 400 . doi: 10.1111/cccr.12157 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Markusoff , J. ( 2018 ). For longshot cities, bidding on Amazon HQ was never really about Amazon. Maclean’s . Retrieved from https://www.macleans.ca Martin , N. ( 2017 ). Uber ready, waiting for Winnipeg . Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC McGuckin , A. ( 2018 ). Winnipeg ridesharing: TappCar vs. traditional cab . Global News . Retrieved from https://globalnews.ca Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Melnyk , G. ( 2014 ). Film and the city: The urban imaginary in Canadian cinema . Edmonton, Canada : Athabasca University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC MNP . ( 2016 ). Summary overview of the taxicab industry in Winnipeg . Retrieved from Manitoba Government website : https://www.gov.mb.ca/mr/taxicab/pubs/summary_overview-of-the-taxicab-industry2016.pdf Moist , P. ( 2017 ). Uber no solution for Winnipeg: Analysis of taxi and transport . Social and Economic Trends, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives—Manitoba . Retrieved from https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Manitoba%20Office/2017/04/Uber_no_solution_for_wpg.pdf Pauls , K. ( 2016 ). Tensions rise between Winnipeg taxi drivers and Indigenous community. CBC News . Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news Pfotenhauer , S. , & Jasanoff , S. ( 2017 ). Panacea or diagnosis? Imaginaries of innovation and the “MIT model” in three political cultures . Social Studies of Science, 47 ( 6 ), 783 – 810 . doi: 10.1177/0306312717706110 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS PubMed WorldCat Ranchordás , S. ( 2017 ). Digital agoras: Democratic legitimacy, online participation and the case of Uber-petitions . The Theory and Practice of Legislation, 5 ( 1 ), 31 – 54 . doi: 10.1080/20508840.2017.1279431 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Rivke , J. , & De Koning , A. ( 2016 ). Introducing urban anthropology . Abingdon, England : Routledge . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Rosenblat , A. ( 2018 ). Uberland: How algorithms are rewriting the rules of work . Oakland, CA : University of California Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Rosenblat , A. , & Stark , L. Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers ( July 30 , 2016 ). International Journal of Communication , 10 , 27 . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2686227 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2686227 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Santin , A. ( 2017a ). Strike by taxi drivers would backfire, mayor says. Winnipeg Free Press. Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com Santin , A. ( 2017b ). City tweaks new taxi bylaw, adds three-cent surcharge to Uber rides . Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Semley , J. ( 2007 ). From big snow to big sadness: The repatriation of Canadian cultural identity in the films of Guy Maddin . CineAction, 73/74 , 32 – 37 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Sharma , S. ( 2008 ). Taxis as media: A temporal materialist reading of the taxi-cab . Social Identities, 14 ( 4 ), 457 – 464 . doi: 10.1080/13504630802211910 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Sharma , S. ( 2010 ). Taxi cab publics and the production of Brown space after 9/11 . Cultural Studies, 24 ( 2 ), 183 – 199 . doi: 10.1080/09502380903541605 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Smith , N. ( 2002 ). New globalism, new urbanism: Gentrification as global urban strategy . Antipode, 34 ( 3 ), 427 – 450 . doi: 10.1111/1467-8330.00249 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Spirou , C. ( 2011 ). Urban tourism and urban change: Cities in a global economy . Abingdon, England : Routledge . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Taylor , C. ( 2002 ). Modern social imaginaries . Public Culture , 14 ( 1 ), 91 – 124 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Uber Estimator . ( 2018 ). Uber Canada. Uber Estimator . Retrieved February 25, 2018, from https://uberestimator.com/country/canada Vanolo , A. ( 2015 ). The image of the creative city, eight years later: Turin, urban branding and the economic crisis taboo . Cities, 46 , 1 – 7 . doi: 10.1016/j.cities.2015.04.004 Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce . ( 2017 ). Vehicle for hire policy . Retrieved from Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce website : http://www.winnipeg-chamber.com/uploads/9/0/8/4/90840474/winnipeg_chamber_of_commerce-vehicle_for_hire_policy_nov.23_2017.pdf Winnipeg Free Press . ( 2015 ). Taxi industry needs to embrace change . Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wong , G. , Berger , S., & Cox , B. L. ( 2017 ). Girl, 16, accused of killing Uber driver with stolen knife, machete . Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from https://www.chicagotribune.com Zussman , R. ( 2018 ). Uber app in B.C. drew half a million visitors over the last two years. Global News . Retrieved from https://globalnews.ca © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - A Desirable Future: Uber as Image-Making in Winnipeg
JF - "Communication, Culture & Critique"
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcz026
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-desirable-future-uber-as-image-making-in-winnipeg-mwo3VSEVzc
SP - 570
EP - 589
VL - 12
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -