Assembling street vending

Abstract

Chinese

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

Introduction

In his seminal work, Bayat (1997) investigated the politics of street vending in Tehran after the 1976 revolution up to the early 1990s, characterising this urban phenomenon as ‘the quiet encroachment of the ordinary and their advancement on the propertied and powerful’ (Bayat, 1997: 7). He reports that many shopkeepers, whose favourable business environment had been adversely affected by the presence of street vendors, joined the protracted war waged by the state authorities against street vendors. The alliance of the rich propertied shopkeepers and the state, he argues, adds a class dimension ‘to the existing conflict over urban public space’ (Bayat, 1997: 15). In this article, 20 years after this work, I revisit street vending in Tehran with a view to investigating how the dynamics and entangled relationships between multiple agents, beyond and in addition to the antagonistic alliance of the state and the powerful against street vendors, are continually shaping differentiated articulations of street vending in different sites in the city.

Current scholarship on street vending has justifiably mainly focused on street vendors in order to provide a nuanced understanding of their everyday strategies (e.g. Turner and Schoenberger, 2012), and their adaptation to the city’s form, organisation and exclusionary policies (Palacios, 2016; Perera, 2015; Siu and Zhu, 2016) and the ways these policies affect them in return (Huang et al., 2014; Roever and Skinner, 2016). This article draws from, and contributes to, this literature in the global south by considering the entangled relationships between a broader range of agents that shape and reshape street vending as a performed and diversely constituted practice. My objective is to examine how the relationships between these 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.

In doing so, I draw on assemblage thinking to envisage street vending as variegated ensembles of heterogeneous elements that are consistently drawn together and shape dynamic yet identifiable landscapes in different parts of cities. As with assemblage thinking, the article maps encounters and practices through which heterogeneous elements were (re)territorialised and de-territorialised and explains how fragmented, multi-scaled and multi-sited networks of associations were stitched into different places in the city and shaped diverse socio-material formations of street vending. The dynamics of these assemblages are examined in three well-established locations of commercial activities in Tehran, with different socio-material articulations of street vending. Along with exploring the particular case of street vending in these three locations, the article reflects on how assemblage thinking can expand the registers through which street vending is understood.

The article first looks at the literature on street vending in cities of the global south and then briefly explains the ways in which assemblage thinking can offer new angles for understanding street vending. Following the introduction of the research methods, the article explains the current condition of street vending in Tehran. The next sections offer an exploratory engagement with the processes of (re)territorialisation and de-territorialisation of street vending that take place in the selected sites.

From street vendors to street vending assemblages

The literature on street vending has addressed, among other issues, the power relations that have discursively, practically and spatially shaped street vending practices in cities of the global south. Examining these power relations has primarily focused on the conflict between the ‘state’ and street vendors; a conflict that arises from the former’s desire to maintain ‘order’– and implicitly create apolitical public spaces, suitable for mainstream consumption – and the latter asserting claims to urban public spaces on the minimum standards for survival (e.g. Crossa, 2009; Hanser, 2016; Huang et al., 2014).

Two key interrelated developments in recent studies, in particular, have evolved our understanding of this conflict over public spaces. The first development involves rejecting the view that locates this conflict at the fissure between ‘formality’ and ‘informality’ (Schindler, 2014). Instead, urban informality is seen as a ‘heuristic device’ (Roy, 2011: 233) that reveals and challenges the state’s – and other actors’– ways of producing informal places and activities. In the case of street vending, this device has been used in the negotiations and contestations of a plethora of actors, including courtrooms, municipalities, NGOs, unions, planning systems and political parties (Schindler, 2014; Te Lintelo, 2017; Tucker, 2017), and even among street vendors themselves (Crossa, 2016). The second development moves away from framing this conflict from a dichotomised analysis of power relations between the ‘state’ and street vendors. Recent studies situate this conflict within a complex entangled interaction between the two sides (Palacios, 2016; Roever and Skinner, 2016; Turner and Schoenberger, 2012). These interwoven interactions are critical for the day-to-day survival of the poor and the operation of the state in dense ‘unruly’ places in less expensive and confrontational ways (Anjaria, 2011; Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011; Polese et al., 2016). Furthermore, exercising power and asserting authority over the use of urban public spaces involves multiple actors (Te Lintelo, 2017), including street vendors themselves, across the lines of ethnicity and race (Munoz, 2018), gender (Overå, 2007) or access to resources and skills (e.g. Bénit-Gbaffou, 2016; Crossa, 2016; Maneepong and Walsh, 2013; Steel, 2012).

