Informal Urban Street Markets

Clifton Evers, Kirsten Seale, Clifton Evers, Kirsten Seale

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317630159
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Géographie humaine

Through an international range of research, this volume examines how informal urban street markets facilitate the informal and formal economy not merely in terms of the traditional concerns of labor and consumption, but also in regards to cultural and spatial contingencies. In many places, street markets and their populace have been marginalized and devalued. At times, there are clear governance procedures that aim to prevent them, yet they continue to emerge in even in the most institutionalized societies. This book gives serious consideration to what these markets reveal about urban life in a time of globalized, rapid urbanization and flows of people, knowledge and goods.

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Informal Urban Street Markets

International Perspectives

Kirsten Seale and Clifton Evers

Informal urban street markets are ubiquitous. Nevertheless, their existence can never be taken for granted and must be continually worked at. They are ambient constellations and complex changing configurations, always coming apart as they are coming together, always at the edge of themselves. Some endure. Others are provisional and ephemeral. In a city somewhere, someone knocks a hole in a brick wall one morning to provide access to private land cleared by a developer’s machinery. For a few hours chickens are slaughtered, underwear sold, shoes repaired, and pensioners squat and slap their playing cards down on a plastic chair. By the evening the wall is bricked up, the police have moved everyone on, and the informal urban street market is gone forever.

This book brings together a collection of examples that address informal urban street markets across the globe. What we mean by ‘example’ follows on from the work of Giorgio Agamben (1993). For Agamben the example holds a unique status because it refers simultaneously to a vague and opaque generality, and a real case that is singular and refuses any claim to uniformity.

Informal urban street markets are made up of people buying and selling. Cash moves from pocket to hand to hand to pocket. Street food vendors sweat over open stoves. Illegal taxis compete for customers. Pharmaceuticals produced by multinationals are sold from collapsible tables. Stacked plastic products of all shapes and sizes lean and wobble on the back of carts. Socks and underwear are displayed on cloth and plastic sheets. Handbags dangle from a collapsible stand. A farmer slaughters a duck pulled from the cage mounted on the back of her pushbike. Middle- class shoppers turn away in horror and a tourist hurries to take a photo before the blood drains away. A restaurant owner buys vegetables in bulk from one vendor while the vendor’s wife haggles with a retiree over the price of 200 grams of tofu. A migrant who has just arrived wanders through the stalls in the hope of meeting someone with the same cultural background.

Experiences of the informal economy in informal urban street markets go beyond labour, production, commodities, capital, and consumption. They facilitate the learning and passing on of information and skills (Geertz, 1978); generate “migrant cosmopolitanisms” (Kothari, 2008) and racism (Riccio, 1999); enable the mobility and participation of both privileged and marginalized social groups (Singerman, 1995; Usman, 2010; Williams, 2002); regenerate urban areas (Middleton, 2003); and in some circumstances they are central to the ongoing production of society and culture (Vecchio, 2013). Street markets are reliant on and produce social capital (Lyons & Snoxell, 2005), and vibrate with sociality (Watson, 2009).

Informal Markets, Informal Economies

Keith Hart’s 1973 study on informal markets in urban Ghana defined the field. Since then scholarly research has canvassed an immense and diverse range of informal urban street markets in cities such as Hanoi (Lincoln, 2008), Yogyakarta (Gunadi, 2008), Mumbai (Anjaria 2006), Lusaka (Hansen, 2004), Nairobi (Lyons & Snoxell, 2005), Johannesburg (Cohen, 2010), Sana’a (Lauermann, 2013), Quito (Middleton, 2003), Baguio City (Milgram, 2011), Cusco (Bromley & Mackie, 2009), Mexico City (Crossa, 2009), Bogotá (Donovan, 2008), Barcelona (Kothari, 2008), London (Lyons, 2010), and Otara (de Bruin & Dupuis, 2000).

