Working the city

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the economy of the marketplace and the street. In each of the three cities, major efforts to territorially restructure market trading have been undertaken in the early twenty-first century, but with divergent outcomes. The chapter explores these before then considering the arena of street vending and hawking, and the different forms of marginalization, persecution, and negotiation that characterize street life in the three cities. The chapter argues that differences in both legitimation strategies and legacies of infrastructural power here combine with varying modalities of political informality to explain the variation in street economies, and consequently the experiences of vendors, hawkers, and hustlers. The chapter argues that how these groups are connected to political regimes through negotiation, attempts at incorporation, or agendas of outright ‘invisibilization’ provide a lens onto the broader politics of urbanization in each of the three cities.