Metaspace,Mobility and Resistance: Understanding Vendors’ Movement Pattern as a Resistive Strategy in Kano,Nigeria

Abstract

The street vendor’s (SV) potential mobility in subverting authorities’ hegemony over public space has been theorised within the contexts of urban informality and resistance. Discussions mainly revolve around movement tactics as resistance strategy while evading arrests and confiscations. This negates SV agency and limits understanding mobility in resistance. Using Bunschoten’s metaspace and Cresswell’s aspects of mobility, this paper employs semi-structured interviews with mobile SV, road users and pedestrians in Kano (Nigeria), to describe vendors’ mobile practices and how they delay hostility from the state. Observing the interplay between vendors, users and environment, this paper identifies four types of vendor movement: focused, targeted, sporadic and self-regulatory; and examines how vendors exploit Cresswell’s speed and rhythm in challenging formal urban practice hegemony through continuous operation. The paper also describes how vendors’ movement affects other actors’ mobilities. Finally, the paper discusses urban design implications for integrating SV within city plans, setting out potential proposals.

Keywords

Street vendors metaspace pedestrianisation rhythm movement resistance

Introduction

The movement of street vendors (SV) within the urban space has been a subject of intense discussion both in the literature, media and administrative circles and in common parlance, presented with negative connotations, such as causing traffic, creating chaos and an unclean presence within the environment (Swanson, 2007; Yatmo, 2008). Insofar as urban opportunities such as customers and viable vending spaces keep changing, mobility will remain a locus for SV, especially as cities (primarily global south cities) have become increasingly expensive for the urban poor to live and operate in, due to their excessive policing (Kamete, 2010; Morka, 2007; Potts, 2006; Robinson, 2002; Watson, 2009). Hence, vendors’ movement has become strategic, exploring spaces outside the immediate reach of the city with timed and constant evasion tactics.

Evasion has been conceptualised as a resistive tactic against the city’s hegemony, ridding the city of vendors in public spaces (Crossa, 2009; Eidse et al., 2016; Turner and Oswin, 2015). Although resisting via mobility may seem reactive, the advantages have intrigued researchers because its instantaneous deployment capacity without prior planning and its urbanscape exploitative nature while evading police, using narrow/labyrinthine roads (Eidse et al., 2016; Schoenecker, 2018), all indicate movement’s strategic importance in resistance. However, these conceptualisations of movement as a strategic tool are predominantly explained by the second phase of resistance, when responding to the overt physical pressure applied. Movement is cast as a respondent, removing street vendors’ agency from the act of resisting. The challenge is to identify how movement in its mundanity can be conceptualised within the first phase of resistance, that is, delaying the application of external force by the authorities.

To this end, this paper employs the metaspace theory as an analytical tool to reconceptualise the nature of vending mobility and its interaction with the ‘physical space’. Such reconceptualisation of vendors’ mobility has a consequence on other street users’ actions and also implicates the design of public spaces. The implications stem from incongruences between diverse activities’ needs (which include informality) within the public sphere and the public space produced in Kano using modernistic design principles acquired from the British. This is more glaring since street vending disparity, according to Carmona et al. (2003: 114), arises as a result of ‘choice’ available to actors ‘which occurs beyond the realm of formal institutions’. These choices manifest in the occupation of streets, junctions and vacant lots by vendors in a manner contrary to designed objectives, glaringly pronounced in Kano.

Over the past five decades, informal activities have dominated Nigeria’s economy (Ogbuabor and Malaolu, 2013), with over a third exercised outdoors in Kano (Abumere et al., 1998; Onyebueke and Geyer, 2011). However, Kano’s design has maintained segregation of activities and specialisation of functional components such as sidewalks and neighbourhood parks, among other communal spaces, which are increasingly reshaped by urban actors elsewhere, creating distinct atmosphere, increasing pedestrian flow while promoting social and economic activities (Chase et al., 1999; Ehrenfeucht and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2010). Borrowing from Franck and Stevens (2006), the non-compatibility between vendors’ activities and the urban environment has led to outright appropriation of spaces, coexistence in tension, resistance to erasure, and often the discovery of ‘new’ spaces by vendors, represented a melee of activities along the city’s streets. However, given the right amalgam of design, regulatory framework and character of activities, Edensor (1998: 215) asserted that this melee of activities and their interactions could serve as a form of knowledge and ‘refuge from the overdetermined, single-purpose streets of the Western metropolis, satisfying the lust to experience sensuality. . .[which is] ever-changing’. Coexistence, therefore, does not necessarily mean ‘chaotic and dirty’ but can create ‘spaces of desire, permitting interconnection and hybridity, pregnant with possibility’ (Edensor, 1998: 211).

Taking our starting point from the potential epistemological insight established by Edensor, we investigate the interaction between vendors’ mobilities, other actors’ movements and the physical environment. Understanding their interplay and incongruences, we propose the following: (a) conceiving street vendors’ movement as focused destination movement, targeted destination movement, sporadic destination movement and self-regulatory movement, we argue that these movements – although mundane – are an essential element for operating within the urban fabric while contemporaneously reducing/delaying the possibilities of hostile actions by the state against them; (b) we describe how these new vendors’ mobilities induce movement lag and deviations in other actors’ movements; and finally (c) we explore potential ways of integrating street vending activities within Kano’s urban plans.

Kano, the second-largest city in Nigeria, makes a compelling site for investigation. Through a combination of population growth, deindustrialisation and influx of local and transnational people (Ahmad, 2017), SV has been the safety net of employment for many, interrupted by the rainy season when some return to agricultural practices in the hinterlands (Hoechner, 2015, 2018). However, military administrators and politicians have attempted to curtail this seemingly last safety net over the past decades, through numerous policies and pronouncements. For example, in 1984, as Forrest (1995) pointed out, 50,000 enterprises were lost from the streets of Kano due to the War Against Indiscipline (WAI) policy enacted by the military regime, which attempted to impose military-like public orderliness in order to achieve a sterilised urban environment. As a result of WAI, the streets of urban Nigeria became awash with military personnel policing street usage in ‘an attempt to turn Nigeria into a vast military parade ground’ (Forrest, 1995: n.p.).

