The Space Between Us: On Shifting Sitting Patterns in Tel Aviv Taxi-Cabs, and Their Meanings

Abstract

The taxi is a widespread mode of public transportation. In this everyday-life urban setting total strangers, a driver and his fare, interact and cooperate. In Israel, taxi passengers must choose whether to sit in the front seat, near the stranger-driver, or in the backseat, behind him. This choice prestructures the incoming interaction and sets its general "tone." Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a taxi in Tel Aviv, as well as on interviews and street observations, this article examines shifting sitting patterns in Tel Aviv taxis. These shifting proxemic patterns reveal homophilous tendencies and reflect, in a nutshell, wider structural, socioeconomic, and ideological changes undergone by Israeli society.

Management Attitude Shaping Cultural Sustainability in a Taxi Company—An Israeli Case Study

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“…The kinds of work undergoing platformisation have a distinct spatial character; they 'involve the crossing of spatial boundariesbetween public and private spaces, but also crossing spaces segregated by class, race and gender' (Anderson, 2017: 59). Uber's model requires and creates constant mobility of racialised populations throughout the city, and an expanded encountering of bodies in the somewhat intimate space of a taxi (Eytan, 2018). This proximity and mobility contradict the biopolitical construction of Uber drivers as bodies that arouse 'fear, disgust, discomfort'and therefore 'must be removed from social space' (Wark, 2020: 89).…”

“…Critical platform labour scholarship situates platformisation as a form of class composition; a way of re-organising urban labour in ways that generate fresh sites of accumulation following the 2008 GFC (Rosenblat, 2018; van Doorn, 2017). Under this rubric, the creation of platform workforces, with their specific technical, political and social formation, exist as part of a broader political economic ‘fix’ post-crisis (Hodson et al, 2020). This structural shift is captured by Srnicek's term ‘platform capitalism’ (2017).…”

“…The composition of an ‘on-demand’ workforce through platformisation is therefore intimately tied to the post-2008 urban contexts in which the platform economy has emerged. For capital, platformisation is a ‘fragile spatial fix,’ unlocking new sources of value through data-driven accumulation (Hodson et al, 2020). This dovetails with the gap created by austerity-driven deficits in government funding of urban services like transport, allowing for platforms to integrate into the fabric of major cities.…”

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