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Since ride-hailing platforms entered Vietnam in 2014, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) have witnessed a rapid increase in motorbike-based ride and delivery apps and driver numbers, alongside car-hailing options. While platformisation has reshaped urban labour and mobility markets, the social networks and dynamics among app-based motorbike taxi drivers remain understudied. Drawing on a conceptual framework focusing on infrastructural citizenship, digital infrastructure, and contingent agency, and analyses of over 120 interviews with app-based drivers, platform managers, and local officials, we compare how app-based motorbike driver communities in Hanoi and HCMC organise and remain resilient. Our findings reveal that in both cities, drivers tactically appropriate urban space and also leverage virtual space to assert claims to urban citizenship, foster mutual aid, and resist platform co-optation. Yet, HCMC drivers engage in more structured and sustained collective efforts, while driver communities in Hanoi remain largely fragmented. Our article highlights how drivers creatively negotiate precarious labour conditions and frequently challenging algorithmic management approaches, as well as numerous regulatory uncertainties. Through acts of contingent agency, app-based drivers add another layer of social infrastructure to platform-mediated mobility assemblages, helping to sustain the rhythms and movements of their platform-based mobilities. Our comparative analysis demonstrates how platformisation results in spatially and politically embedded urban practices, with driver agency and resistance shaping infrastructural citizenship in these rapidly digitalising urban spaces.
Nguyen et al. (Sat,) studied this question.