1st Edition
Rebel Streets and the Informal Economy Street Trade and the Law
Street trade is a critical and highly visible component of the informal economy, linked to global systems of exchange. Yet policy responses are dismissive and evictions commonplace. Despite being progressively marginalised from public space, street traders in the global south are engaged in spatial and political battlegrounds to reclaim space, and claim de facto property rights over their place of work, through quiet infiltration, union power, or direct action.
This book explores 'rebel streets', the challenges faced by informal economy actors and how organised groups are seeking to reframe legal understandings to create new claims to space and urban rights. The book sets out new thinking and a conceptual framework for improved understanding of the plural relationship between law, rights, and space for the informal economy, the contest between traditional, modernist and rights-based approaches to development, and impacts on the urban working poor. With a focus on street trading, the book seeks to reframe the legal context in which modern informal economies operate, drawing on key areas of academic inquiry and case studies of how vendors are staking claim to urban rights.
The book argues for a reconceptualisation of legal instruments to provide a rights-based framework for urban work that recognises the legitimacy of urban informal economies, the scope for collective management of urban resources, and the social value of public space as a site for urban livelihoods. It will be of interest to students and scholars of geography, economics, urban studies, development studies, political studies and law.
1. Urban informality and 'rebel streets'
Alison Brown
Part 1: 'Rebel Streets' - Law, Rights and Space in Urban Development
2. Legal Paradigms and the informal economy: pluralism, empowerment, rights or governance?
Alison Brown
3. Rights-based approaches and social injustice: a critique
Beth Watts and Suzanne Fitzpatrick
4. 'Right to the city' and the new urban order
Edésio Fernandes
5. Reclaiming space: street trading and revanchism in Latin America
Peter Mackie, Kate Swanson and Ryan Goode
6. Claiming the streets: reframing property rights for the urban informal economy
Alison Brown
7. Law and the informal economy - the WIEGO law project
Christine Bonner
Part 2: Street Trading at the Front Line
8. Claiming urban space through judicial activism − street vendors of Ahmedabad
Darshini Mahadevia and Suchita Vyas
9. Law and litigation in street trader livelihoods − Durban, South Africa
Caroline Skinner
10. Revisiting the revanchist city: the changing politics of street vending in Guangzhou
Gengzhi Huang, Desheng Xue and Zhigang Li
11. Commerce of the street in Sénégal − between illegality and tolerance
Ibrahima Dankoco and Alison Brown
12. The politics and regulation of street trading in Dar es Salaam
Colman Msoka and Tulia Ackson
13. Street trade in post-Arab spring Tunisia − transition and the law
Annali Kristiansen, Alison Brown and Fatma Raâch
14. Street traders in post-revolution Cairo − victims or villains
Nezar Kafafy
Part 3: Claiming 'Rebel Streets'
15. Emerging themes for the new legal order
Alison Brown
Biography
Alison Brown is Professor of Urban Planning and International Development in the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, UK. She is an urban planner, whose research focuses on urbanization and development policy, local governance and urban law, livelihoods, the urban informal economy and post-conflict cities, and she has published widely on the informal economy and rights-based approaches to development. She was Principal Investigator on the research project Making Space for the Poor: Law, Rights, Regulation and Street-Trade in the 21st Century, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)/Department for International Development (DFID) Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research, reported in this book. She was an expert adviser to Habitat III, the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (as a member of Policy Unit 1 on the Right to the City and Cities for All) and has written specialist development Topic Guides for DFID on planning for sustainable cities in the global south and livelihoods and urbanisation. She is a board member of the NGO Reall (formerly Homeless International) and planning adviser to the global network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing).