Despite these developments, a narrow focus of the mainstream literature on the collective or individual strategies of vendors in the face of revanchist policies does not provide an explanation for how differentiated articulations of street vending are being shaped, being reshaped, disappearing or enduring in different locations in a city. These diverse articulations, in turn, shape and reproduce fragmented urban experience and scenery in different localities.

The Deleuzoguattarian (1987) conception of assemblages, I argue, can build on, and contribute to, street vending literature by addressing these gaps. Interpreting street vending as assemblages fits our purpose as it shifts our unit of analysis (Fox and Alldred, 2015) from particular actors, such as street vendors, to the socio-material ensembles of street vending as arrangements of many heterogeneous entities that are linked together and form provisional, open-ended wholes. I consider these open-ended dynamic collectives of street vending as assemblages, since they are interconnected compositions of human bodies (shopkeepers, vendors, police, passers-by and the like), objects, stalls, urban infrastructure and buildings, discourses and policies; they claim a territory; they take on a specific set of functions and meanings (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011); and they involve movements of territorialisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. The key promise of assemblage thinking is to work as an exploratory engagement of how everyday configurations like street vending assemblages take shape, endure and are remade through dynamic interactions between people and things, discourses, policies and infrastructure (Farías, 2011). This perspective highlights that a focus on street vendors or their contestations against the ‘state’ is insufficient for understanding street vending as it works and is experienced in cities.

Through the prism of assemblages, the article seeks to address two questions: how do street vending ensembles shape, endure or disappear in different sites; and how do they take different articulations in different locations? For the first question, I apply two concepts of co-functioning (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987) and territorialisation. The former highlights that street vending assemblages are not just a happenstance collection of people and materials (Buchanan, 2015). Their unity lies in co-functioning (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 69), that is, those alliances and relationships that hold heterogeneous elements together. For street vending assemblages the co-functioning between multiple entities revolves around two different desires of maintaining ‘order’ in, and maximising profit from, urban public spaces. The territorialisation of street vending assemblages signifies a ‘moment’ at which a particular alignment along these desires ‘become[s] visible and articulable’ (Stark, 2017: 153). Along with these territorialising forces, assemblages always exhibit de-territorialising potentials, whereby the relationships are breaking away and territories are eroded, that is, vendors are removed. At the micro-level unpacking these relationships primarily relies on an ethnographic analysis of the labour of assembling (Lancione, 2016; Rankin, 2011).

Assemblage thinking also offers a helpful framework for addressing our second question. According to Stark (2017), the Deleuzian conception of assemblages first and foremost concerns how difference manifests itself through differential processes, whereby particular alignments become visible and articulable and take hold in different locations. These differences are shaped by, and manifest in, the ‘precise state of intermingling of bodies’ and their relations (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 99). These differences, in turn, create differentiated affects, that is, ‘collective forms of aﬀective capacities that exceed the ensembles from which they emanate’ (Anderson, 2014: 160). In each of our cases, street vending assemblages territorialised differently, exhibited different affective capacities and hence shaped differentiated experiences of the street. Understanding these differences implies unpacking the multi-scalar labour of assembling and tracing how negotiations and settlements involved in creating and maintaining street vending are stitched into particular places (McGuirk et al., 2016), while making them ‘selected, organized and stratified’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 406). Beyond micro-level analysis, however, unpacking these entanglements has been subject to lively debate. Storper and Scott (2016) and Brenner et al. (2011), among others, assert that assemblage thinking as an ontology fails to offer a clear basis with which to answer questions like ‘why some assemblages are actualized over and against others that are suppressed or excluded’ (Brenner et al., 2011: 235). This failure, they suggest, lies in this framework’s lack of consideration for ‘wider forces’. In the final section of this article, I will reflect on the adequacy of assemblage thinking when we shift our attention from one case to multiple disparate locations in a city.