Between 1991 and 2012, three laws – Kano State Petty Trading Edict; Kano Roads and Traffic Agency Law of 2012, which established Kano State Road Traffic Authority (KAROTA); and Counterfeit and Fake Drugs and Unwholesome Processed Foods (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1999¹ – were enacted that directly bear consequence to SV activities by increasing the number of actors policing public conduct and operations along the streets. These laws were to safeguard the girl child, ‘provi[de] security awareness and public sensitisation [on] effects of illegal motor parks street trading within the metropolitan roads, high ways, [and] under age road user[age]’² and tackle the menace of drug proliferation within the city. While progress is yet to be made on the educational front (UNICEF, 2012), sizeable quantities of drugs into the billions of naira have been seized as a result of action by the different task forces (Adebayo, 2015; Akunyili, 2010; NAN, 2016).

However, such operations have not been without controversies, with many viewing the operational successes within a low-income/high-population country as a peril to stability. The demolition of 3000 petty trading shops, constant arrest, threats and temporary bans by the state and the police, and intimidation of SV (Cities Alliance, 2009; Jaafar, 2009; Musa, 2010; Musa and Ibrahim, 2002; NEN, 2015; Premium Times, 2014; The Nation, 2014; VOA, 2013) has led actors within the judiciary, NGOs and academia to call for the decriminalisation of petty trading (ACHPR, 2018; Bamgboye, 2019). These calls are not just passionate pro-vending policies; rather, according to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR, 2018), the application and execution of the laws, the hostile attitude of the enforcement agencies, and the pre/post judicial conditions to which informal actors are subjected contravenes the African Charter Articles,³ which protect against any form of discrimination (by age, socio-economic condition, etc.) and undue targeting by the law. Furthermore, the task force’s incomprehension of the law leads to poor enforcement, as shown in Baseline Report on the Decriminalisation and Declassification of Petty Offences, intensifying the decriminalisation discourse (Okoye, 2019) which is yet to be achieved.

Vendors operate within the framework outlined above, aside from the occasional inconsistency in enforcing the law induced by political seasons or a mass movement of informal actors. This means vendors’ performative persistence within Kano relies on navigating its regulatory and enforcement landscapes. Of interest here, however, is their navigation of the city’s urban landscape that makes their continuing existence possible. Their ubiquitous nature along the city’s streets, despite the obstacles mentioned above, invites an inquiry into vendors’ mobility as potential resistance. Likewise, as our study seeks an exploratory endeavour rather than a comparative or generalised inquiry, limiting the geographical scope within a single city (Kano metropolis) controls for differences in social, political and legal factors as well as law enforcement capacities.

Metaspace and street vendors

Public life is inherently ephemeral (Gehl and Svarre, 2013), involving people running, socialising on streets and squares, or engaging in mundane activities that continuously change depending on activity, weather, design of the environment and level of user control (Gehl, 2011; Francis, 1989; Sharifi et al., 2015). A plethora of factors have to be analysed – crucially, user diversity – if an urban environment is to be produced that can cater to this continual change within the public space. However, recent trends in public space design have sought to limit the categories of users often referred to as the undesirables, that is, the homeless, the poor and street vendors, among others (Whyte, 1980). Such practices harbour negative implication in the social, economic and political fabric of the city (Crawford, 1995; Madanipour, 2015). The ideals of public spaces as fora for citizens’ engagement, public discussions and the exercise of democratisations, as argued by both Harvey and Lefebvre (see Harvey, 2003; Lefebvre et al., 1996), are once again threatened through exclusionary discourse and practice which conceals (or attempts to) the dynamism of the city and its temporality, further complicating the theorisation of public life and implementation of solutions by designers and administrators.

The implication of these actions on street vending activities is not just the exclusionary practices and the reduction in potential areas of vending, but crucially their resultant erasure. The theoretical implication is that subsequent resistance models of vendors are translated through the prism of overcoming the coercive actions (Crossa, 2013; Kamete, 2010; Musoni, 2010) removing vendors’ agency. To overcome this direct relationship between the resistance models and the coercive force applied, we need to implicate our traditional understanding of space as the site of this resistance in a neo-liberal agglomeration focused on exploiting resources for capital gains (Brenner, 2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2011). Space has been transformed – from city centres to the hinterlands – to operate in unison in expediting the movement of goods and services and improving communication while servicing capital ideals. These ideals are professed such that the entire space (including extra-terrestrial) is tamed and is subjected to curation, eliminating the uncontrollable, the ever-transient. The constant desire for the fixation of the urban space (i.e. planetary) is incongruent its intrinsic dynamic nature.

As seen from the vendors’ perspective, their precarious nature and insecurity of sustained wealth, while operating under the ‘tyranny of emergency’ (Appadurai, 2001: 30), forces a constant rethink of the space, dispelling the need for physical domination but rather exploring space for what it can offer. These conceptions of spaces, which emphasise control, on the one hand, and flexibility on the other, can be conceived as separate – each producing its own space (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991) and amplifying a particular set of relationships.

Conceptualising different spaces as distinct insofar as their underlying philosophy on usage character differs, despite occupying the same geographical location, does not imply isolated existence. Both conceptions are bounded within an overarching metaspace, ‘a fluid form of public space. . .[with] different definitions of public space and different ways of participating in it’ (Bunschoten, 2003: 59). The ability of the metaspace to hold simultaneously contradictory approaches to space emphasises its ‘innate ephemeral character’, its suitability as a place of inquiry and a ‘container of knowledge-management processes, [for] the dynamic chaos in which we live’ (Bunschoten, 2003: 59). The ephemeral character can be considered from the spatio-temporal interactions within the informal and formal spaces produced (lateral interactions) and likewise, the ideo-temporal interactions, which manifest when the ideas and practices of the formal space(s) meet the ideas of the informal space(s), or vice versa.

