Although practices of mobile street vendors might appear fleeting, they are not transient and without effect on the urban landscape. The spatial practices of street vending transform public spaces into markets by inscribing the vendors’ knowledge necessary to conduct business in the urban landscape. With reference to ethnographic material on mobile street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I will show how street traders learned to locate the relevant social, material, and symbolic goods and people at specific nodes in the spatiotemporal dynamic of the city and jointly created an understanding of the relations of these elements to one another and to themselves. By means of a shared jargon vocabulary with which they named places, customer groups, or kinds of encounters, the vendors inscribed their experiential knowledge into urban space and thus transformed it into a market as an epistemic landscape, a layer of meaning and knowledge that spanned the spatiotemporal topography of the city and allowed the vendors to organize their practices. The concept of the epistemic landscape refers to the structuring potential of recursive spatial practices and emphasizes the socially and culturally creative potential of street vending. [Africa; Tanzania; Urban Economy; Informal Economy; Street Vending; Temporality; Practice; Space; Knowledge; Landscape]

For a group of Wayao street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, kinship relations were simultaneously an advantage and a hindrance. Their migration to the city and entry into the urban economy had occurred along ethnic and kinship lines. But, as they perceived the socially heterogeneous environment of the city that potentially offered them opportunities to cooperate with people from different social or ethnic backgrounds, they experienced their continuing dependency on their relatives as a form of confinement. Against the backdrop of the city, the Wayao perceived their social relations as being burdened with an inescapable sameness that made it impossible to trust one another. Mistrust, contempt and mutual suspicion were the flip side of close social relations and culminated in accusations ofuchawi(Swahili: witchcraft). However, these accusations did not have a disintegrative effect; paradoxically, their impact on social relations among the vendors was integrative. On the one hand,uchawiallegations expressed the claustrophobic feeling of stifling relations; on the other, they compelled the accused to adhere to a shared morality of egalitarian relations and exposed the feeling that the accused individual was worthy of scrutiny, indicating that relationships with him were of particular importance to others.

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sowie des Instituts für Technikzukünfte (ITZ) des Karlsruher Instituts für Technologie (Professur für Technikkulturwissenschaft) und des Interdisziplinären Zentrums für Wissenschafts-und Technikforschung (IZWT) der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal. Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter der Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Lizenz (BY-NC-ND). Diese Lizenz erlaubt die private Nutzung, gestattet aber keine Bearbeitung und keine kommerzielle Nutzung. Weitere Informationen finden Sie unter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.de/ Um Genehmigungen für Adaptionen, Übersetzungen, Derivate oder Wiederverwendung zu kommerziellen Zwecken einzuholen, wenden Sie sich bitte an

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