Practicing space: Vending practices and street markets in Sana’a Yemen

Abstract

Qat, a legal stimulant commonly consumed in Yemen, is the center of an extensive production and consumption culture, and a significant component of contemporary Yemeni economy and society. This paper explores qat vending practices and street market politics in Sana’a, Yemen’s largest city. Using interviews focused on the business practices of qat vendors, it argues that making spatial claims on street markets is a central component of everyday vending practices, and that this provides empirical insight into the formation and regulation of informal institutions in the regional qat market. This is seen in (1) micro-politics over allocations of space inside individual street markets which regulate interactions between vendors and local government, and enforce localized standards of business propriety; (2) vending practices which build place reputations for qat markets, in the process producing a retail landscape that institutionalizes market reputations; and (3) practices of networking in which street markets serve as material and symbolic points of reference around which wholesale and labor networks are assembled. The paper contributes to empirical conversations on the role of street markets and vending in semi-formal economies, arguing that market spaces feature centrally in small business strategies. It contributes to conceptual debates over how markets are performed and assembled, using a practice-based analytical lens to identifying the ways in which business practices strategically utilize the marketplaces to form and stabilize markets more abstractly.