“The Street is Ours”: Street Vendors’ Resistance to Urban Revanchism in selected Sub-Saharan African Cities.

Keywords: Urban revanchism, Street vendors, Right to the city, Spatial legitimacy, Public space, Spatial resistance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

This paper examines the experiences of revanchist urban transition among street vendors in selected cities in Sub-Saharan Africa-Lagos and Abuja (Nigeria), Accra (Ghana), Harare (Zimbabwe). These cities were purposefully selected because they have institutionalized some of the most draconian urban revanchist policies in which street vendors are discursively branded as ‘criminals’, ‘undesirables’, and ‘out of place’ elements that constrain the modernization of cities, and thus are forcibly removed from public spaces. The question is: how do these street vendors negotiate these revanchist urban policies and claim their right to work on public space? The paper demonstrates that street vendors in these cities use their ‘own power’ at both macro and micro levels to deploy negotiation and strategies of spatial resistance in ways that challenge the dominant modes of space production, thereby claiming spatial legitimacy and their ‘right to the city’. The implications for building inclusive cities are also discussed.