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How does public transport work in an African city under neoliberalism? Who owns what in it? Who has the power to influence its shape and changes in it over time? What does it mean to be a precarious and informal worker in the private minibuses that provide public transport in Dar es Salaam? These are the main questions that inform this in-depth case study of Dar es Salaam's public transport system over more than forty years.
The growth of cities and informal economies are two central manifestations of globalization in the developing world. Taken for a Ride addresses both, drawing on long-term fieldwork in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and charting its public transport system's journey from public to private provision. This new addition to the Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research and Practice in International Development Studies series investigates this shift alongside the increasing deregulation of the sector and the resulting chaotic modality of public transport. It reviews state attempts to regain control over public transport and documents how informal wage relations prevailed in the sector. The changing political attitude of workers towards employers and the state is investigated: from an initial incapacity to respond to exploitation, to the political organisation and unionisation which won workers concessions on labour rights. A longitudinal study of workers throws light on patterns of occupational mobility in the sector. The book ends with an analysis of the political and economic interests that shaped the introduction of Bus Rapid Transit in Dar es Salaam, and local resistance to it.
Taken for a Ride is an interdisciplinary political economy of public transport, exposing the limitations of market fundamentalist and postcolonial appraoches to the study of economic informality, the urban experience in developing countries, and their failure to locate the agency of the urban poor within their economic and political structures. It is both a contribution to and a call for the contextualised study of neoliberalism.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 1: Taken for a Ride: Rethinking Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour and Public Transport from an African Metropolis
- 2: Public Transport in Dar es Salaam: From State Monopoly to Neoliberalism, 1970-2015
- 3: 'Life Is War': Capital and Informal Labour in Bus Public Transport
- 4: The Politics of Labour 1: The Quiescent Period (up to 1997)
- 5: The Politics of Labour 2: Struggling for Rights at Work
- 6: Tracing Occupational Mobility/Immobility among Informal Transport Workers
- 7: The New Face of Neoliberalism: The Bus Rapid Transport Project in Tanzania (2002-2016)
- 8: Conclusion: Taken for a Ride
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Matteo Rizzo is a political economist who lives and works in London, where he is a senior lecturer across the Departments of Economics and Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, UK. He previously worked at the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford and at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cambridge. His work has been published by leading African studies and development studies journals, including the Journal of Development Studies, Development and Change, the Journal of Agrarian Change, African Affairs, the Journal of Modern African Studies and the Review of African Political Economy, of which he is also a member of the Editorial Working Group.
Zusammenfassung
How does public transport work in an African city under neoliberalism? Who owns what in it? Who has the power to influence its shape and changes in it over time? What does it mean to be a precarious and informal worker in the private minibuses that provide public transport in Dar es Salaam? These are the main questions that inform this in-depth case study of Dar es Salaam's public transport system over more than forty years.
The growth of cities and informal economies are two central manifestations of globalization in the developing world. Taken for a Ride addresses both, drawing on long-term fieldwork in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and charting its public transport system's journey from public to private provision. This new addition to the Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research and Practice in International Development Studies series investigates this shift alongside the increasing deregulation of the sector and the resulting chaotic modality of public transport. It reviews state attempts to regain control over public transport and documents how informal wage relations prevailed in the sector. The changing political attitude of workers towards employers and the state is investigated: from an initial incapacity to respond to exploitation, to the political organisation and unionisation which won workers concessions on labour rights. A longitudinal study of workers throws light on patterns of occupational mobility in the sector. The book ends with an analysis of the political and economic interests that shaped the introduction of Bus Rapid Transit in Dar es Salaam, and local resistance to it.
Taken for a Ride is an interdisciplinary political economy of public transport, exposing the limitations of market fundamentalist and postcolonial appraoches to the study of economic informality, the urban experience in developing countries, and their failure to locate the agency of the urban poor within their economic and political structures. It is both a contribution to and a call for the contextualised study of neoliberalism.
Zusatztext
Matteo Rizzo's Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis is a book on urban transport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and it makes two important scholarly contributions. The first is an intervention into debates about neoliberalism,...The second, more nuanced contribution of the book is the analysis of the past and present of transport work in the urban informal economy. The story Rizzo tells is a powerful and convincing one, in large part due to research methods that are both longitudinal (he carried out research over an extended period between 1998 and 2014) and up close.
Bericht
pushing forward much-needed critical debate by helping us rethink and reimagine alternative public transport futures for African cities, futures that should start with the lived realities and aspirations of the majority of citizens, including the poor and middle classes, who currently - for better or worse - rely fundamentally on these deeply rooted and complex minibus systems. Jacqueline M. Klopp, Africa