Street vending in Tehran

The current condition of street vending in Tehran should be seen within the context of the economic slowdown in the country, which started in 2008 and has been exacerbated by the tightening of the international economic sanctions. This trend was associated with deteriorating employment prospects, particularly for the youth, with their unemployment rate reaching 46.3 per cent in 2008. Recent research conducted for the Ministry of Welfare shows that in Tehran, two-thirds of street vendors are young, 58 per cent of them lost their previous jobs and 40 per cent of them are considered as high skilled labour (Saghafi, 2015). This condition has brought together thousands of vendors predominantly from southern or peripheral areas to Tehran’s busy public spaces on a daily basis (Tafti, 2019). With the ongoing development of the underground transportation network (since 1999), metro station exits work as what Buser (2018) called ‘bright objects’, which draw together, structure and organise street vending assemblages in the city.

Faced with the rising number of street vendors, the state often tolerates their presence – albeit with episodic crackdowns – in order to maintain the image of a fair but also capable state (Bayat, 1997). Nevertheless, the state has rejected recognition of street vending as an occupation, which leaves vendors in what Yiftachel (2009: 90) terms ‘permanent temporariness’. Unlike most cases reported in the literature, where the creation of the modern and hygienic city is the dominant discourse adopted by the state for removing street vendors from public spaces (Roever and Skinner, 2016), the Iranian government – in line with its overall approach – framed its policies about street vendors by using an Islamic rhetoric. The state adopted the discourse of sadd-e-mabar (obstruction of thoroughfares), which, according to some Islamic sources (Hadith and Fatwa), is not permitted. This framing is used to justify the state’s sometimes heavy-handed crackdowns on street vendors. In practice, the state’s reactions towards street vendors have included random crackdowns; issuing a banning zone in popular and busy public spaces (Figure 1); and setting up weekly markets in places with low foot traffic. In the absence of rivalry between political parties or active NGOs or unions, street vendors have to find other ways of coping with, and adapting to, the pressures of contestations over public spaces.

Figure 1.

The three selected sites are located in no-vending zones, as announced in 2017.

The following sections explain street vending in three sites that are among the busiest commercial streets in Tehran. The first one, 15th-Khordad Street, provides the main access to Tehran Bazaar. The two other sites are both located along Valiasr Street, one of Tehran’s main thoroughfares and commercial centres, which connects the more expensive, rich northern parts of the city to the poor southern areas. The selected locations demonstrate different social and built environments, business activities and street vending ensembles. They are under three different local municipalities. Local municipalities are the main entities responsible for implementing urban policies regarding street vendors. All or a part of the three selected sites, shown in Figure 1, are among no-vending zones as announced by Tehran Municipality in February 2017.

In these sites, data collection and analysis attended to the ‘labor of assembling’ (Baker and McGuirk, 2017: 432), of the coming together and coming apart of actors, materials and policies in street vending assemblages. At the micro-level, ethnographic research provided the necessary tools for this purpose. Field data collection was conducted in April and May 2017, including in-depth interviews, participatory and non-participatory observation, and mapping street vending practices and spatial distribution in three sites. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 street vendors, 11 shopkeepers, four municipal staff members and six people who worked in surrounding buildings (e.g. car parks) and were involved in some arrangements with vendors. The aim of the interviews was to understand the ways in which various actors related to and collaborated (or failed to collaborate) with each other, and their underlying motives. I also spent hours sitting with two street vendors, in order to spend time with other street vendors, glean information indirectly from informal chats and consciously observe their interaction with each other, shopkeepers and municipal staff.

