Mobilising the dispositive: Exploring the role of dockless public bike sharing in transforming urban governance in Shanghai

Abstract

This paper contributes to debates on urban governance and mobility through a case study of the transformation of public bike sharing schemes in Shanghai (China) from fixed/docked (PBSS 1.0) to flexible/dockless (PBSS 2.0). Based upon stakeholder interviews and observations between 2015 and 2017, we use the concept of a dispositive to foreground two related processes. The first is the reformulation of the governmental dispositive that coalesces around PBSS in Shanghai. We show how the relations within the dispositive shift from more hierarchical, bounded, regulated and state-led to those characterised by a more dispersed, disconnected, horizontal and distant set of social relations. Second, we show how this dispositive both produces and is produced by an emergent environmentality that manifests in a fixed territoriality in PBSS 1.0 and a more fluid and deterritorialised digital environmentality in PBSS 2.0. In framing this shift, we demonstrate how PBSS 2.0 produces a new dispositive of urban governmentality where the conduct of users is dispersed through a much less co-ordinated network of actors and technologies. Ultimately we argue that it is no longer possible to separate physical and virtual mobility when trying to understand the internal dynamics and external manifestations of mobility governance, which in our example are characterised by less localised and less hierarchical relationships that are more fluid, voluntary and physically distant.

Disposable infrastructures: ‘Micromobility’ platforms and the political economy of transport disruption in Austin, Texas

“…By mid-2018, many American cities had created regulations in reaction to micromobility platforms’ excesses. Even in these cases, however, cities have shifted from spatially planning mobility access, to biopolitically governing at a distance: setting up fee schedules, fleet sizes, parking zones, coverage goals and in-app prompts (Hirsch et al, 2019; Lin and Spinney, 2021). Despite these positive steps, we argue in this article that micromobility platforms in the United States have thus far largely exploited, rather than addressed, inadequacies of urban transport.…”

The Governance Challenge within Socio-Technical Transition Processes: Public Bicycles and Smartphone-Based Bicycles in Guangzhou, China

“…Among all the changes brought by the new mobility, however, those that occurred in local mobility governance have not achieved enough academic attention. Moreover, as pointed by Lin and Spinney [17,18], some of the only exceptions basically regard the new mobility, and new technologies that make it a reality, as the result of governance, rather than the influencing factors. To fill this gap, the aim of this article is to explore how new technologies in the field of daily mobility/transportation impact existing modes of governance.…”

A vehicle for valorising the labour power of commuting: The politics of mobility fixing in Shanghai's Dockless Public Bike Sharing Sector

“…Whilst PBSS2.0 is rapidly evolving and evidently can have a role to play in urban mobility systems, this chapter seeks to bring a much-needed critical perspective to bear on the largely obfuscated workings of such platform urbanism (see also Lin & Spinney 2020;Stehlin et al 2020). As a result, in some ways this paper is not about cycling at all, but about the ways in which the bringing together of two forms of mobilityvirtual and physical -create the grounds for new avenues of accumulation and surveillance to emerge in the smart city.…”

“…This is clearly the case with PBSS2.0 where empirical investigation has been largely focused on instrumental, operational and managerial aspects. A number of studies have focused on the economic, environmental and health benefits of PBSS (Caulfield et al, 2017;Lin et al, 2011Lin et al, , 2013Shen et al, 2018;Lu, 2016). However, the bulk of PBSS research has focused on operational issues, with substantial research on parking (Lin & Yang, 2011;Midgley, 2011;Paul & Bogenberger 2014); maintenance (Furth et al 2016); location (Shi et al 2018;Zhang & Mi, 2018); and redistribution of bicycles (Schuijbroek et al 2017).…”

“…have begun to explore the ways in which PBSS reshapes social and economic relations, concluding that relations being produced through PBSS 2.0to useMcLaren and Agyeman's (2015) termare transactional rather than transformational in the way they re-orient different actors toward each other. AsStehlin et al (2020) note, it seems that platform mobility is less concerned to produce "…governable individuals than about producing subjects whose activities generate the data used to govern" (1263; see alsoLin & Spinney 2020). In this paper we seek to build upon these insights to highlight in more detail the processes of valorisation through which users are enrolled and become productive in the context of PBSS as a form of surveillancecapitalism.…”