Abstract
Street trading has become integral to how public space works in cities of the global South. It cannot be considered as marginal since it gears to the urban economy and works as a key mode of income generation for the urban poor to sustain livelihoods. A poor understanding of how forms of street trading work in public space can lead to poor design and policy interventions. While many practices of formalization aim at the elimination of informality, the challenge is to explore the complex informal/formal relations and the dynamics of street trading to understand how forms of informality negotiate space and visibility in the public realm. In this paper, we propose a typology of street trading, based on the criteria of mobility within public space and proximity to public/private urban interfaces. While exploring the degrees of mobility in informal street trading can be crucial to the modes of governance and adaptability involved, of critical importance is to investigate how street trading takes place in relation to the built form—particularly the edges of public space where public/private interfaces enable or constrain exchange and appropriation. The developed typology provides a better understanding of the dynamics of street trading and contributes to the ways in which the built environment professions can most effectively engage with interventions in public space without eradicating the scope for informal adaptations.
Highlights
Cities have become the primary centers of opportunities and jobs, accommodating more than half of the global population [1]
Moving towards a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of informal urbanism is related to the Sustainable Development Goal 11, which is by and large the most relevant to the New Urban Agenda adopted at the Habitat III conference
Informal trading has a significant contribution to the urban economy, it is often seen by the authorities as marginal [4,5,6,7], out of order [8,9,10] and damaging to the formal market [11]
Summary
Cities have become the primary centers of opportunities and jobs, accommodating more than half of the global population [1]. Cities of the global South have been increasingly facing the consequences of globalization and international restructuring of the global economy They have become exposed to the effects of global accumulation of capital to which local trade has to adapt for economic survival. Middle- and low-income urban dwellers often benefit from the products provided by street traders because they are often cheaper, more diverse in range, and more accessible in terms of time and distance than those in the formal market [13]. Their entrepreneurial activities have the potential to fill the gaps in the formal market and adapt promptly to changing demands. We seek to move beyond such binary thinking, drawing on what has been described as a “post-dualist” approach [28], to investigate the dynamic of street trading in public space
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