Are Informal Economic Spaces of Street-Vending Sights of ‘Disorderly Urban Environments’ and Sprawl? A Case Study on Hawkers of Kolkata: Fid-Bau Portal

Are Informal Economic Spaces of Street-Vending Sights of ‘Disorderly Urban Environments’ and Sprawl? A Case Study on Hawkers of Kolkata

Dhar, Madhubarna / Sen, Amrita / Patnaik, Archana

Abstract

While an ever-increasing and economically marginalised urban population is a principal constitutive element when thinking about urban sprawlUrban Sprawl, another significant element is the embodied aspiration of the growing Indian Middle Class to live in a ‘world-class cityCities’. In this chapter, we aim to explore the political economy framework on how class-animated city spaces lead to newer images of urban frontiers eluding the realities of sprawl and disorder that they constitute. Informal economicInformal economy activity by the vendors is seen as a spilling ‘hazard’ by middle-class citizens, who believe that public spaces like streets, pavements and parks should be hygienic and spectacular, and enhance the quality of urbanUrban life. With its omnipresent role in redefining the legitimacy of ‘worlding cities’, the neoliberal state is usually at odds with the vendors’ interests and makeshift vending spaces. Nevertheless, at the same time, it concurs with growing motorised vehicles, redundant infrastructures and ‘spectacular’ high-rises to accomplish its goal of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. In this article, drawing on an intersectional conceptual framework and empirical observations from street vending in KolkataKolkata, we trace a route to look into urban environmentsEnvironments as subsumed within popular mass politics and not as a linearly ecological category. We establish that street-based livelihood activities, despite being popularly seen as sprawl and a ‘cityCities-hazard’, formatively proliferate through powerfully shaped strategiesStrategy of politics and governmentality.