Multiple Marginality and the Emergence of Popular Transport: ‘Saloni’ Taxi-Tricycles in Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Informalities in urban transport: Mobilities at the heart of contestations over (in)formalisation processes

“…The term 'artisanal transport' is used in the Francophone literature from Sub-Saharan Africa (Behrens et al, 2016;Zouhoula Bi, 2018) and the term 'popular transport' has also been introduced. For Doherty et al (2021), the latter term captures how certain transport services are collectively produced by city residents as workers and passengers in ways that lack clear leadership or ideology but reflect a shared interest in making the city work for themselves and their community.…”

“…This general diversification has started to break down easy distinctions between transport studies and other disciplines, including political science, development studies and anthropology, where attempts to 'formalise' paratransit have also been studied (e.g., Doherty, 2017;Goodfellow, 2015;Mains & Kinfu, 2017;Rizzo, 2017;Sopranzetti, 2018). These and other studies (e.g., Agbiboa, 2018b;Doherty et al, 2021;Hasan & Dávila, 2018;Turner, 2020) tie the state's attempts to professionalise, regulate, and sometimes outright ban so-called informal transport provision to the way these services are seen as contravening modernisation narratives and the interests of politically powerful road user groups, such as middleclass private motorists. In the light of the limits of the informal transport concept and the recent critical reappraisal and diversification of approaches to the topic, this Special Issue shifts attention from informal transport to the multiple ways in which informalities and (in)formalisation processes manifest in urban mobility.…”