After reading, please send comments to the author
The reader picking up this volume may be perplexed by the
conjunction of street
vending and the postmodern in the title. We typically think of
street vending as a part of
the premodern, traditional economic order that survives only on
the fringes of modern
society. How could something that we think of as premodern be
associated with the
postmodern age? Our reasons for presenting the reader with this
conundrum is rooted in
our research on street vending in various different
countries—research that we began with
the common assumption in mind that street vending should, by all
logical criteria,
eventually disappear. What we found, however, is that street
vending, despite being under
constant attack, is a thriving and growing trade for reasons tied
directly to the current
changes in the global economy that have been associated by many
authors with
postmodernity.
It is appropriate here to make a
distinction between postmodernism and
postmodernity. As Lemert notes, “This distinction is
inherent in the difference between
speaking of postmodernity, a purportedly new state of
world affairs, and
postmodernism, a theory or cultural attitude towards those
affairs.” (Lemert 1997:26) It
is not the objective of this book to delve into the various
debates within the realm of
postmodernism, focused as they are in
the areas of art, literature, philosophy and the
sociology of science. While these are fascinating in themselves,
they require serious
attention that cannot be afforded in an introduction to a book of
this nature, which
already has far too much territory to cover. But we are
concerned with the question of
postmodernity and how this has, or could have, an influence on
the economic conditions
of those who turn to street vending.
While there
is some debate about whether or not it is appropriate to use the
term
postmodernity to describe today’s world, “At the least
it is obvious that the world which
for a long time has been thought of as ‘modern’ is
experience a crisis of grave and global
proportions.” (Lemert 1997:32) Lemert associates this crisis
with three factors: the
collapse of the Euro-American colonial system; the disappearance
of a coherent imperial
world center and; the rise of a global opposition to a single,
unified world culture
associated with Euro-American value systems. These broader
changes are also associated
with changes in the global economic system that have seriously
undermined the central
logic of modernism itself—the Fordist/Keynesian economic
order. This system
emphasized, on the one hand, the centralization of production and
distribution in the
hands of mega-corporations built around the theory of economies
of scale. On the other
hand, it emphasized the regulatory role of the state in managing
relations between
workers, managers, owners, and consumers. This regulatory role is
the basis of the
massive increase in the size of the state bureaucracy at every
level even as it has
intervened into every aspect of social life, a process shown
clearly in the historical
archaeology of Michel Foucault.
Obviously,
this modern project began long before the advent of Ford and
Keynes.
Many tie its origins to the enlightenment (Harvey 1990), but the
Fordist/Keynesian
approach to economic management, the former at the corporate
level and the latter at the
state level, exemplified the process and theory behind economic
centralization and
regulation that became a hallmark of the “modern”
world, whether it was capitalist or
socialist. While the grand rationale behind modernism was the
creation of more and more
“efficient” and “productive” individuals by
controlling and ordering the relations between
individuals, in fact modern efficiency and productivity could
only fully thrive under
optimal conditions that had to be molded gradually over time.
These conditions not only
required massive changes in state structure, roles and revenues,
business organization,
factory structure and market systems, but also in the very
culture and social life of
individuals, families and communities. As a total system, it
required that every aspect of
society should be molded according to its requirements. Fordism
represents above all the
formal recognition that mass production requires a mass
market, and that mass markets
don’t just exist—they must be manufactured!
This need to
manufacture a “modern” society is best expressed in its
ideal version
by the height of modernist architecture and urban planning, which
are at the same time of
key relevance to the issue of urban street markets. Long seen as
the best representative of
modernist design was Le Corbusier, a French architect who
influenced the field greatly in
the mid-war period with his emphasis on grand scale design and
planning. In his 1923
keynote text, Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier
(1996) expressed the modern
focus on the re-creation of society through a planned structure
that would assign each
individual to his or her place in life, regulating and caring for
each need and demand:
“…without plan there can be neither grandeur of aim and
expression, nor rhythm,
nor mass, nor coherence. Without plan we
have the sensation, so insupportable to
man, of shapelessness, of poverty, of
disorder, of wilfulness.” (1996:207)
Thus does Corbusier exhibit the modernist
dream of a model society run from
above. One can imagine that street
vending would have little refuge in such a world. In this
ideal, everything is ordered, efficient and structured. Nothing
is left to chance. It is little
wonder, indeed, that Corbusier, like many others in Europe at
this time, was attracted to
more and more authoritarian regimes that could put such an order
into effect. The result
could perhaps be more appropriately termed the modernist
nightmare, as Fascism and
Stalinist socialism arose to crash against eachother and against
the more liberal (but no less
modern) democracies in the second world war (Harvey 1990:128-9).
The same modernist
nightmare influenced such novels as Huxley’s Brave New
World and Orwell’s 1984,
differing versions of the same theme of modernism gone wild.