Hence, considering informal and formal spaces within a metaspace means conceptualising the idea of their activities as operating in different dimensions within the metaspace. Such deconstruction and reconstruction of space within the meta dissolves the inherent value judgements associated with the character, activities and spatial qualities of any particular environment. As Foucault has described, the justification for otherising space, people or activities lies in the long history of casting them as ‘deviant in relation to the required mean or norm’ (Foucault, 1986: 25). Therefore, for analytical purpose, the ability to conceive the space without apropos of judgement is crucial to understanding informality’s urban curation.

Movement and vendors

Mobility and movement are intrinsically vending activities. Mobile vendors often come to the mind of the populace when discussing the vendor/city relationship due to the tenuous and antagonistic relationship that exists between a few sections of the two. Mobility patterns of vendors are seen as contrary to the visions of the neoliberal city (see Graaff and Ha, 2015), a relic of the old geographical understanding of movement as an inferior human activity (Oakes and Price, 2008) to be solved by progress and modernity. However, vendors perceive mobility as essential practice in creating alternative spaces of vending, even if temporary, that secures their means of obtaining livelihoods and semi/extra-legal status from the city (Eidse et al., 2016). An example is the tianguis (weekly street markets) and ‘Market on Wheels’ described by Cross (1998a,b), where vendors change locations weekly, setting up new vending spaces occupied only for a single day. What is interesting here is not the ability of vendors to congregate, occupy a space/streets and sell goods within the city, but rather the quick transitory nature of the enterprise afforded to it through vendors’ instantaneous collective mobility. This established mobile character of markets has aided in their (un)official recognition by authorities.

Other forms of mobility are not as dramatic and consequential as Cross’s account, but are nevertheless influential in understanding vendors’ movement. These involve the sub-mobility components – motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction – developed by Cresswell to unshackle that ambulatory descriptive nature associated with mobility, that is, action of displacement from origin to destination. According to Cresswell (2010: 23), rhythm involves ‘repeated moments of movement and rest, or. . .repeated movements with a particular measure’. Here, minute actions that would otherwise be overshadowed by origin-destination analysis of mobility are brought to the fore, and as demonstrated in a study carried out in SoHo, New York, USA, rhythm reveals the relationship between vendors’ mobility and the urban environment. According to Mikoleit and Pürckhauer (2011), their observations of SoHo revealed the importance of mobility even to stationary vendors where it was employed as an environmental adaptive strategy. This is through the subtle adjustments vendors undertake with regards to the position of the sun, resulting in a perpetual nature of shifting and moving – especially in winter/spring – while concurrently protecting their products from the sun’s rays. These incessant but limited movements that continuously occur throughout the trading day are non-voluntary, since they are conditioned by natural elements – a point not missed in Cresswell’s formulation.

What happens to the interpretation of mobility when vending/vendors is/are declared illegal? Here, Cupers offers a multi-dimensional insight into mobility. He implicates the legal framework and racism in the production of vending spaces and in determining what he calls ‘deliberate elusiveness’ as a movement pattern. This elusiveness seeks a cat-and-mouse relationship with the authorities in the city, pointing out that ‘space[s] of street vending. . .exists by virtue of movement. . .[and vendors] urban mobility relates directly to both why they are outlawed and how they creatively tackle the constraints of social class, foreignness, and racism’ (Cupers, 2015: 141–142). Undocumented foreign vendors evading police capture and their local counterparts operating on what is considered illegal grounds employ this elusiveness by combining motorised and non-motorised transport to operate within the most potentially productive vending spaces in the city (Cupers, 2015).

Cupers’ illustrations of policing and citizenship effects on vendors’ movement patterns should be understood as a case occurring within a system with ‘high-state integration’ (Cross, 1998b: 227) – that is, where policies/programmes are implemented with minimal levels of opportunity for resistance from outside groups, though the question of vendors’ citizenship and mobility also appears in the global south (see Eidse et al., 2016). Likewise, indigenous vendors in the global south still face such neoliberal attitudes imported from the north, in both policies and discourse. This has resulted in some vendors crossing their country’s borders (Swanson, 2007). However, despite the extreme case of transnational migrations, vendors resist employing movement. As observed by Etzold (2015: 181), ‘it is not formal laws that define the everyday practices of street vendors, but rather the informal arrangements between them and powerful agents at their vending sites’. Such realisation has led vendors to adopt a transient attitude towards spaces with zero vending tolerance. During hostility periods, vendors quickly vanish, however ‘reappear[ing] at their [prior] vending sites within minutes’ (Etzold, 2015: 180).

Another advantage of mobility manifests when permanent vendors are uprooted, and mobile vendors are allowed to stay because ‘they do not threaten the state’s monopoly on regulating public space. . .[unlike] permanent vendors’. . .comprehensive spatial appropriation and thus [their] displace[ment]’ (Etzold, 2015: 177). Mobility, therefore, is discussed and interpreted against multiple factors that place vendors as reactionary, unwitting participant in the urban drama, devoid of agency. Even when vendors are proactive and asserting influence that forces consultation with authorities, movement is considered as exogenous – not an inherent activity of vending that warrants its understanding. The next section of this paper attempt to redress this by situating vendors’ mobility as the fulcrum of understanding vending practices. To do this, we employ metaspace as an analytical tool.

Metaspace as an analytical tool for understanding street vending

Urban informality literature has been the tool for conceptualising informal (vendors’) activity vis-à-vis the city. Although it seeks to challenge the dominant narrative, it implicitly works within the premise of acceptability, legality, spatial and other categorisations that favour the state’s practices. Hence, analysis of informal activities is characterised vis-à-vis formal practice.

However, we employed metaspace to ensure the following:

That there is no value judgement attached to a particular type of spatial practice. Street vendors’ movement is seen as a consequence of their actions. However, we interpret the movement patterns as tactics for existence rather than constraints exerted on by external actors. Vendors, therefore, are given agency and characterised as proactive, their choices viewed as the preferred options from a list of possible alternatives.

