Taken For A Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis (Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research, and Policy in International Development Studies) - Softcover

Rizzo, Matteo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198839057 ISBN 13: 9780198839057

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198839057
• ISBN 13: 9780198839057
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240