Heetchin' a ride: Getting around on the ride apps in Oran, Algeria

Abstract

This article explores how ride-hailing apps have been adapted to local social practices in Oran, Algeria. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2024, it examines how drivers and passengers navigate between digital coordinates and socially meaningful landmarks in a city where official street names – whether colonial French or post-independence Arabic – rarely match how people actually find their way around. Rather than eliminating personal connections, as ride apps typically do elsewhere, in Oran, these technologies necessarily foster social relationships. The article demonstrates how the crucial phone call between driver and passenger establishes a quasi-familial bond that transforms an anonymous digital transaction into a personal commitment. This adaptation of ride-hailing technology reveals broader patterns in how residents navigate between digital and traditional ways of knowing urban space, while highlighting how new technologies become embedded in existing social relationships. The case of the Heetch app in Oran shows how apparently ‘global’ technological systems are necessarily localized through specific social and cultural practices.