Furthermore, conducting hours of non-participatory observation before the start and at the end of the street vendors’ working day revealed many connections and interactions between different vendors, shopkeepers, as well as people and buildings in the surrounding areas, about which interviewees were silent. I also mapped street vending practices in all three selected locations, to understand the spatial distribution and intensity of different street vending practices. Attending to the relations and connections that cut across micro and macro levels required collecting data from a variety of other sources (Fox and Alldred, 2015). The empirical research, therefore, was complemented by analysing official reports, newspaper articles and policy documents.

15th-Khordad Street

15th-Khordad Street provides the main access to Tehran Bazaar, the historic centre of commercial activities in the city. Since the 1930s, when the street took shape as a commercial strip, it has attracted a high number of passers-by (500,000 people daily) and street vendors. The opening of a metro station in 2001 and the pedestrianisation of the street in 2008 meant even larger numbers of vendors were drawn to the site (estimated 1000 vendors in 2016).

Before the Nowrooz (Persian New Year) of 2017, a massive crackdown took place in the street, almost unprecedented in terms of the intensified use of riot police. The event started from Reza Passage, where shopkeepers closed down their shops to express their dismay with street vendors, who were selling the same goods on marginal revenue. In particular, they criticised the municipal staff for letting street vendors work in return for money. The practice of closing down shops has historically acquired a strong political meaning in Iran, given that the strike of bazaaries (main traders in the Bazaar), traditionally backed by religious leaders, has taken place in major political uprisings leading to the 1979 revolution. The relationship between the Bazaar and the ‘state’ is particularly important in the Iranian context, since the bazaaries have consistently played an active role in major political episodes, leading to the revolution of 1978 (Keshavarzian, 2007: 259). Despite the weakening political position of the Bazaar in recent years (Keshavarzian, 2007: 259), an old right-wing powerful conservative party (Motalefeh) is still firmly embedded there. Therefore, the state has been highly cautious not to cause dissatisfaction among bazaaries by means of its urban projects in surrounding areas.

As a result, on the same day, city authorities held an emergency meeting, with the ‘recovery plan’ of the area being announced the following day. Within three days, the riot police forces recovered the street. The heavy policing of the street (with at least 40 police officers and municipal staff, backed by two police kiosks), to prevent street vendors from returning to the site, is still present at the time of writing this article. Unlike the municipal staff, police forces are replaced on a regular basis, reducing the chance of bribery between them and the vendors.

This ‘relative’ de-territorialisation of street vending assemblage was followed by a re-territorialisation through new and surprising forms of relationship between shopkeepers and street vendors. A very small fraction of street vendors (29 cases observed) negotiated with shopkeepers to find a new way of continuing their businesses in return for money. This new way was setting up their stalls at the interface between the shops and the street, such as where the shop is set back from the street slightly (Figure 2) or has a small step or an open front where the boundary between private and public space is blurred. This co-functioning secured the vendors from the harassment of the municipal staff or police, who have been instructed not to confront the shopkeepers:

I used to put my stall in front of this shop for nearly 50 years … when the police came to remove us, I came to this guy [shopkeeper] and asked him if I can work here … He knew me and accepted that I sit on this step and sell my stuff. (Vendor – 01-13)

Figure 2.

Two street vendors set up their stalls at the interface between the shop and the street.

In this case, instead of grafting on new elements, reassembling of street vending relied on reworking and repurposing the old ones (McGuirk et al., 2016), including pre-existing relationships with shopkeepers, as well as the pre-existing public/private interface, which acquired a new use.

The socio-material formation of street vending in this site, therefore, was characterised by an inconspicuous presence of vendors, who either retreated to the spaces in front of shops or chose mobility. This restrained socio-material formation of vendors re-stabilised the relationship between the powerful bazaaries and the ‘state’. The re-territorialisation was shaped through a mutually beneficial relationship between vendors and shopkeepers and the state functionaries turning a blind eye to their practices.

Valiasr South

While the uses and users of pavements were heavily contained in 15th-Khordad Street, one of the biggest ensembles of street vendors in the city has being actualised to the south of Valiasr juncture (Chaharrah Valiasr). This presence has greatly intensified since the opening of a metro station in 2010 (Shopkeeper – 02-03), bringing together a significant number of passers-by and vendors (approximately 153 stall holders on weekday afternoons).

