An inquiry into the culture of Street vending: accounts from Sitabuldi Market, Nagpur

Abstract

Vendors are quintessential to Indian streets. These wandering merchants have intrinsically woven themselves into the historical and social fabric of our cities. Despite this, many perceive them as informal and consequentially illegal. For years, the country has ‘managed’ them through disjointed policy-making and top-down legislation. The government’s reluctance to accept the informal aspects of their trade has excluded them from crucial decisionmaking processes that concern street vending and blatantly ignored their rights to the city and its street space. This research argues that street vending in India is an amalgamation of both formal and informal processes. This culture is engendered through a network of actors and mediators, interlinked in a complex web of relationships and day-to-day negotiations. This network plays a crucial role in defining new socio-spatial processes that shape our urban environment. Street vendors’ economic productivity, socio-spatial relations, and impact on our urban form are a testament to their socially constructed stakeholdership in the streets of India. The way to empower the vendors is to acknowledge their stake in our street space and bring them to the centre stage in conversations concerning the design and regulation of our urban form.