Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Since the 1990s cities in the global south have implemented revanchist neoliberal urban regeneration policies that cater to urban elites based on “recovering” public space for capitalaccumulation purposes. These policies often work to reify street vending as survival strategies of ‘last resort’ for marginalized people and as an unorganized, unsystematic economic activities that needs to be disciplined, incorporated and institutionalized into the formal economy. So how do we move away from formal/informal economy frameworks that shape neoliberal urban regime policies, towards a framework that understands street vending as valuable, flexible, entangled, non-criminal and productive? I argue, that by moving away from frameworks that reify formal/informal spheres of the economy, we are able to disrupt and rethink normative understandings of economic practices categorized as ‘informal’. Through queering economies, we prioritize and center informal workers’ own understandings of their own self-value and legitimacy of their economic lives and contributions to urban life. As such, queering the economy opens up possibilities of rethinking urban redevelopment policies that incorporate rather than remove street vendors, as their economic practices are incorporated into the everyday fabric and aesthetic of urban life. This paper is based on a qualitative ethnographic research on anti-vending spatial recovery programs and (im)migrant street vending practices conducted from 2012-2016 in three cities in the Global South: Cancún, Mexico; Bogotá, Colombia; and Johannesburg, South Africa.