Effects of Street Vending on the Lives of Vendors and on Urban Space

Author(s):  
Mansi Karna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Amany Ramadan Arisha ◽  
Nancy Mostafa Abd El-Moneim

Street vending is a growing controversial phenomenon in urban environments. It is a survival strategy and an economic opportunity for countless numbers of marginalized vendors. However, the temporal presence of vendors is portrayed as the source of substantial urban issues, which detract from the quality of the urban public space and the public life of individuals. This chapter aims to propose a practical approach to understand the impact of vendors' temporal presence on the quality of urban space and social life. By space syntax theory, this study utilizes pragmatic methods in the fields of social and human sciences; to analyze the socio-spatial and temporal attributes of the vending phenomenon in relation to urban users' movement in a case study street market at Cairo. The findings introduce a syntactic methodology that highlights the profound relationship between users and informal urban markets to be applied in diverse contexts.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
Tavonga Njaya

The study sought to examine how street vendors were coping with informality and illegality in metropolitan Harare. Data collection techniques included in-depth personal interviews, direct observations and documentary reviews. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect socio-economic and technical data pertaining to street vending and the resistance strategies adopted by the vendors. The study showed that despite numerous constraints placed on various groups of street traders, these groups had actually developed survival and resistance strategies that enabled them to maintain their livelihoods from public urban space. These strategies included “soft” forms of resistance; small-scale individual and group actions; subtle and innovative arrangements and even open protest and direct confrontation with the authorities. This was because for many street vendors, the street provided them with an honourable and respectable means of livelihoods. The study recommended that the government should recognise street industry through registration and introduction of a code of practice for street vendors. Over time a legal instrument should be introduced to regulate the operations of street traders. However, as a first step towards recognition, street vendors should constitute themselves into well organised associations that could become a forum of negotiations with the City of Harare. Future research should focus on quantifying the number of street vendors in Harare and their economic benefits.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziwen Sun ◽  
Simon Bell ◽  
Iain Scott

In contemporary Chinese cities, street vendors often emerge in a predictable space where numerous people frequently walk or stay. In this sense, the ubiquitous phenomenon of street vending closely relates to the walkability of urban space in the Chinese context. The use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) analyses a series of immaterial and material actors, which intertwine as a heterogeneous network within complex associations. Based on our previous reviews, this study is the first exploration to implicate the heterogeneous network of street vending as a possible approach to understanding walkable spaces.© 2016. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.Keywords: Street Vendors, Actor-Network Theory, Walkable Spaces


Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-74
Author(s):  
Eghosa O Igudia

Street vending has become an increasingly common feature of urban centres for several decades, with a relatively high proportion of developing countries’ populations depending on it for employment, income or survival. Taking a supply-side approach, studies have shown that the responses of urban planners to street vending have followed the modernism theory. In this paper, we take a demand-side (buyer-focused) approach to studying street vending, which has received little attention to date from the academic community. Employing data from Lagos state, Nigeria, we report four explanations underpinning the demand side of street vending: formal economy failures, social/redistributive explanations, financial gains and a multifeature explanation. These are, in turn, explained by the marital status, level of education and perception of individuals. Our findings highlight the need for urban planners to embrace pragmatic policies in addressing these demand-side drivers of street vending and use of urban space, rather than criminalising its actors.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Harris

This essay draws upon the author’s performance script Fall and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a provocation for considering the ways performance texts provide a threshold for somatic inquiry, and for recognizing the limits of scholarly analysis that does not take up performance-as-inquiry. Set at the Empire State Building, this essay embodies the connections and missed possibilities between strangers and intimates in the context of urban modern life. Fall’s protagonist is positioned within a landscape of capitalist exchange, but defies this matrix to offer instead a gift at the threshold of life/death, virtual/real, and love/loss. Through somatic inquiry and witnessing as threshold experiences, the protagonist (as Benjamin’s flaneur) moves through urban space and time, proving that both scholarship and performance remain irrevocably embodied, and as such invariably tethered to the visceral, the stranger, risk, and death.


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