Scale and jurisdiction in urban governance: Implications of the Uber regulations saga

The proliferation of powerful ‘platform’ corporations such as Airbnb and Uber has exposed serious structural weaknesses in local urban regulatory systems. At nearly every angle, the local regulatory reach of local governments has proven too narrow to effectively corral large, multi-national platform firms. These firms are ultimately quite effective at sidestepping regulation, playing one jurisdiction against another and using their capital to lobby local politicians to sidestep public interest. The scale of local government places municipalities at an inherent disadvantage against these firms, amplifying the effectiveness of their commonly used tactics to gain a favourable regulatory environment. In this paper, we examine and compare these weaknesses of scale and jurisdiction, synthesize existing studies, incorporating both case studies and grey literature, and make policy-recommendations for local actors, including a proposal to scale up the regulatory authority for such platform firms to better manage the demands currently placed upon municipalities for regulatory approval.