GOJEK AS INFRASTRUCTURE: STREET SMART TECHNOLOGY OF INDONESIA

Abstract

This dissertation is an intervention into the burgeoning genre of platform studies, exploring the roots and impacts of a novel form of urban infrastructure that is now ubiquitous in Indonesia. Scholarly literature on the expanding economy of platforms, has so far lacked a full appreciation of how profoundly the phenomenon has been shaped by urban conditions (Davidson et al., 2018). Some earlier scholars have argued that digital technologies would make cities obsolete (Graham and Marvin, 1996), and assert that revolutions in communication will completely distort our relationship with space (Taylor, 2011). Digitally mediated sharing economy prove to be, nonetheless, practical solutions that are firmly rooted in and moulded by urban realities, as much as they are widely imagined as virtual orchestrators of electronic data through disparate mobile devices. Within the last decade, Gojek, a centralised urban mobility application, became the most vivid form of infrastructure across the Indonesian archipelago, accommodating vast pools of workers and governing the circulation of people and everyday items in cities. Using this platform’s emergence as a case study, this dissertation aims to rethink and update our conceptualisation of the ‘city’ in accord with the digital age, thus delving into who and what makes up contemporary ‘urban infrastructure’ in Southeast Asia. Such a study offers to delineate the boundaries of the city according to circulations of labour and extends the body of literature regarding ‘labour as infrastructure’ into discussions of where and who constitutes as ‘urban’.