As a consequence of (1), the challenge is (how) can we remain neutral and analyse vendors’ movement patterns without becoming trapped in the circle of spatial determinism.

Where within the metaspace the two spatial practices meet, they are considered as comparable tiers of activities of equal standing. Any activity which can be read or construed as acting against the other is read as temporal.

With this criterion for understanding vendors’ movement, we explore the question using three different streets within Kano metropolis. Kano is the second-largest city in Nigeria, with a population of about 12 million (4 million metropolitan population) and an informal sector worth US$143.75m in 2013 (Wambai and Hanga, 2013), which by comparison makes it approximately 10% of the state’s budget of US$1.44bn, according to Adebowale (2013).

The proliferation of street vending in Kano can be mapped in a multifaceted way. The historical importance during the trans-Sahara trade has cemented its position as a favoured destination for trade and business across the region and country, until the decline of the trade ‘as a result of cheaper transportation to and from Europe by rail [and sea]’ (Baier, 1977). Transportation modes disruption did not dampen business activities in the region, but continued to see ‘growth in population. . .paralleled by increases in business, betokens an environment favored beyond the average in that part of the world’ (Whittlesey, 1937: 177). However, continuous population growth and subsequent deindustrialisation of the region created conditions that gave rise to 3.5 million informal workers within the state (Yusuf, 2014), the highest in the country. Although the majority of the informal economy is operated from the confines of residences, according to Abumere et al. (1998; Onyebueke and Geyer, 2011), 27.5% are on-street activities or occur in open spaces. This seemly substantial open participation sits alongside the officially recognised markets, which represents 32.42% of the city’s built-up area (Ibrahim, 2014).

The city has made a few attempts at providing vending spaces, albeit those that restrict mobility and are often unaffordable to traders. Such attempts include the construction of the 3000-stall shopping-complex-type Yan-Tebura market at the CBD (Daily Trust, 2017; Odogwu, 2017) or the specialised neighbourhood trading clusters such as yan-lemo (fruit market), Bachirawa (Binns and Lynch, 1998) and the state library cluster. However, some vendors still hawk along the streets due to restrictions on mobility within markets and trading clusters and/or unaffordability of stalls. Hence, vending has become ubiquitous along main streets and within neighbourhoods.

To explore mobility within the diverse urban environments, we employed integration analysis using depthmapX 0.50 to analyse movement potential within the city’s streets as a method of categorising the street’s hierarchy. Figure 1 shows the potential of passing through each street within the city’s network. From each of the high (red), mid (orange-yellow) and low (blue) integration zones, one street was selected – namely Murtala Muhammad Way, Dorayi Emir Line Road and Sheka Sabuwar Abuja respectively. These streets (the road sections) are paved and primarily oriented in the same direction. Orientation was considered to be a significant factor in reducing environmental impact on spatial distribution of vendors (see Mikoleit and Pürckhauer, 2011). Having observed the interactions between vendors, environment and users, we then employed snowball sampling to interview SV, road users and pedestrians along the selected streets regarding their views on their own and other actors’ mobilities. Snowballing was done to break the initial resistive barrier between researchers and participants using familiarity as the starting point. In the end, 12 vendors and nine road users, including pedestrians, participated in the process. The next sections detail the results of the study.

Figure 1.

A (Nuuman Ashaka, 2019) B and C shows satellite maps and pictures of selected streets in context of their environment.

Modalities of movement

Within the daily mundaneness of SV activities – constantly morphing – it is easy to misrepresent an individual’s movement pattern. It takes seconds for a vendor to cross an intersection and disappear from the scene, swerve off the pavement and onto the road, or make a sale, thereby changing the definitions of their activities. This temporariness is essential in distinguishing between the different movements, and, as Bunschoten (2003: 59) posits, it is within the metaspace ‘we can see [this] temporality’. Using Cresswell’s (2010) sub-movement categorisations of speed and rhythm, which delineate the act of mobility beyond its primary intent and expose the hidden politics in movement, the following discussion will show the different types of SV mobility patterns within the urban scape.

Focused destination movement (FDM)

We define focused destination movement (FDM) of vendors as a mobility pattern that is intended and will eventually end at a single destination of activity. Vendors partaking in such movement are mostly those selling peculiar goods and their target location areas of proximity to their target market or where similar vendors congregate, creating a culture associating vendors with a space. Mexico’s Coyoacan Historic Centre is an example where an intellectual identity grew through a combination of the intelligentsia’s constant presence and street art vendors and creative performances (Crossa, 2013). Hence, vendors operating in such niche markets move in a fashion that directs their daily route straight to such spaces. When we asked some vendors walking along a street regarding where they intend to make their sales – the streets or somewhere else – one responded:

Handheld items such as glasses have no business been in one place [stationary] on this street. I make more sales at BATA roundabout [where glasses merchants and repairers congregate]. . .if I make any sale along my way that will be good, but I am just passing through here to get there [BATA]. (Glasses vendor, 2018, personal communication)

It would seem for vendors on FDM, reaching the target destination represents the principal activity, paramount to opportunistic sales along the way, which are still entertained but not actively sought after. Put simply, the determination to reach the intended location is comparable to the opportunities present at the location. This is evident from multiple trips taken by some vendors to a specific location (see Figure 2). As one vendor put it: ‘It is easy for us [to sell] here. We come twice a day to this platform and display our goods’ (Groundnut oil vendor, 2018, personal communication).

Figure 2.

Ambulatory vendors heading to a specific destination plying through the street of varying spatial qualities.

Vendors observed avoided hostile encounters with authorities when moving through the city’s thoroughfare by mostly mimicking the city’s desired mobility pattern – in other words, a case of vendors’ ‘mobile practices conform[ing] to the representations that surround them’ (Cresswell, 2010: 20). In areas with established infrastructure, this means using the sidewalks, crossing streets at non-disruptive/designated points and not loitering around reserved areas. However, in infrastructure-deprived areas (lacking either sidewalk, tarred roads or clear street demarcations), effective negotiation of paths sufficed, interchanging between platforms along the street with the same fixated thrust on reaching and operating the destination. Hence, FDMs are unconditioned by the quality of the platform, exhibiting signs of Gehl’s (2011) necessary activity.

