Street entanglements: Contestation, collaboration, and co-optation in Manila’s informal vending spaces

ABSTRACT

Global estimates show that millions of urban poor in many Global South cities embrace informal livelihoods to earn a living. Street vending is one of such informal employment. The literature has examined how state institutions use “formal” and “informal” approaches to manage street vending. Yet, there is inadequate empirical account of the governing relations emerging from an interface between state-led interventions and grassroots collective action. I deploy the notion of street entanglements—how street vendors' actions and the ties they forge are structurally entwined with state power and its broader political context—to examine this interface. Drawing on the experiences of informal vendors in Metro Manila’s Baclaran district, I unpack four overlapping factors that shape the state-vendor relationship: (1) disjunctive urban governance, (2) strong kinship ties, (3) clientelist political relations, and (4) grassroots democratic entanglements. I discuss the causes and consequences of these entwined relations and problematize their implications for governing urban spaces. Although the findings are rooted in Metro Manila, similar challenges may take place in other Global South metropolises.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A recent article sums up current urban governance themes (Da Cruz et al., 2019), but it focuses on issues surrounding “formal” institutional arrangements.

2. Barangay is the smallest political administrative unit in the Philippines. It has formal village-level government structure with elected executive and legislative officials.

3. While the MMDA is a regional entity, it operates under the Office of the Philippine President as it supervises Metro Manila, the country’s National Capital Region.

4. All the names that appear in this paper are pseudonyms I use to protect the interviewees’ identity.

5. The congressional district-city mayor combination in both cities produces a potent dynastic permutation as it blends the local executive power with the access to national resources.

6. In relation to informal settlements, Ren (2018) notes how electoral politics has shaped informal housing policies and their implementation in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Mumbai (India).

7. Although McCoy (1993) uses it to describe a strategy of elite families to strengthen their political alliances, I argue that even grassroots agents like vendors employ kinship network to engage with powerful forces.

8. The subsequent sections use clientelist politics and patronage relations interchangeably.

9. Although I view kinship bonds as implicated in clientelist relations (as shown in clientelism literature), I devote a separate discussion on kinship to emphasize how family ties help vendors appropriate their “claimed spaces of power” (Gaventa, 2011) by managing contested vending spaces and addressing migration concerns.

10. These evictions occurred during Bayani Fernando’s reign as MMDA Chair from 2002 to 2009.

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Redento B. Recio

Redento B. Recio has a PhD in Urban Planning and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Informal Urbanism Research Hub, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. His research focuses on social inclusion, urban informal livelihoods, grassroots collective action, development planning and urban governance issues in Global South cities.