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Taxi Drivers, Infrastructures, and Urban Change in Globalizing Mumbai
Author(s) -
BEDI TARINI
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
city and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.308
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1548-744X
pISSN - 0893-0465
DOI - 10.1111/ciso.12098
Subject(s) - taxis , modernization theory , negotiation , livelihood , context (archaeology) , globalization , urbanization , economy , economic growth , political science , business , geography , engineering , economics , transport engineering , archaeology , law , agriculture
Abstract This paper focusses on taxis and the taxi industry in relationship to crisis and change in contemporary Mumbai. Through an ethnographic exploration of Mumbai's taxi modernization project, changes in the material aspects of the taxi and taxi system, and a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia, I examine ways that infrastructure is understood, practiced, and contested. Focusing on how chillia drivers negotiate livelihoods in the context of contemporary moves to modernize, deregulate, and privatize the taxi trade, I argue that while rationalizing imperatives of infrastructural modernization are vital to jumpstarting urban change, they contend with multiple and shifting meanings that infrastructure building takes on among various actors in the city. Mumbai's taxi modernization project illuminates how negotiations around these meanings have the capacity to shape and redirect urban change both from “above” and “below.” [Urban Infrastructure; Globalization; Labor; Transportation; South Asia; Taxis; India]