Understanding these sites is timely and necessary given that they are crucial in the emergence and reproduction of an informal economy that is, according to Robert Neuwirth, “in many countries—particularly in the developing world—[…]growing faster than any other part of the economy” (2011, p. 18). By 2020, the OECD projects that two- thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in the informal economy (ibid.). Neuwirth and others (Bhowmik, 2009; Coletto, 2010; Cook, 2008; Portes, Castells, & Benton, 1989) identify informal markets as key to economic growth and urban sustainability at the local, regional, national, and international scales. In many cities around the world informality—spatial, economic, social, political, bureaucratic—is the norm rather than the exception (Roy, 2004; 2009). Informality is fully integrated with cities. It is pertinent to all cities (AlSayyed, 2004).

Informality is not necessarily synonymous with poverty and the subaltern. The wealthy also engage in informal practices. There is ‘informality from above’; for instance, to acquire and develop land through informal processes that devalorize “current uses and users and makes way for a gentrified future” (Roy, 2009, p. 84). There is also the example of consumption by the privileged through informal markets for reasons of “fun, sociality, distinction, discernment, the spectacular […] rather than by economic necessity” (Williams, 2002, p. 1897).

There is no clear- cut binary of formal and informal. As Ann Varley (2013) explains, there is a “continuous urban fabric without obvious boundaries between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’” (p. 13). In one way or another, they are linked (Chen, 2012; Daniels, 2004; Devas, 2001; Donovan, 2008; Meagher, 2013; Robinson, 2006) or tangled (Meagher, 2010). Formal and informal urban practices are interwoven through deals between multiple informal and formal stakeholders and processes (Simone, 2001; Friedman, 2005). Rather than an informal–formal binary Varley (2013) points us towards the work of Ash Amin and Stephen Graham (1997), who suggest we understand cities as “as a set of spaces where diverse ranges of relational webs coalesce, interconnect and fragment” (p. 418). The relationships require ongoing negotiation, alliance building, restructuring, and resistance. Klarita Gërxhani (2004) explains that activity that falls within this sphere has diverse, complex, and ever- changing economic and noneconomic reasons and motives of existence, which include (but are not limited to) employment/unemployment, labor conditions in the formal sector, flexibility and satisfaction in work, culture and custom, skill sets, migration, allocation and rationing of goods, banning of goods and services, and the role—or lack thereof—of the State in regulating operations such as urban infrastructure, taxation, policy, health and safety rules, bureaucracy, and corruption. Participation may be necessary and by choice. At times activities in informal urban street markets are authorized and legitimate, but often they are not. Formal governance from state and city- sanctioned regulatory procedures folds and unfolds with unofficial and unregistered practices and encounters. This can mean that sometimes informal urban street markets are equated solely with criminality, illegality, chaos, spontaneity, and an absence of organization. However, informal urban street markets also involve degrees of planning, order, efficiency, deliberation, calculation, formalization, and regularization, even though at first glance these may appear lacking.

There can be a general tendency to ignore, repress, and regulate informal activities (Devas, 2001). When cities are ‘cleaned up’ as a demonstration of modernity and order, as well as the glorifying of the ability to do so (Kamete, 2007; 2009; Swanson, 2007), a clampdown on informal street markets and vendors usually takes place concurrently. Efforts to regulate, classify, contain, manage, and glorify urban order may perpetuate inequitable arrangements (Yiftachel, 2009a; 2009b). Inquiry into the regulation of informal street markets is often a concern of policy bodies such as local governments, business councils, and nongovernmental organizations. Martha Chen (2012) explains that they may turn a ‘blind eye’ to them or try to eliminate them, and that “most cities assign the ‘handling’ of street traders to those departments—such as the police—that deal with law and order” (p. 14). However, “Either stance has a punitive effect: eviction, harassment, and the demand for bribes by police, municipal officials and other vested interests” (ibid.). Some participants desire regularization and regulation, whilst others are wary (Chen, 2012; Kumar, 2012; Sinha & Roever, 2011). For example, traders’ associations and organizations struggle to provide lasting impacts and a voice for vendors so they have legal and social protections in the face of complex local and global pressures (Brown, Lyons, & Dankoco, 2010; Dunn, 2014). They must work out what appropriate regulations should be as well as what should or should not be regulated: “A missing regulatory environment can be as costly to informal operators as an excessive regulatory environment” (Chen, 2012, p. 14). Consequently, informal urban street markets are frequently sites of conflict and compromise (Cross, 2000; O’Connor, 2000). They also involve resistance (Kamete, 2007; 2009; Kudva, 2009). Debates about the political, judicial, and economic rules of state- enforced planning and regulation can lead to empowerment and exploitation. According to Chen (2012), “There is a need to rethink regulations to determine what regulations are appropriate for which components of informal employment” (p. 14).

