Governmentality and Spatial Strategies: Towards Formalization of Street Vendors in Guangzhou, China

Abstract

A new policy approach that seeks to formalize street vendors by immobilizing them in designated places has been taken as an alternative to exclusion in Guangzhou, China. This article develops an analytical framework for understanding this spatial formalization by drawing upon Foucault's concept of governmentality. Formalization can be understood as a form of spatial governmentality that seeks to guide the behaviour of informal economic individuals towards officially desired norms by creating bounded spaces. While the formalization programme reflects a moral form of political rationality that directs modern governments towards principles of social justice, it is fundamentally founded on a dispositional spatial rationality that imagines the dependence of social control on the ordering of space. However, this spatial rationality entails a tension between the goal of formalization and its practical effects, resulting in a failure to respect vital attributes of street vending and vendors’ counter‐responses to it. The article concludes by questioning the government's formalization approach, given its ignorance of the reality of informality, and opens up the question of what might be good formalization.

Beyond Growth Machine Politics: Understanding State Politics and National Political Mandates in China’s Urban Redevelopment

“…[iii] Community Participation: The new phase of urban redevelopment represents the political task of achieving a greater urban order (removal of informality and "beautification") (Huang et al 2014;Wu et al 2013). Similar to the governance of street vendors (Huang et al 2019), urban renewal is a rehabilitation of the built environment (Shin 2016;Wang 2020). Hence, the political intention is not secondary but rather can be the primary consideration.…”

“…Similar to the governance of street vendors (Huang et al. 2019), urban renewal is a rehabilitation of the built environment (Shin 2016; Wang 2020). Hence, the political intention is not secondary but rather can be the primary consideration.…”

Urban Redevelopment, Displacement, and Governmentality in Nanjing’s Historic Inner‐City

“…Compared with previous brutal and coercive tactics used in urban governance (e.g. massive domicide-destruction of their home-across the country in the 2000s), less overt measures are now being used by the Chinese local state against the less privileged class (also see Huang et al 2019). In this paper, rather than arguing that China's urban transformation is evidence of "the retreat of the state" as experienced in many Western democracies (Sigley 2006), we argue that the state is regrouping itself.…”

COVID-19 and sonic governmentality: Can we hear the virus speak?

“…19 These are but a couple of instances of recent publications on the relationship between sight and politics in contemporary China. There are surely other inquiries into governmentality that follow other paths 20 -but inquiries into the sonic remain largely silent, save for the rich tradition of Chinese popular music studies. 21 Our inquiry addresses this research gap, as guided by what we have heard during the pandemic in China.…”