In response to the intensification of street vending, shopkeepers intensified their mobilisation activities against vendors, including meeting with city authorities, letter writing campaigns and calling the police. Not having the political capacity and leverage of their counterparts in the Bazaar, these shopkeepers’ attempts were largely futile. The older established shopkeepers found no other way beyond putting up signs saying ‘Do not sit here’ in front of their shops, or moving out (Shopkeeper – 02-03). ‘They [the municipality] said we don’t have money to pay the riot police to evacuate them … Some of my neighbours have moved out to other places’ (Shopkeeper – 02-01).

Those who replaced them, however, either entered into competition or made new connections with street vendors. In at least 20 cases, these new shopkeepers took control of the space in front of their shops by putting up stalls and stands, often selling goods different from what they normally sell, or by renting out the spaces at the interface of their shops and the pavement. The stall-holder in these cases was often a town resident either hired by the shopkeeper or paying a fee to them. These practices, however, were rarely talked about: ‘Those stuff belong to me […] He is not a vendor. He is my employee’ (Shopkeeper – 02-06).

Apart from these shopkeepers, two or three major groups controlled vending activities on the pavement, in particular near the metro station exit. These organised groups shaped a network that included surrounding buildings (e.g. using the second floor of a restaurant as their storage space) and entailed hierarchy and distribution of responsibility. Everybody knew their place, and everything was supervised by a strongman. They often maintained a good relationship with municipal staff because of their ability to make regular payments. On their daily visits to the pavement, the municipal staff did not interfere with the activities of these groups. Once or twice a year, the riot police raid this site to signify the capacity of the state to maintain order over the pavement. However, ‘the day that the police are supposed to come and evacuate them, they [organised street vendors] do not show up at all. It is clear that somebody [municipal staff] gives them this sort of news’ (Shopkeeper – 02-07). Other smaller groups mostly based on townsman or kin relationships also occupied busy sections of the pavement, often through physical fights. They often extended their ethnic-based relations to access other sources, including finding a nearby building doorman from their hometown to store their goods, or even finding municipal staff originally from their region to help them avoid harassment.

The socio-material formation of street vending in this site was characterised by large stalls, umbrellas, racks, a conspicuously high number of street vendors, proactive vending practices and increasingly lower-income passers-by. The expressive qualities emerging from these dynamic arrangements of bodies and materials have re-affirmed and re-inscribed the declining status of the shopping strip in Valiasr South in the past decades. The alignment of the desire of different actors (new shopkeepers, group-based vendors and municipal staff) to exploit the commercial opportunity created by significant foot traffic also implied that the desires of others, like individual vendors or older-established shopkeepers, were ignored. As one of these vendors mentioned, ‘At the beginning I set up my stall near the junction. You see those with large tables and umbrellas? … They told me to go away’ (Vendor – 02-08). Therefore, in this site individual vendors with lower resources were almost absent from busy locations.

Valiasr North

The third site is a shopping strip with shops staged to appeal to middle-income consumers. The status of this strip is in decline in the face of mushrooming shopping malls in the northern areas of the city, and shopkeepers were keen to preserve its prestige. They built relationships at the levels of both municipal staff and local municipality officials to ensure a minimal visibility of street vending activities. ‘It is often shopkeepers who called them [municipality] to remove us from the street’ (Vendor – 03-11). Municipal staff conducted a daily visit to this site, sometimes asking vendors to pack up and leave, even if it was obvious that the peddlers would soon return. There were no self-organised street vendors operating at this site, and neither were shop interfaces rented out to vendors. This made it easier for shopkeepers to harass and remove newcomer vendors from the pavement in front of their shops. This was not the case for young ‘modern’ street musicians, who often worked near the cinemas on the pavement, since the shopkeepers perceived their activities as ‘suitable for the “aura” of the street’ (Shopkeeper – 03-08).

