Rebel Streets and the Informal Economy

Street Trade and the Law

Alison Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317280088
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Street trade is a critical and highly visible component of the informal economy, linked to global systems of exchange. Yet policy responses are dismissive and evictions commonplace. Despite being progressively marginalised from public space, street traders in the global south are engaged in spatial and political battlegrounds to reclaim space, and claim de facto property rights over their place of work, through quiet infiltration, union power, or direct action.

This book explores 'rebel streets', the challenges faced by informal economy actors and how organised groups are seeking to reframe legal understandings to create new claims to space and urban rights. The book sets out new thinking and a conceptual framework for improved understanding of the plural relationship between law, rights, and space for the informal economy, the contest between traditional, modernist and rights-based approaches to development, and impacts on the urban working poor. With a focus on street trading, the book seeks to reframe the legal context in which modern informal economies operate, drawing on key areas of academic inquiry and case studies of how vendors are staking claim to urban rights.

The book argues for a reconceptualisation of legal instruments to provide a rights-based framework for urban work that recognises the legitimacy of urban informal economies, the scope for collective management of urban resources, and the social value of public space as a site for urban livelihoods. It will be of interest to students and scholars of geography, economics, urban studies, development studies, political studies and law.

1
Urban informality and ‘rebel streets’

Alison Brown and Peter Mackie

Introduction

When 26-year-old Tunisian street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in December 2010, in protest at humiliation and constant harassment from police and city officials, his death inspired revolution throughout the Arab world. The protests in Avenue Habib Bourguiba and Tahrir Square unseated despotic regimes as protestors challenged political repression and economic exclusion in a universal call for justice, fairness and the rule of law (Guardian, 2011). The revolution raised concern across the region about the explosive political power of marginalised street traders, but, in practice, little has changed and in cities of Africa, Asia, Middle East and Latin America legislation affecting street traders remains unreformed and punitive for the poor.

This book focuses on the interface between street trade as the most visible and most controversial component of the informal economy, its relationship with urban law and the conflicting legal environment in which street trading takes place, and the rebellions of street traders in challenging the law and claiming legal space. Although there is no universally accepted definition of the informal economy, the conceptual framework now adopted by the ILO includes both: 1) the informal sector referring to employment and production in unincorporated, unregistered or small enterprises, and 2) informal employment referring to employment without social protection – which includes own-account workers and employers in informal sector enterprises, contributing family workers, employees holding informal jobs, members of informal producer’s cooperatives, and own-account workers producing goods exclusively for their household’s use (ILO, 2013: 42).

The book is an outcome of the Urban Law Project, research funded under the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)/Department for International Development (DFID) Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research,¹ supplemented by two linked British Academy small grants² and research funded under the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China.³ This introduction explains the philosophy of the research, and then outlines central themes of the book: law and development, law and urban management and rebel streets. The introduction ends with an overview of the book structure.

Street trade is defined here as all non-criminal commercial activity that depends on access to urban public space including market trade, trade from fixed locations and mobile vending, while public space is framed by the social relations that determine its use. The concept of urban public space is adopted to mean physical space and the social relations that determine that space, including all space that is not delineated or accepted as private and where there is a degree of legitimate public or community use, encompassing both formal space in parks, squares and streets, and marginal or under-used edge space (Brown, 2006: 22).

The term ‘street trade’ is broad in meaning. The distinction between street trade, market trade, hawking and home-based enterprise is often blurred, as markets may encompass surrounding streets, street traders may be static or mobile and home-based enterprises may spill onto the street. There are also differences in terminology as street trading is also described as ‘vending’, ‘petty trading’, or ‘hawking’. Terms are often country-specific and nuanced; for example, in India the term ‘vendor’ is widely used, whereas in South Africa ‘trader’ is more common.

The activity of street trade embraces the sale and purchase of the phenomenal range of goods and services bought on city streets. These include food and produce, new and second hand clothing, manufactured items (often imported), shoes, phone accessories, traditional herbs and medicine, and services such as hair cutting and braiding, selling phone credit and many others (Brown, 2006: 8).⁴ The street economy is a wider concept, embracing all the commercial and business activities and workers that profit from the street, such as transport workers, porters, watchmen, small-scale manufacturers, rent collectors, landlords and many others, although the legal challenges are common. Excluded from this discussion are activities often considered socially illegitimate, including drug trading and prostitution.

Urban law encompasses the policies, legislation, decisions and practices that govern the functioning of cities and human settlements – covering land, housing, urban economies, operations of local government, the environment and citizens’ rights. However, legislation affecting local economies is usually designed for the formal economy, and fails to support informal workers, often criminalising the working poor. Urban law affecting the informal economy is poorly documented and erratically applied. It is often framed at national level and implemented by municipalities, but rarely fully understood by informal workers. Bylaws regulating cart-pushers, kiosk owners, hawkers and businesses licences are often outdated, and prohibitive costs and lengthy procedures put business registration out of reach.

Research objectives

The Urban Law Project was a three-year research project on law, rights and regulation of the informal economy. The focus was on street trade as one of the most contested domains of the informal economy and affected by many strands or urban law. The research hypothesis is that the urban informal economy operates in a fragmented and plural regulatory environment, with conflicts between formal and informal regulatory systems that exacerbate risks, vulnerabilities and exclusions of the working poor, and are hugely damaging to the security and stability of their livelihoods, particularly at times of economic crisis.

