Research project Structuring informality: informal trade policy through the lens of infrastructural experiences
Urban informal trade has long presented a policy challenge for countries across the global South.
Led by theories of modernism and neoliberal urbanism, a vast body of research explains the politics of exclusion of street vendors in different contexts. In many contexts, municipalities have attempted several strategies, variously expelling traders, allowing unmanaged trading and, in the current configuration, ‘normalising’ informal trade by partially incorporating it into urban plans. This has sometimes resulted in the adoption of a strategy that removes traders from the streets and into allocated controlled spaces, co-managed by government and private agencies. This attempt at ‘spatial formalization’ is relatively under-theorized, and its effects remain debatable. Academic literature has focused on understanding the complex landscape of political actors in driving these changes, but the impact of the physical infrastructure itself has received relatively little attention. The physical orientation (vertical or linear), location, access and material provisions of electricity, storage, hygiene, and security systems creates a new environment inside, while the limitation on spaces for trade, new language of legality, as well as new infrastructure in the form of consolidated transportation hubs, changes the environment on the outside. This project aims to understand the everyday experiences and the new ways of functioning that have been adopted by informal traders in response to the these changes.