When vendors were asked about the present quality and potential uses of pedestrian facilities, they exuded a nonchalance that indicates they have a purely functional view of these amenities. ‘Having a specialised space to move might be good,’ one vendor commented, adding ‘but I am not waiting on it. . .I just swerve onto the road keep on’ (Cart vendor, 2018, personal communication). While such acts do not imply resistance, it is crucial to understand that in Kano it is the vendor (ambulatory and non-ambulatory) who is considered a (potential) threat rather than the perceived illegality of the activity embarked upon (Cities Alliance, 2009), despite attempts of co-optations and vending bans (Olofu, 2014). By adopting a spirited-city-type sanctioned movement, the potential threat/illegality of the activity is masked under the framework of good citizenship, thereby evading the reach of the law. While such mobility can be characterised as cajoled, nevertheless, vendors navigating and operating within the sites between sanctioned mobility (a visible character of the city) and law enforcement create the trading opportunities.

Targeted destination movement (TDM)

During a lifetime of vending operation, vendors are bound to make acquaintances who often become returning customers on a timely basis depending on the product/service provided. This is supported by Robson’s (2004: 205) findings in Zarewa, on the outskirts of Kano, that ‘children who regularly hawk the same goods often establish a routine to maintain a pool of customers’. Likewise, the city’s dynamism, which often shuffles people across locations during specific times, creates hot vending spots. Vendors who exploit this dynamic urban nature, by going to specific places at a precise time to offer services and products, engage in what we term targeted destination movement (TDM) (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Fresh bread and water vendors making their daily deliveries.

TDM is neither dependent on the specific vending locations, nor on an agglomeration of vendors peddling similar products, but instead hinges on targeting frequent buyers in their locations by ‘going to different places depending on where the customers are [which] depends on the time of the day’ (Fruit vendor, 2018, personal communication). In such TDM, time proves a crucial component. It sustains the constant ambience within the city during the day as vendors partake in movements, delivering products/services which are time-specific to different locations. For example, many food vendors do two rounds – mornings and middays – while others do multiple rounds. As a vendor describes it: ‘After I finish here [selling to customers along the street], I [will] go into the market sell some there, then and wait for my afternoon rounds’ (Vegetable vendor, 2018, personal communication).

As time conditions the distribution of people, likewise, it affects mobility (and in turn the mode of TDM resistance). This is evident in the varying speeds employed during the hours of morning and evening as against midday. The day began with a lack of urgency, and TDM vendors reflected this slowness via casual movement. This same attitude was reflected in the evenings. It is important to note that as observed between the hours of 7.00 a.m. and 9.30 a.m., there was no police presence at the studied scenes. However, during the midday, when the streets were buzzing with traffic and the police were present to manage public conduct – which increased the chances of harassing informal workers – TDM vendors’ pace sped up, thereby shortening their otherwise elongated presence along the thoroughfares. This combination of speedy and non-loitering attitudes (as other vendors) – in other words, transitoriness – preserves TDM vendors’ continued operational presence in public spaces, overcoming the informality, illegality and potentially criminal labels that would otherwise eviscerate them from the city’s life.

Sporadic (stop) destination movement SDM

Sporadic (stop) destination movement (SDM) is the type most associated with vendors who appear to be in constant helter-skelter movement. Vendors in this category are micro-business owners, ubiquitous within the city but unable to attract enough potential buyers to a specific location, therefore relying on pursuing all potential locations for customers. Their sporadic nature can be contained within a junction, square, street or over a larger geographical area. Despite these swaths of spaces, vendors acknowledge they face ‘difficulty [in] finding a place that suits [their vending] business’ and have to ‘keep staying at different spaces’ for varying amount of time.

The duration spent in a particular location while engaging in SDM depends on the location. When we asked vendors who operate at intersections and those along the streets, there was a difference of more than 20 minutes in their activities in any single location. At the junctions, vendors say they spend 20–30 minutes in a single location, while those operating along the streets spend 1–3 minutes at a single location (though it can reach up to 5 minutes from our observations). These protracted stays, especially at junctions where often a traffic warden (police) is stationed, constitute a threat to vendors who must navigate the roads while marketing their products. Also, the sporadic nature of vendors is heightened at junctions by the back-and-forth movements between point of sale (roads) and merchandise storage area (sidewalks), which act as foci for the vendors, determining the distances they can explore during sales without leaving their goods unattended.

To avoid the potential of punitive measures while maintaining their strategic locations, vendors employ temporality. This includes short stays on the thoroughfare while traversing quickly between cars at a red light. As cars/tricycles come to a halt, vendors descend from their ‘secluded’ area – sidewalks, road shoulder or bridge footings – and march downwards away from the traffic lights/police, navigating through cars (see Figure 4). As observed, the police/traffic wardens are usually preoccupied with the other moving vehicular traffic, placing the vendor on their blindside. This should not suggest that the police are unaware of the vendors’ whereabouts, but rather that the vendors on their momentary road occupation are most often on the blindside of authority.

Figure 4.

Images a–d show the street occupation sequence and ambulatory pattern of vendors from the moment the traffic stops to when it disperses. Image e shows the position of the police at the intersection.

The time available for a vendor’s operation is dependent upon the structure of the junction (e.g. cross or T-junction) and the time allocated for other lanes to cross. A cross junction affords more vending time than a three-way junction, since it takes longer for the right of way to return to a stopped lane on which the vendors are operating. Despite relative availability of time, vendors speed up activities, exhibiting products when passing vehicles, only stopping when making a sale or noticing a passenger’s attention locked on their goods. Put another way, the essence of their entire action is predicated on moving from the head to the tail of the traffic, making their items visible repeatedly over the trading day.

