Seeing the City through Traffic Hawking and Merchandise Differentials

Abstract

One of the confounding and historical contradictions of Lagos megacity is its permanent state of traffic gridlocks that eventuate in what in this paper is conceived as “traffic hawking”. Although traffic hawking is a common site in Lagos, settlement patterns and economic class of dwellers mark a distinction between the city’s urban and suburban environments. Against this backdrop, this paper contends that the distinction is reproduced by an observed differential in the merchandise of the traffic hawkers. It underscores how social inequality is reinforced through the prism of traffic hawking. Data for the study were generated over a period of six months from four different locations that were purposively selected to represent urban and suburban settlements. Semi-Structured Interviews with 40 hawkers and 8 buyers were conducted between February 2019 to July 2019. Findings reveal that one of the most striking urban and suburban differentials in traffic hawking is the display of “live merchandise”. Highly priced pets, mostly dogs in various species and cross-bred hybrids and other sophisticated good, constitute urban hawkers’ merchandise. Where goods such as perishables and cooked food items are displayed by traffic hawkers, they are rarely and less patronized in urban settlements than in suburban locations. Regular urban traffic merchandise also includes car items such as windshield wipers, seat-covers, and foot mats; info-tech items such as storage devices, laptop bags, and phone pouches; painting and sculptural arts; cutlery and sport wares. The paper concludes that the observed differentials show income and consumption disparity between the urban and suburban dwellers and underscore the enduring colonial heritage of dichotomization of spaces within Lagos in the postcolonial dispensation, even when traffic gridlocks tend to level the spatial binaries in the city.