Assembling street vending

Mojgan Taheri Tafti

Urban Studies, 2020, vol. 57, issue 9, 1887-1902

Abstract: Current scholarship on street vending in cities of the global south have mainly focused on street vendors and their politics of resistance against the state’s revanchist and exclusionary policies. This article draws from, and seeks to contribute to, this literature by considering the strategies of, and the shifting associations between, a broader range of agents – in addition to street vendors themselves – and the ways they shape and reshape street vending as a performed and diversely constituted practice. The article examines how the embedded relationships between agents including various state entities, shopkeepers and street vendors, as well as city buildings, infrastructure and policies, have been shaping geographically uneven and spatially differentiated forms, intensity and distribution of street vending in three different locations in Tehran. To make this argument, the article draws on assemblage thinking for framing the processes and trajectories through which urban street vending is being (re)territorialised and de-territorialised. The article demonstrates that moving beyond the dichotomised analysis of power relationships between the state and vendors matters for a better understanding of street vending practices as the local articulations of the fragmented, multi-scaled and multi-sited networks of associations that are stitched into different places in the city and shape diverse socio-material formations of street vending.

Keywords: assemblage approaches; street vending; street vending politics; Tehran; urban public space; é›†å ˆæ€ ç»´; è¡—å¤´è´©å –; è¡—å¤´è´©å –æ”¿æ²»; 德黑兰; 城市公共空间 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098019856864 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:57:y:2020:i:9:p:1887-1902

DOI: 10.1177/0042098019856864

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().