This introduction highlights the paradox of the uses and regulation of public spaces by street trading reflected in two interwoven contradictions. The first contradiction is about the massive presence of street trade and the persistent ambiguous regulatory framework. The second contradiction deals with the misconception of street vending as an “unorganized” and “temporary” activity. It illustrates that vague legal and institutional frameworks as well as a hostile operating environment are drivers of conflictual uses of public space, such as streets that are partially fragmented and privatized by traders.

Through examples of small and medium-sized towns in East Africa mountain areas, in Uganda and Tanzania, the paper focuses on the changing role of secondary towns through their commercial functions, acting as nodes in wide trade networks (fieldwork conducted in urban and rural markets of the studied areas). The local productive systems have turned to market gardening to face the drastic decline of cash crops like coffee and new products and productions are now inundating local markets, like fruits and vegetables but also imported Chinese or second-hand clothes, shoes or kitchenware. Trade connections are more open and complex than before with strong processes of spatial and economic differentiation and specialisation. The position of secondary towns is at the same time challenged by new roads, new (often external) actors and new strategies, with visible bypassing effects (direct connections between rural and large cities), but also remains inconspicuously important for servicing rural areas. The paper presents the changing role of these secondary towns in globalisation, the stakeholder interplays (old and new, local and exogenous) in these new configurations, and finally the redistribution of market localisations, in response to new opportunities and challenges in globalised trading systems.

This paper is about the contested use of urban space, focusing on the appropriation of informal trading spaces by street traders in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city. The objective is to understand the access to and control of the trading streets around Jomo Kenyatta Sports Ground. These trading places are understood as a resource. I argue that legal and political contradictions create an ambiguous institutional environment. These ambiguities contribute to the development of conflicts in the use of these trading places and give advantages to actors with a key position, particularly the brokers acting as an interface between street traders and authorities. The empirical material for this study comes from surveys carried out in Kisumu between April and December 2016. 26 semi-structured interviews, three life story interviews and two focus group interviews were carried out, mainly with street traders. The first part of this paper develops the theoretical approach and the ambiguity of the street trading institutional environment. The second part deals with the daily struggle for trading places and then it focuses on projects by local authorities about street trade management. These projects increase the process of fragmentation of street traders’ associations.

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Référence électronique Sylvain Racaud, « Ramifications discrètes de routes marchandes transnationales : circulation de la pacotille chinoise entre marchés ruraux et villes secondaires au Cameroun », Les Cahiers d'Outre-Mer [En ligne], 278 | Juillet-Décembre, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2024, consulté le 12