Self-regulatory movement (SRM)

All the modalities described above have dealt with the question of movement as a precursor to making more sales, and their performance – insofar as they are tactical or strategic – seeks to serve their ends: profit. Self-regulatory movement (SRM) changes this perspective. Essentially it is a movement that seeks to reduce congestion at (potential) conflict points along a road. Such a practice diverges from the previous three, since SRM’s primary purpose is not only to achieve sales but to open up more public spaces temporarily for other users. Often as in the case here, vendors move tens of metres from a particular location until the crowd subsides, before returning. A shoe vendor describes the situation as follows:

[The junction] gets congested mostly during midday when morning students have closed [and returning home] and afternoon students are starting especially at the junction. Movement becomes difficult for all even when we are stationary. There are cars, tricycles, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians all using this small space. We always have to give way for others, that is why some of us start moving inwards to more spacious places where we do not get disturbed. (Shoe vendor, 2018, personal communication)

Self-regulation acknowledges that space, a shared resource, is insufficient to cater for vendors’ individual needs while persistent territorial claims might cause rift among vendors, hindering communal benefit. As some vendors claim, no group can ‘assert claims of a particular space’, adding that all vendors ‘have to coexist and operate in harmony’. This search for a harmonious relationship varies; however, constant movement about the periphery of this space interjected by short stays provides open access to all vendors and reduces conflict.

SRM exhibits a rhythmic character when responding to students flowing onto the streets during a 30-minute window around 12.30 p.m. All through the trading day, vendors, pedestrians and vehicular traffic organically crisscross the street without a definite pattern. For a particular moment in a day, vendors’ movement appears in synchronisation with other pedestrians, that is, students. Although the motive is not forced by the state, vendors have an acute understanding of the consequences that might befall if such a valuable vending position were to be characterised as problematic. However, by employing this short mobile pattern which involves three or four vendors, the vending space is saved and possible hostile actions by both citizens and authorities are delayed.

Other urban actors and their perception of vendors’ movement

As we have shown in the previous section, vendors employ different movement modalities to navigate the city (in search of favourable vending spaces) and delay state coercive actions. Apart from creating vending spaces/opportunities, these commuting scenarios have consequences for other urban mobile actors. These could broadly be divided into two categories: movement lag and slowing vehicular traffic; and course directional deviation.

Movement lag: slowing vehicular traffic

As mentioned earlier, vendors exploit static traffic by descending from sidewalks to make sales, either at junctions, red lights, or traffic held by a warden. As traffic flows from other lanes, vendors crisscross those where automobiles are stationary, making sales. This opportunity is ephemeral since it depends on traffic flow and traffic control cycles, administered by a warden or traffic light, relieving congested lanes. Vendors maximise the repetitive temporality by operating until the lane gets the green light. Here, movement of road users (cars, bicycles, tricycles, buses, etc.) becomes hindered as vendors struggle to navigate back onto the sidewalk. This causes an increase in the movement lag: the time between motorists being given right of way (by a traffic warden) and the actual time movement begins. Time lost here is seconds; however, considering that each lane has somewhere between 90 and 120 seconds to cross the intersection (or until all vehicles have crossed), these seconds’ delay, multiplied over the working hours of a four-way intersection, amount to significant loss of productive time.

Movement lag not only occurs at the traffic’s anterior but depends on how deep into the hold-up vendors have penetrated. Likewise, crossing to the pedestrian section is not the sole cause of movement lag. As we have observed, some vendors (mostly SDMs) elect to stay mid-road, having users pass them by, before subsequently returning to the sidewalks; others linger on the road; others attempt to finalise a transaction already in progress; while some motorist switch of their engines (in an effort to conserve fuel). All these are causes of delay or slowdown in movement. A tricycle driver puts the case of slow mobility succinctly:

Vendors keep running following us, determined to sell to our passenger. They [passenger] keep haggling with the vendors in order to fetch a lower price for the item. This eventually makes me [tricycle driver] slow down to the vendor’s pace. Sometimes, I have to find a place to park immediately after a junction or a traffic light to allow the passenger time to buy [the product], but only if there is opportunity to park (some places are designated no parking areas). . .otherwise, we keep moving slowly. This irritates other passengers in the tricycle, the motorist behind us and soon they will keep honking at us until we move or get off their way. (Tricycle driver, 2019, personal communication)

Therefore, vendors’ mobility affects other actors moving through the city, creating a co-dependant scenario while producing a transitory and fleeting vending space.

Movement deviation: Pedestrians and motorists

The second effect of vendors’ activities on other urban actors’ movements is seen in their deviations. Ambulatory vendors along thoroughfares often push carts, carry head-pans or other handheld items to aid their products’ transportation and distribution. These items create obstructions, causing users to deviate in mostly two ways. First, motorists and pedestrians often give way as vendors navigate the city due to perceived nonchalant attitude towards others’ properties. This manifests when cart/wheelbarrow pushers move through the traffic with other motorists (see Figure 5). As one commuter puts it:

The people [vendors] do whatever they can to make ends meet . . . [a]lways in a hurry, scratching and damaging our vehicles . . . We avoid them as much as we can . . . we sometime deny them space by closing all gap between cars [in a hold-up so they can’t navigate between cars] or give them way [when in motion]. (Pick-up driver, 2019, personal communication)

Figure 5.

Cart pushers (top) going against traffic and one (bottom) pushing through stationary traffic.

These scenarios mostly occur around bottleneck sections of the streets – where the number of lanes decreases – and in log-jammed areas according to some bus drivers, where the perceived impatience of TDMs manifests in their attitudes.