Vendors who work at this site attempted to build connections both with shopkeepers and with municipal staff: ‘I often talk to them [municipal staff] … These guys do not earn much and living costs are so high, so we [street vendors] help them by collecting money and in return they look after us’ (Vendor – 03-01). It was often the older-established vendors who collected money for them. They also attempted to keep street vending practices less provocative (e.g. not shouting), with minimised visibility, and prevented their spread by not allowing their counterparts to join them. This latter was mostly done by letting the municipal staff know about a newcomer, to force him/her out. As a then-newcomer mentioned: ‘it was very hard to start my business here. They did not allow me to put my stall here. I had to bring my brother to help me fighting them … They do not want us to increase’ (Vendor – 03-07). A few weeks later he was no longer there. As an older-established vendor explained: ‘The municipal staff made him to pack up and go. […] he allows us to work, because we have been working here for many years’ (Vendor – 03-09).

The dynamic socio-material formation of street vending at this site involved low-key street vending activities, with vendors having small stalls that could easily be packed up. Stalls were on a cart, pram or a blanket on the ground, to enable them to be quickly packed up upon a warning from other vendors or passers-by. The enrolment of different bodies, materials and practices continued to support the particular meaning that shopkeepers pursued, that is to salvage the rapidly declining prestige of the commercial strip in the face of the changing commercial landscape of the city. This common project of ‘managed informality’ (Batréau and Bonnet, 2016) endured through the co-functioning of older-established vendors who controlled other vendors and maintained a good relationship with municipal staff; the municipal staff with their frequent performative visits; and the shopkeepers who constantly watched the street and maintained good relationships with the municipality. In the absence of organised groups, individual vendors could operate at this site, though not in prime locations. As one of them said, ‘[In Valiasr South] they [the vendors] kicked my stuff and told me not to come tomorrow … So I came here. There are no street vendors here and passers-by are fewer. Nobody would force me to go away’ (Vendor – 03-31). Prime locations, like metro exits, however, were occupied by vendors with higher resources who could bribe the municipal staff.

Re-thinking street vending

After exploring how different connections, disconnections, reconnections and power relations created diverse actualisations of street vending assemblages, in this section I reflect on the contribution of thinking with and through assemblages to the street vending literature, while addressing our two main questions. The first question attends to the ways in which street vending assemblages were shaped and endured, and the second concerns their diverse and multiple socio-material formations in different locations.

(Re)territorialising street vending assemblages

In the three selected sites, mapping and tracing co-functioning relations foregrounded the ongoing devising relations, negotiations and accommodations of a broad coalition of actors from near and far (Simone, 2014) that shaped and maintained street vending assemblages. This focus on relations of co-functioning shed light on two under-examined aspects of street vending in cities.

Firstly, instead of a sole focus on the antagonistic relations between the ‘state’ and street vendors, this view explored how co-functioning between these two as well as a wider range of actors, including shopkeepers, passers-by, owners and workers in nearby buildings, shaped and maintained street vending assemblages. Furthermore, it showed that pre-figured social categories such as shopkeepers, vendors or even state functionaries were not homogeneous and nor did they pursue similar desires in different sites, which affected their enrolment in these assemblages. These assemblages were the laborious achievement of multiple (yet changing) actors who ‘constantly built bridges between what they do and what others were doing’ (Simone, 2014: 3). These relations of co-functioning, however, did not necessarily involve direct engagement and negotiations. They involved getting by, avoiding friction and direct confrontation (e.g. between state functionaries in the former and between shopkeepers in the latter) or unspoken rituals (such as the performative inspections of municipal staff and the vendors’ performative packing up).

