Reading for difference on the street: De-homogenising street vending in Mexico City

Abstract

In cities across the Global South, neoliberal urban policies have unfolded through a series of projects that take the streets, plazas and other public spaces of the city as central arenas to booster the neoliberal project. This has entailed the removal and displacement of groups who depend on these spaces for their daily survival, for example street vendors and other participants of the so-called informal economy. This paper draws from and seeks to contribute to work on the urban politics of informality in the Global South. My objective is to broaden our understanding of informality and resistance in cities by recognising difference and de-homogenising so-called informal activities, particularly street vending and vendors. To make this argument, I draw from the experience of resistance movements against displacement carried out by street vendors in Mexico City as a result of the implementation of a series of exclusionary policies implemented by city authorities. I demonstrate that thinking about difference matters to the way in which vendors carried out their resistance strategies and to how the post-policy context materialised.

The rise of corporate retailing and the impacts on small‐scale retailing: the survival strategies of Kirana stores and informal street vendors in Durgapur, India

“…To add to the problem, the new spaces of large‐scale grocery retailing are often only part of a wider urban dynamic—a new urban policy—which may also include new office space, professional housing and shopping centres. Whilst these so‐called neoliberal entrepreneurial urban strategies ambitiously claim to improve quality of life for the local population, they often overlook the livelihood issues of those whose daily subsistence is generated in public spaces (Crossa, , ; Bromley & Mackie, ). Raiding ‘illegal’ street markets and confiscating the inventories of street vendors by municipal authorities is common in India as the vision of creating ‘world‐class cities’ often induces the authorities to restrict illegal encroachments (Roy, , ).…”

Displacing Informality: Rights and Legitimacy in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

“…Empirical research engaging with urban informality has focused on how (in)formality emerges as an outcome of never‐ending negotiations and struggles among various actors (Kudva, ; Hackenbroch, ; Schindler, ; Crossa, ). What is interesting about such perspectives is that they challenge the idea that legitimacy is something that emanates uniquely from the state and its apparatus, as is assumed in the approach of Roy ().…”

“…Research has revealed that other agents, such as the middle‐classes, can play an important role in legitimizing informal practices (Schindler, ). Others, such as Crossa (), have argued that although the formal/informal split is deployed by the state as a strategic narrative to justify displacement, ‘it is not only the state who actively participates in the construction of this narrative, but so‐called informal people themselves by enacting the formal/informal divide in contexts of displacement and exclusion’ ( ibid . : 300).…”

“…Nevertheless, although the stadium was often crowded with informal traders, the stallholders were the only group recognized by the state. This points to a complex ‘differentiation within informality’ (Roy, : 149) and to a politics of difference among informal traders (Crossa, ).…”

Problem and Power: Informal Commerce Between Repression and Enterprisation

“…A series of studies have pinpointed enterprisation strategies-usually travestied as modernization-of market spaces associated with the work and consumption of lower classes in several countries, such as Argentina (Kopper 2015), Mexico (Crossa 2016), Ecuador (Bromley 2002), Peru (Bromley & Mackie 2009), and also in more developed countries, such as the case of the English towns studied by Gonzales & Waley (2013). All these situations rely on the existence of large stakeholders who see economical potential in business spaces that once were repressed or barely tolerated in big cities.…”