Tricycle and motorcycle drivers, who see the fragility of their vehicles as a weakness, share the driver’s sentiments. ‘One has to be wary of them [vendors] and not make the slightest contact . . . otherwise, the damage to be inflicted [on the bike] will be enormous’ (Motorcycle driver, 2019, personal communication). Abandoning caution for speed reflects the relationship of income to haulage per day, which is exacerbated by the fact that most carts used by vendors are daily rentals (Ahmad, 2017; Kariuki and Schwartz, 2005). However, living under the ‘tyranny of emergency’ does not exonerate vendors’ appalling actions. The possibility of double jeopardy incurred from damage to actors’ property and rented carts should warrant ‘a sober quest for long-term solutions’ from vendors (Bindé, 2000: 52).

The second deviation results as a consequence of vendors’ (temporary) immobility – a short stay for transactional purposes – or the presence of fixtures that facilitate vending. As vendors engage in SDM around intersections, the sidewalks are often converted into storage area to easy product retrieval. Figure 6 shows these items, which include bicycle, wheelbarrow, cartons and crates, and small buckets left along the sidewalk reservation. As a result, pedestrians (including other vendors) swerve to avoid these obstacles, creating an unnatural movement pattern that may range from the slight and minute, such as a swerve, to a complete change of path.

Figure 6.

An unpaved sidewalk congested by vendors and their varying apparatus.

Course/route alteration

As often occurs on streets or their intersections, there can be a plethora of ambulatory mobile vendors in different states of motion, pace, or temporarily immobile. The mobility/stillness combination, coupled with availability (and quality) of pedestrian facilities, influences pedestrians’ movement, as we observed. Along the streets studied, pedestrians often use sidewalks regardless of quality. However, there exist a minority of users (although frequent) who elect to abandon the pavement and their reservation for an unconventional walk on the road, which represents a departure from the simple pedestrian swerve. This is to avoid the rowdiness, interruptions, and often chaotic approach that come with street vending. The pattern was most common at Dorayi Emir Line Road where all the vending activities occur on one side due to its asymmetric nature – bound by a fence on the other side of the road – affording no setback for on-street activities. Figure 7 shows a snapshot of the disruption and adaptation on pedestrian movement patterns. Once all the hassles of vending have been avoided and a destination reached, the pedestrian returns to the normal route.

Figure 7.

Pedestrian avoids vending activity disrupting his mobility by walking on the ‘wrong side’.

The implication of everyday practices to urban design

Modern cities are designed according to the prevailing architecture ideologies. These have included the search for order and standardisation that has been transported to southern cities where there already exists ‘instinctual definitions of space where paths turn into roads across an unplanned landscape’ (Coates, 2000: 320). Mobility in such cities had incorporated all possible urban eventualities until the dominance of the auto industry, when the chasm between the mobility patterns of everyday people⁴ commuting for daily activities and those of vendors seeking to earn a living became more apparent.

Concepts for reviving liveable cities and improving public life – reactions to a century of vehicle dominance – have sought to make mobility/walking central to city planning, arguing for greater proximity of shops, schools and parks to all neighbourhoods. Such attempts at redress are insufficient insofar as they operate within the design/legal realms created for the auto-city. Pedestrian walkways, zebra crossings, jaywalking, speed limits, traffic lights, etc., while representing an attempt to address the concerns of pedestrians, are simply that: a concern, responding to the need for continued auto-dominance rather than the best interests of pedestrians and SVs. Redresses required to encompass all urban actors, especially in cities dominated by informal activities such as Kano, will have to be radical. We attempt to put forward a few. The following ideas should be read as retrofits and site-specific, to be proposed for viable identified vending spaces rather than imposed holistically across the city.

The first option is the pedestrianisation of commercial streets, which is common in Europe and gaining ground in the US (Lennard and Lennard, 1995), although yet to gain traction in sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that pedestrianisation presents an opportunity for mobile vendors to access markets in their specialised manner while the city gains from the established economic, social and environmental benefits resulting from the process (see Iranmanesh, 2008). Pedestrianising roads (or sections) proximate to markets should provide sufficient public transport to chauffeur people into the district while creating viable vending space. This addresses the diverging nature of commuting strategies explored above by encapsulating all mobilities within a scheme, despite FDMs largely operating as a city-sanctioned movement, while TDMs, SDMs and SRMs express degrees of erraticness.

Additionally, pedestrianisation slows down street speed, eliminates frequent vehicular traffic, reduces accidents (Khayesi, 1997), improves air quality and reduces environmental damage within high-activity commercial zones. The result prompts safer streets and a rise in necessary and optional activities, thereby increasing opportunities for retailers, users and vendors (Kumar and Ross, 2006; Topçu et al., 2007; Yiu, 2011). Likewise, pedestrianisation promises designated bases for SDM vendors beyond what sidewalk storage currently offers. By providing on-street storage facilities designed to act as foci of mobility, vendors can explore the advantages their preferred mobility affords while supporting the vagrant habits of TDMs, SDMs, SRMs (i.e. traversing pavements for sales), users and other retail activities without creating significant hindrance to any group.

Similarly, partial or full pedestrianisation of commercial streets increases property and rental value, and causes a rise in sales volume (Kumar and Ross, 2006; Topçu et al., 2007; Yin, 2011), therefore proffering gains to customers, businesses and vendors along major commercial streets. However, where it is employed, pedestrianisation should not replace one form of vendor castration with another, as Nduna (1990) has shown it possesses the capacity to alienate the supposed beneficiaries. Here, it is essential to note that pedestrianisation cannot resuscitate declining commercial districts, especially areas with low pedestrian flow (Robertson, 1993); therefore, its implementation should be in viable commercial areas, as we stated at the outset.

Second, the radical rethink concerns junctions. As Mikoleit and Pürckhauer (2011) pointed out, junctions effectively serve as squares; having steady pedestrian flows makes them commercially viable for vendors. We argue that junction design should radically maximise such benefits without compromising vehicular and pedestrian traffic. To this end, the creation of vending pits – akin to a Formula One pit lane or a drive-through – could be a starting point: a parallel lane where drivers could approach a line of vendors for purchase, without holding up traffic or endangering vendors’ safety. Such designs will begin to redress the imbalances within the city’s infrastructure towards the spatial needs of those at the bottom stratum of society.