Focusing on co-functioning also shifted our attention from locating actors in formal/informal ‘domains’ to explore how territorialisation of street vending assemblages involved highly entangled formal and informal relationships between seemingly ‘formal’ entities (McFarlane, 2011; Simone, 2011). In particular, the state exemplified an entity that was neither stable nor well-bounded. While the state’s formal interactions with vendors and shopkeepers (e.g. policies, discourses and recovery plans) hinted at de-territorialising tendencies of street vending assemblages, its informal interactions were often indispensable for these assemblages to endure. Faced with an increasingly unemployed population, the state relied on the co-functioning between its low-level staff and street vendors for a smooth and less expensive way of maintaining order in public spaces (Anjaria, 2011; Bénit-Gbaffou and Oldfield, 2011; Benjamin, 2004), while enabling local municipalities to hire field staff on low wages who were compensated by street vendors’ unofficial regular payments. Therefore, ‘illegal’ street vending assemblages were actualised within the scope of the state practices, not outside it.

Secondly, the Deleuzoguattarian reading of power as being plural and performative (Müller, 2015) revealed dynamics beyond the often discussed imposition of power from one or two repressing agents (Buchanan, 2008), be it the ‘state’ or shopkeepers. Instead, this view considers power as a ‘mediated achievement’ that depends on establishing relations (Müller, 2015). These mediated achievements differed across different locations. For instance, in Valiasr South, it was the more established shopkeepers who had to move out, while in Valiasr North, organised vendors were less likely to work. Tracing these relationships also captured the ways in which these mediated achievements prevented other possible trajectories from being activated (Ureta, 2014), for instance those where vendors with little resources (connections or money) could enrol in the assemblages. In our three sites, such individuals were constantly pushed out. Their enrolment in street vending assemblages was mediated within the web of relations between well-resourced vendors (those with more money, skills, physical ability or connections), state functionaries and shopkeepers. As a result, street vending assemblages in all three sites mainly consisted of younger men (143 male and 10 female vendors in Valiasr South) belonging to groups located in prime locations, which highlights how these assemblages are ‘selected, organized and stratified’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 406). The next section discusses the differences between these mediated achievements in our three sites.

Multiple articulations and trajectories

The second question of the article was an inquiry into the diverse and multiple socio-material formations of street vending in different locations of the city. In our three sites, differentiated socio-material formations of street vending were being made among disparate urban spaces. In 15th-Khordad St, this formation was hardly visible, consisting of a small number of vendors with small stalls, working at the interface of public/private spaces. In contrast, in Valiasr South, this was characterised by large stalls and makeshift tables and big umbrellas, as well as vendors with noticeably different selling styles and intensive use of the interface between public and private space. At the third site, street vendor numbers, stalls, ordering, visibility, activities and use of building fronts were contained.

Looking across the three sites, understanding these differences required us not only to consider the micro-level labour of assembling, but also relational connections and disconnections at larger scales and temporalities (McFarlane, 2011: 380). In particular, the relationships between, and the alignment of the desires of, different levels of the ‘state’ and shopkeepers mediated the socio-material formation of street vending assemblages. For instance, in the case of the Bazaar, the historically entrenched connection between well-established bazaaries and the highest levels of the state gave prominence to the latter’s project that is removing or minimising such formations. In the other two sites, the changing relations between lower levels of the ‘state’ and shopkeepers were linked to the wider processes of urban transformation in Tehran and the intensified capital accumulation in northern wealthier parts of the city. This signifies loosening connections between the state and shopkeepers in southern areas, which then allowed more explicit socio-material formations of street vending in Valiasr South. Nevertheless, street vendors were looking for gaps and fissures in these relations, intensifying their connections with both sides to open up new opportunities for staying in public spaces.

This focus on unpacking the labour of assembling at multiple scales and temporalities (McGuirk et al., 2016: 134) showed how in different sites distinct, yet dynamic, socio-material formations of street vending were shaped and reshaped through anchoring wider processes in situated encounters. Street vending assemblages, therefore, at one level were choreographed by well-rehearsed, deep-seated practices (Simone, 2011) and at another through day-to-day improvisations, negotiations and accommodations (McGuirk et al., 2016). They were therefore contingent, provisional and situated.

