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Abstract
Street trader organisations are paradoxical objects of study. Their claims resist being analysed through the ‘right to the city’ lens, so contested are rights to inner city spaces between multiple users, not all of them in dominant socioeconomic positions; and so ambiguous is the figure of the street trader, oppressed but also appropriating public space for profit, increasingly claiming, in neoliberalising cities, an entrepreneurial identity. In the aftermath of the 2013 ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ (in which the City of Johannesburg unsuccessfully attempted to evict street traders from its inner city), this paper unpacks the politics of street trader organisations: how they organise their constituencies, frame their claims, forge unlikely alliances and enter into disempowering conflicts in engagements with a divisive municipality.
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at the European Conference of African Studies conference in Paris, July 2015. The paper is based on the author’s own fieldwork and activist engagement with trader leaders, to whom she wishes to express her gratitude. It is also based on joint workshops, run with colleagues in the Center for Urbanism and the Built Environment (CUBES) throughout 2014 and 2015; and on a class project with students from Planning and Politics at Wits University (whose work is referenced in the text), which constituted stimulating spaces of research and debate. Views and interpretations are my own.
Notes
1. Anjaria, “Ordinary States”; Bayat, “Un-civil Society”; and Kamete, “Defending Illicit Livelihoods.”
2. City of Johannesburg, Office of the Chief Operational Officer, Progress of the Inner City Informal Trading Task Team; Verbal commitment given in the participatory process started by the City of Johannesburg (Promulgation and Designation of Trading Spaces in the Inner City, August 2014) to ‘accommodate all legal traders’; and declaration by the Member of the Mayoral Committee, Ruby Mathang, captured in the newspapers, and confirmed in a subsequent meeting by City officials on September 17, 2014, mentioning the possible figure of 10,000 legal trading spaces to be created in the inner city in the medium term.
3. Bromley, “Street Vending and Public Policy”; and Skinner, Street Trade in Africa.
4. Kamete and Lindell, “The Politics of ‘Non-planning’ Interventions.”
5. Skinner, Street Trade in Africa.
6. On the Indian case, see Sinha and Roever, India’s National Policy on Urban Street Vendors; Kumar, The Regularization of Street Vending; and Grest, Statutory Representational Systems.
7. Dobson and Skinner, Working in Warwick; Horn, “From Best Practice to Pariah”; and MICAT, Liberia, “Commerce Ministry, MCC, NAPETUL sign MOU.”
8. It is less the case for secondary cities, where the pressure for sanitised inner city streets and land-use competition around inner city streetscape is often lower.
9. See Bénit-Gbaffou, “Operation Clean Sweep: (Not) Managing Street Trading”..
10. Morange, “Street Trade, Neoliberalisation and the Control of Space”; Kamete and Lindell, “The Politics of ‘Non-planning’ Interventions”; and Bénit-Gbaffou, In Quest of Sustainable Street Trading Management
11. Bénit-Gbaffou, A Political Landscape.
12. See, for instance, V. James, “One Voice Hawkers’ March purely Opportunistic.” Johannesburg News, April 13, 2011.
13. Lindell, Africa’s Informal Workers.
14. Kamete, “Defending Illicit Livelihoods”; and Wafer, “Informality and the Spaces of Civil Society.”
15. Holston, Insurgent Citizenship.
16. Bayat, “Un-civil Society.”
17. Kamete, “Defending Illicit Livelihoods.”
18. Anjaria, “Ordinary States”; and Simone, “People as Infrastructure.”
19. Wafer, “Informality and the Spaces of Civil Society.”
20. Lindell, Africa’s Informal Workers.
21. Lindell, “Between Exit and Voice”; and Lyons et al., “(Why) have Pro‐poor Policies Failed?”
22. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.
23. Bénit-Gbaffou and Katsaura, “Community Leaders.”
24. Matjomane, “Strategies used by Street Traders’ Organisations.”
25. Morange, “Street Trade, Neoliberalisation and the Control of Space.”
26. Devenish and Skinner, “Collective Action in the Informal Economy.”
27. Celik, “Rethinking Street Traders as Promising Agents”; and Gallin, “Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment.”
28. Horn, Collective Bargaining in the Informal Economy; and Horn, Summary Report.
29. Pillay and Van der Walt, “Introduction”; and Lindell, Africa’s Informal Workers.
30. Bayat, “Un-civil Society.”
31. For the full list of street trader organisations’ names, see Table .
32. Block leaders are elected by traders at the block level to represent them at the city level.
33. SERI, “Con Court slams Operation Clean Sweep as an Act of ‘Humiliation and Degradation’.” Press statement, April 4, 2014.
34. Thulare, Trading Democracy?; and Motala, Organizing in the Informal Economy.
35. Bénit-Gbaffou, In Quest of Sustainable Street Trading Management.
36. Bénit-Gbaffou, A Political Landscape.
37. Lindell, Africa’s Informal Workers.
38. A spaza shop is an informal, neighbourhood convenience store located in a residential area.
39. Brunette et al., The Contract State.
40. Lindell, Africa’s Informal Workers.
41. Von Holdt et al., The Smoke that Calls.
42. Lindell, “The Multiple Sites of Urban Governance”; and Lindell, Africa’s Informal Workers.
43. Matjomane, “Strategies used by Street Traders’ Organisations.”
44. Meagher, “The Politics of Vulnerability.”
45. Ibid; Horn, Collective Bargaining in the Informal Economy; and Thulare, Trading Democracy?
46. Houtzager and Lavalle, “Civil Society’s Claims to Political Representation.”
47. Bénit-Gbaffou, A Political Landscape.
48. Wafer, “Informality and the Spaces of Civil Society.”
49. Castells, The City and the Grassroots.
50. Bénit-Gbaffou, In Quest of Sustainable Street Trading Management.
51. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation.
52. Lindell and Appelblad, “Disabling Governance.”