Fieldwork for the research took place in cities with contrasting legal and poverty traditions: Ahmedabad, Dar es Salaam, Dakar and Durban, and the concepts were developed through related studies in Cairo, Tunis, Cusco, Quito and Guangzhou. All the authors in this book have contributed to the project. Four broad dimensions of informal work are explored by authors:

• the dynamics of the informal economy and street trading in each city;
• the plural legal and regulatory environment in which street trading operates;
• the regulation of street trading in practice, through self-management, informal landlords, local governments or other means; and
• the conflicts faced by street traders and their legal or physical claim to the streets.

Understanding and addressing the conflicts is crucial to developing an enabling, pro-poor regulatory framework.

Global context

Widespread informality has now become a structural characteristic of low-income urban economies and contributes significantly to GDP. In many cities of the developing world, the informal economy provides 60–80% of urban jobs and up to 90% of new jobs (Roy, 2005; Varley, 2013; ILO, 2013a). Street trade is one of the most visible and contested domains of the urban informal economy, and a crucial livelihood strategy for the poor and very poor; it provides a key source of new jobs, particularly for young people entering the job market and new migrants to cities, and supports significant urban-to-rural and international remittances (Chen et al., 2002; Brown, 2006). In times of economic crisis its role is heightened and, as the 2008 global economic crisis demonstrated, it is a refuge for the working poor, but is also vulnerable to global market change. The downturn came at a time of intense debate over the potential for legal empowerment to drive poverty reduction in the heterogeneous socio-political and legal context of cities of the south (Fernandes and Varley, 1998; McAuslan, 2002). Yet policy consistently ignores the existing and potential contribution of the informal economy to both jobs and economic output.

Far from the common perception that street trade is survivalist – an outlet for local produce or manufacture – traders are now inextricably linked to global systems of exchange (Lyons et al., 2008; WIEGO, 2016). Cross and Morales suggest that the modernist vision that has shaped cities in recent years has seen many attempts to ban and over-regulate street trading as a sign of ‘disorder’ and poverty, yet street trading has survived and thrived as ‘street merchants have not simply returned to a romanticized past but created reasoned reactions to local manifestations of today’s economic, cultural and social world’ (Cross and Morales, 2007: 7). In contrast, de Soto (2000) argues that it is over-regulation that drives entrepreneurs to avoid regulatory bonds.

Despite extensive academic research on illegal cities (McAuslan, 1998), debates have focused on housing and land tenure (Durand-Lasserve and Selod, 2007). Discussion of law and regulation for the economies of the urban poor − usually the informal economy − has been limited, with emphasis on formalising labour and business rights (for example, ILO, 2013b) or on urban management (Chen et al., 2002). Yet fieldwork consistently shows that insecurity and harassment are crucial factors undermining urban livelihoods, with forced evictions, often pursued for political or commercial ends, legitimised by draconian or outdated legislation or externally led reforms (Brown, 2006; Brown et al., 2010).

Urban law affecting street trading is complex, poorly documented and erratically applied. Interpreted and implemented by municipalities, it is often framed at national level with roots in international influences (Lyons and Brown, 2009). It is rarely understood by street traders; bylaws regulating cart-pushers, kiosk owners, hawkers and businesses licences, are often colonial relics. The legal context affecting street trade can include:

• constitutional frameworks;
• policing, local government and public order law;
• highways and urban planning legislation;
• bylaws and business licensing regulations;
• public health, markets and food hygiene regulations;
• hawking and vending regulations.

The result is that trade is often illegal in multiple ways: prohibitive costs and lengthy procedures put business registration out of reach, and lack of property rights makes traders vulnerable to evictions. Instead, street trade is regulated by a panoply of informal actors including private landlords, religious or ethnic groups, market or welfare associations, unions, savings groups, the police or vigilantes, with extortion and exploitation rife. The cumulative impacts of weak or inappropriate urban law and exploitative informal processes are poorly understood.

The risks of operating in this environment are extreme. Shocks and stresses commonly include policy shifts, victimisation or exclusion of specific groups, civil unrest, police harassment, or evictions. Several authors have written powerfully about specific conflicts (for example, Potts (2007) on Operation Murambatsvina, Skinner (2008) on evictions in Durban in the run-up to international sporting events and Middleton (2003) on exclusion of street trade from Quito’s historic centre), but a more general review the drivers of eviction is overdue and will be explored in this book.

Law and development

The legal systems of nation states is the backdrop against which informal activities take place. Since the end of the twentieth century, development policy has been underpinned by a global call for the rule of law which relies almost exclusively on formal legal and judicial systems, pursued vigorously by international agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (Santos, 2006). The approach relies heavily on the neoliberal development model which emphasises the importance of market-based economic growth for poverty reduction, and a judicial framework that clarifies property rights and contracts, with little consideration of the plurality of unofficial governance mechanisms that have existed for many years (Santos, 1997, 2006). Urban policies and legislation, changes to planning and land laws, the ‘modernisation’ of legal and institutional frameworks take little account of the diversity of provision and informal regulation actually taking place (Lyons and Brown, 2009).

Strengthening livelihoods makes a major contribution to poverty reduction, but the impact of urban law and informal processes underpinning rights to work, to space, or to representation is not well researched. For example, enshrining a ‘right to work’ in legislation can form an important bargaining platform in negotiations over evictions (Brown, 2009). This book argues that urban development resulting from the livelihoods of the poor often take place outside formal law, but are nevertheless based on legitimate and socially accepted processes, as explored through the chapters in this book. Sometimes these invoke formal legal processes, but often operate in tension with the law. The case studies span different continents and legal systems, to explore how street traders claim urban space and negotiate the relationship between offici...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Urban informality and ‘rebel streets’
• PART I ‘Rebel Streets’: law, rights and space in urban development
• PART II Street trading at the front line
• PART III Claiming ‘Rebel Streets’
• Index