Another redressive measure for junctions consists of raised platforms (RP). Borrowed from transport safety design, RPs slow down vehicular traffic and improve visibility of drivers towards pedestrians (Null et al., 2018). This feature can be employed to demarcate vending zones along potential streets. The advantage of employing RPs in low-income cities/countries is that they require less investment than radical changes to the already built environment such as vending pits, meaning that this option is likely to be more positively received by administrators and politicians.

Other measures concerning street design include narrowing lanes and reducing speed limits to allow vendors move between cars – which reduces accidents and increases vending opportunities – and the possible creation of vending zones in loose spaces along streets and abandoned rail lines. Laws of jaywalking and minimum setback requirements should be (temporary) suspended within these specialised vending zones.

The proposals suggested above appear static and thus antithetical to street vendors’ natural inclination to mobility. However, expressing spatial changes does not necessitate fixity. As shown with SDM and SRM, vendors can appear located or to have limited reach due to the precarious nature of where their merchandise is stored, mostly on sidewalks due to the constant need to safeguard products from seizure and other actors, restricting vendors’ exploratory opportunities. Designated storage points acting as foci of mobility could unleash vendors’ reach within prescribed operational zones. Furthermore – and keeping with the foci metaphor – locating the storage areas as islands along pedestrianised areas performs a security function by ensuring people circumnavigate the installations, placing vendors under a perpetual collective gaze, thereby serving as a technique for ensuring safety (Jacobs, 1961).⁵ Deploying CCTV technology can augment low pedestrian hours and ensures retroactive policing. Low-technology means of sustaining security such as high-visibility numbered jackets can be assigned to vendors as means of identification, ensuring street users can identify and report unruly incidents. Local institutions such as Bukavo Barracks, Bayero University Kano and the local airports employ this low-tech solution as a means of restricting public transport access into their premises.

Finally, what will guarantee the success of urban interventions is having those who will be affected on board when crafting urban solutions and ensuring such solutions appear and prove non-restrictive. The similarities in protection and design requirements between vendors’ and other actors’ facility needs (Khayesi et al., 2010) suggests more significant secondary beneficiaries from proposed mobility solutions. We argue, therefore, that by employing pedestrianisation, RPs, vending zones, and their ilk – temporary or permanent – on specialised streets/neighbourhoods and with complementary security architecture, the city will begin to address the diversity of activities within it, turning away from the imposed programmes that serve the auto-city or a distorted vision for the city.

Conclusion

Exploring movement patterns of street vendors as legitimate urban actions within the vending archipelago reveals a distinct pattern of urban environment usage. Although scholars have interrogated vendors’ mobility, the discussions are placed within the framework of (in)formality. This has led to the conspicuous yet unknown paradigms of movement being underemphasised. The effect of such oversight – neglecting the importance of mobility in its varying manifestations – has led to the failure of programmes that have sought to incorporate vendors of different kinds in the formal sectors. The various schemes that have attempted to tame the dynamism of vending have been met with its capacity to mutate, resist the new proposal and return to established operational habits. Successfully incorporating informal activities in southern cities is the modern-day designer/administrative challenge.

The scale of innovative/retrofit designs required for the successful integration of mobile vendors will stem from the number of mobility patterns that can be identified, grouped and codified. Likewise, the appraisal of how such mobility delays hostile actions is crucial to gaining a broader insight into vending activities. The patterns described here – focused destination movement, targeted destination movement, sporadic (stop) destination movement and self-regulatory movement – and their consequential effect on other actors’ mobilities, such as delay, alterations and deviations as a result of vendors’ (im)mobility, are limited both in number and geography to determine the radical undertaking required. However, metaspace facilitated the temporal deconstruction and stratification of the vendors’ operating scenes from the entire urban environment. The result reveals emerging nuances of mobility patterns and their relations to other urban actors and the environment. As we have seen, vendors with a clear and predetermined single destination operational niche have mobility mimicking formal movements, causing it to diverge from opportunistic sales vendors. Likewise, the time of day influences vendors’ relationships with users, ambience created by vendors and tactics for creating vending opportunities, and impacts vendors’ informal management of space. These findings are starting points for an inquiry into a holistic understanding of vendors’ mobile actions within different urban and political settings. Hence, the coded categories here are not exhaustive. Likewise, there exists the possibility of transformational character between different modalities explored. Can an SDM metamorphose into TDM or FDM? These questions require further studies to establish answers.

Therefore, suggestions for street and junction redesign/retrofits, even if they appear erroneous or insufficient, are made here to indicated the necessary shift from an auto-city-dominated framework to a more inclusive one. The traction of pedestrianisation elsewhere needs to consider the socio-economic life of the downtrodden who mostly, in the global south, engage in micro-businesses such as vending. Public space – that is, streets and squares as social setting – should be the entry point of discussions about inclusion when pedestrianising streets. It should go further to understand first, second, third, and nth-order beneficiaries, making serious attempts to incorporate them. This does not suggest incorporation of all vendors in all schemes at every space within the city. Vendors are sophisticated enough not to be ubiquitous in the city, but to operate in commercially viable areas and around formalised vending zones in Kano (Balarabe et al., 2019). Hence these measures are likely to be few relative to the number of junctions and streets within the city.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Muhammad Kabir Balarabe

Notes

Author biographies

Muhammad Kabir Balarabe is a doctoral candidate in the interdisciplinary programme Design, Technology and Society at Özyegin University, Istanbul. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. His research interests are informality and the urban composition, informal/vernacular architecture and architecture education. He has gathered practical experience working with numerous architectural consulting firms and construction companies in Nigeria.

Murat Sahin is an Associate Professor and head of the Architecture Department at Özyegin University, İstanbul. He obtained his doctorate from Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. He has been a visiting scholar at Bahçeşehir University since 2003 and served at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture in the academic year 1999/2000. His research interests and architectural studies include cultural facilities, contextual urban design, design education, integrated design, children and the built environment, and regional/vernacular architecture.

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