ABSTRACT
Ride-hailing is dynamic, evolving, and contentious. In less than a decade, ride-hailing has gone from a mere idea to a global phenomenon, attracting venture capital funding, embedding itself in urban innovation and startup ecosystems, and reshaping urban transportation. This chapter examines the economic geography of ride-hailing, underscoring the challenges and opportunities that the growth of platform urbanism presents for cities and urban infrastructure. It considers the contributions of scholarship to understanding the global organization of ride-hailing firms and the production and reproduction of concentrated activity in a select subset of world cities. The chapter analyzes a novel database of ride-hailing’s 11 global unicorns and presents insights on platform urbanism from the perspective of a firm’s location decisions. It suggests that the urban economic geography of ride-hailing shapes our understanding of platform urbanism at both intraurban and interurban scales.