Informal Urban Street Markets as Subaltern Urbanism

Informal urban street markets can irritate government departments, urban planners, corporations, and real estate developers as they try to fix, determine, and claim territory over space and meaning in cities (Kudva, 2009). The political questions, problems, possibilities, and the inventions they disclose and animate challenge the hegemonic ideological work of subordination, centralization of power, homogenization, unification, normalization, and standardization.

Informal urban street markets can de- frame canonical knowledge of cities. Governmental blueprints, planning, strategies, and design are transformed, dissolved, and disorientated by the whirlwinds of idiosyncrasies, energetics, dislocations, hybridities, specificities, and partialities. There is sometimes the reconfiguring of trading networks, transport routes, labour, housing, electricity supply, sanitation, water supply, refuse collection, and other urban infrastructure. Top- down efforts to militate against and exclude nondominant modes of city living, city imaginaries, and becoming- city are resisted and alternatives are put forward and emerge. The public interest of the city is not left wholly in the hands of governmental bodies, the hegemonic political apparatus, private developers, and institutional financiers (Roy, 2009).

While there are clear governance procedures that aim to contain or prevent the operation of and participation in informal urban street markets, they continue to emerge even in the most institutionalized societies and economies because they can provide many benefits to city life: employment, skills training, transport, housing, health care, innovation, belonging, cultural exchange, well- being, community, urban regeneration, identity formation, place- making, recycling, and economic growth. New ways to live and exercise power are found. Gaps in formal provision of urban services can be filled (Meagher, 2007; Nunan & Satterthwaite, 2001). Informal does not simply equal powerlessness.

Mörtenböck and Mooshammer (2008) raise the issue of subject formation in informal street markets and suggest it is an open question for all participants as they invoke distinctive arrangements. People self- organize to enhance their labor situation, as well as gain access to resources and facilities (Motala, 2002; Simone, 2001). Unseen spaces become apparent (Chattopadhyay, 2012), and space is contested for with the state and private enterprise, and realized as sites of local transformations (Bromley & Mackie, 2009; Crossa, 2009; Donovan, 2008). Everyday technologies are reimagined. Bodies are rehabituated as newcomers lightly and intensely brush past or encounter those with a more established habitus. In other words, despite efforts to dominate, sideline, destroy, undermine, constrain, and coerce events so that they can be controlled, organized, and planned for, “new possibilities are ushered into being” through self- cultivation and self-education (Connolly, 2002, p. 1). There is the proliferating of possibilities through collective (human and more- than- human) action, adaptation, and experimentation (Gibson- Graham, 2006).

Informal urban street markets involve kinetic flows of bodies, emotions, goods, sounds, temperatures, smells, finance, psychologies, ideas, discourses, fauna, flora, waste, and, and, and…. Co- constitutive relationships (productive, restrictive, and potential) are formed with architecture, institutions, regulations, policy models, and city infrastructure. Informal urban street markets are more- than- human (Evers, this volume). They vibrate with materiality and literally matter (Bennett, 2010). They are always qualitatively different because at different times and under certain circumstances the sociological, biological, spatial, and psychological intermingle and inter-penetrate. Geographer Doreen Massey calls this a “throwntogetherness” of negotiation, “judgement, learning, improvisation” (Massey, 2005, p. 162). Throwntogetherness isn’t necessarily unplanned; rather, the different constituent parts work together to produce outcomes.

We adopt the concept of the rhizome from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to figure the informal urban street market. Unlike the arboreal model of the tree, the rhizome is an ever- changing multiple and decentralized process of human and nonhuman relationships that generates nodes, offshoots, clusters, and links tha...