Tobias Kuttler

Postdoctoral Researcher

Tobias is a Postdoctoral Researcher based at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), where he coordinates Fairwork’s research activities in several countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Furthermore, he coordinates the project’s regional activities in Europe. He also conducts research as part of Fairwork’s Germany team.

Tobias is a geographer and urban planner with a research focus on the interrelations of urban development, mobility and platform work. He has a particular regional research interest in South Asia and South Africa.

Before his engagement in the Fairwork project, he was a research associate at TU Berlin (Chair of Work, Technology and Participation) and a PhD scholar at TU Munich and the University of Hamburg.

His PhD thesis focused on the continuities and changes in the taxi sector of Mumbai/India, in the context of the emergence of digital mobility platforms. By researching both platform and metered taxi drivers’ everyday driving practices and socialities, he investigated the embeddedness of platform mobilities in the socio-spatial networks of the established metered taxi sector.

His recent publications include: 

• 2025. Graham, M., Alyanak, O., Bertolini, A., Feuerstein, P., Kuttler, T., Ustek Spilda, F., & Valente, J. “Pressure and praise as an action research methodology: The case of Fairwork.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
• 2024. “Urban mobilities in Mumbai: Towards worker-centric platformisation beyond ‘urban solutionism’.” Urban Studies.
• 2023. “The spatial politics of platformization: Negotiating platform power in everyday taxi driving in Mumbai.“ Geoforum 147 (2023).
• 2023. “(In)Formality and the Janus Face of the platform: Production of the ‘space of taxi driving’ between everyday realities and rationalities of the state and market.” In: Surie A and Huws U (eds) Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2022. “Going on a ride with Lefebvre: Everyday contestation of platform mobilities in Mumbai.” Applied Mobilities (2022): 1-17.
• 2022. “Socio-spatial embedding of platform mobilities. A study on taxi driving.” In: Sujata Patel, D. Parthasarathy, George Jose (Eds.): Mumbai/Bombay. Majoritarian Neoliberalism, Informality, Resistance, and Wellbeing. Taylor & Francis.
• 2021. Kuttler, T., Moraglio, M. Re-thinking Mobility Poverty: Understanding Users’ Geographies, Backgrounds and Aptitudes. Taylor & Francis.

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