In turn, in each site these differentiated socio-material formations, including the aesthetics, organisation and intensity of stalls, merchandise, and selling behaviours, all created certain meanings, qualities and experiences of the street. These meanings and affects were generated through, and re-affirmed by, the selective enrolment of entities at multiple scales into street vending assemblages, which coalesced around securing particular interests. For instance, the changing and disconnections of the city authorities with shopkeepers in Valiasr South provided an opportunity for organised vendors to occupy and intensify their activities. The quality and type of their merchandise drew less well-off shoppers who seek cheap items – and later new shopkeepers who sold cheap items – to the shopping strip, all of which re-inscribed the declining prestige of the shopping strip. Looking at multiple cases allowed us to better understand how these assemblages ‘are written into “big stories”– by tracing chains of meaning and practice that are pieced together in situated encounters’ (McGuirk et al., 2016: 131).

Conclusion

In this article, I explored how assemblage thinking can inform a generative re-thinking of street vending in Tehran. This exploration involved tracing and mapping encounters and relations involved in (re)territorialisation and de-territorialisation of street vending assemblages in three sites in the city. As with Deleuzian thinking, this exploration offers a way of surpassing dualities (Lancione, 2013), such as street vendors/state, highlighting the entanglements of different shopkeepers, state functionaries at different levels, people who were living, working or passing by in the area, nearby buildings and metro stations, as well as the shopping strip and its interface with public space in these assemblages. Investigating the relations of co-functioning between these different elements provided a better understanding of how contemporary street vending is being made and transformed and is enduring on a daily basis in the city.

As Simone (2011: 357) suggests, assemblage thinking seeks to chart both the mechanisms and forces that permit intensities of association such as those involving street vending to occur and the trajectories through which such intense relations are entangled or disentangled. Therefore, in addition to paying attention to the micro-scale analysis of street vending practices, this research sought to situate their relational enrolments in large scale processes in a non-democratic regime of urban governance and broader dynamics of capital accumulation. For the latter, I found that adopting a multiple case study can help clarify these relational, multi-scale entanglements and disentanglements, since it creates a basis for reflecting on how seemingly similar entities enrol differently in different street vending assemblages, and on which larger scale processes should be taken into account.

In terms of policy implications, the investigation of street vending in banned zones in Tehran showed that ‘the most centralized state is not at all the master of its plans, it is also an experimenter, … but along [these experiments] also arise experiments of another kind’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 145–146). Because of these multiple projects and experiments, the policy of banned zones did not always take hold in the way imagined (or hoped for). This research also raises questions regarding the type of urban policies that could enable alternative assemblages to actualise. While the most important step in the Iranian context would be a formal recognition of street vendors’ occupation, allowing the formation of independent unions and then working with them, it is not clear whether or not policies like licensing or zoning would redress or exacerbate the inequalities among street vendors in accessing public spaces. Studies show that such measures often fail to take into account power relations between street vendors (Crossa, 2016; Steel, 2012). In our cases, whenever the state was unable to implement a zero-tolerance approach towards street vendors – and this was most of the time – the low-end street vendors’ margins of manoeuvre were highly constrained and prescribed through the co-functioning of municipal staff, shopkeepers and organised or well-resourced street vendors.

Attempts to apply the Deleuzoguattarian’s tool box of concepts into policies and planning have been limited (Banville and Torres, 2017; Devlin, 2018). Purcell’s (2013: 34) reading of this tool box stands against state-led planning, for being ‘an apparatus of capture that attempts to control, shape, and channel desiring-production into speciﬁc arrangements’. Referring to the cases of ‘informal settlements’, he suggests to nurture the existing practices of self-management in these places. Banville and Torres (2017: 10) agree with this reading, seeing planning as separating ‘people from their desires and powers, from their autonomy’ to flourish. Both works reject the Hobbesian view that without the intervention of the ‘state’ people would fashion their environments in egocentric ways, as ‘intense deterministic’. In our work, however, the cyclical presence or absence of the ‘state’ was accompanied by both high tensions and the marginalisation of low-end vendors. Engaging with both these concerns, Hillier (2017: 6) believes in ‘the possibility of developing new practices, inspired by anarcho-syndicalism’. A more attentive focus on these and other practices may offer productive pathways for our cities towards becoming more inclusive.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mojgan Taheri Tafti

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