Modernism did
not go wild, however. While its heyday was reached in the 1950s
and 1960s, with rapid economic growth in the United States and,
later, Europe and Japan,
the 1970s began to show cracks in the basic economic structure of
modernism itself. Not
only did growth slow down in the U.S. as it was faced with
increased competition from
Europe and Japan, but unemployment and inflation began to grow in
all these areas. Third
World growth strategies, built around protectionist import
substitution policies, also
began to enter into crisis at this point (Harvey 1990:141).
Even at the
height of modernist growth, not everyone was equally privileged.
The
dynamics of race and gender in the U.S. meant that white males
obtained the best jobs
opened up in the factories and corporate offices that opened up
by the millions during
this period. In Third World nations, growth benefited an even
smaller class of elite
workers and managers, leaving most people outside the modernist
dream. In terms of
meeting the needs of the poor, “Modernism failed as
mass-housing and city building
partly because it failed to communicate with its inhabitants and
users who might not have
liked the style, understood what it meant or even known how to
use it.” (Jencks
1996:475) Thus, those left out of the dream could neither benefit
from it, nor fully escape
from its effects.
Nor did the decline of modernism bring the
poor any direct advantages.
Harvey defines this process as a shift from Fordism to flexible
accumulation. This
process “spelled danger for traditionally organized
businesses, sparking a wave of
bankruptcies, plant closures, deindustrialization, and
restructuring…” (Harvey 1990:155)
The economies of scale sought by Fordist mass production were
supplanted, at least to a
large degree, by economies of flexibility. In effect the growth
of regulatory and labor
power in the first world economies grew to the degree that they
produced a competitive
disadvantage, leading “either to the rise of entirely new
industrial forms or to the
integration of Fordism with a network of subcontracting and
‘outsourcing’ to give greater
flexibility in the face of heightened competition and greater
risks.” (Harvey 1990:155-6)
In effect, the modernist compromise whereby workers gave up
control over their labor in
exchange for a modicum of wealth and security unraveled in the
face of competitive
pressures. Not only were workers paid less in the aggregate, but
they also took greater
risks as jobs moved rapidly to find the lowest wages.
The
“great sucking sound to the south” that Ross Perot
alluded to in the
debate over the passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement with Mexico and
Canada in 1993 had really begun decades before as plants and
production had relocated to
Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea and myriad other nations where labor
costs were lower and
regulatory enforcement was partial.
Postmodernity, then, reflects a stage in
economic development in which
capital is free to go wherever profits are higher without the
need to worry about the
welfare of workers or consumers. Investment is made based upon
the assumption that
consumers will be found elsewhere in the world market, thus
escaping from the Fordist
need to pay wages and benefits high enough so that the workers
could themselves
consume the products they produce.
As far as the Third
World is concerned, postmodernism implies business as usual.
While new investment pours in, wages levels remain low for the
vast majority of the
population. For the first world, however, the effect is to
produce new forms of
employment that lack the security and wage guarantees of modern
industry. The result is
an increase in the labor market without, however, a corresponding
increase in the average
wage. People are paid less for doing more: a violation of the
very laws of supply and
demand that throws the entire logic of classical economics into
question.
Street vending, modernity,
postmodernity and the informal economy
Street
vending usually falls within the category of informal economic
activity.
This category includes “the production and exchange of legal
goods and services that
involves the lack of appropriate business permits, violation of
zoning codes, failure to
report tax liability, non-compliance with labor regulations
governing contracts and work
conditions, and/or the lack of legal guarantees in relations with
suppliers and clients.”
(Cross 1998a: 580). This definition does not imply a
“black/white” definition of
informality, but rather the possibility of differing degree of
informality, since an
enterprise or business relation could be formal by some criteria,
but informal by others.
For example, a workshop or street stall may have a permit, but
not pay taxes. Or it may
pay taxes but not have a legal contract with its employees.
Another dimension of
informality that is little discussed in the literature but very
often important in terms of
individual motivation is the actual social relationship between
economic actors: one might
compare, for example, a consumer at a Walmart or McDonalds, who
has a purely formal
relationship with the enterprise and its staff, and the customer
of a vegetable stall, where
interpersonal relations and trust become important, for example,
in the question of
whether the produce is fresh or the balance fairly weighted.
The
relationship between the informal economy and modernity was
obviously
problematic from the start, given the discussion in the previous
section. As the state’s
regulatory system expanded to encompass every aspect of economic
activity in order to
regulate and order the relations between owners, employees and
consumers, it has become
more and more difficult for the poor, in particular, to establish
businesses that met all of
the growing legal requirements. Not only are these requirements
costly, they may require
the assistance of lawyers, accountants or other
specialists—services typically out of the
reach of the poor. De Soto (1989) argues that this
over-regulation is itself directly
responsible for spurring the growth of the informal economy by
creating an
entrepreneurial incentive to skirt the regulatory system, thus
allowing them to compete
with multi-national corporations. But the problem is a bit more
complex.
While the
growth of the modern corporation, which used mass production to
reduce the units costs of these requirements, allowed these costs
to be passed on to
consumers, mass production is limited in its capacity to meet the
needs of the population:
it is only feasible where there is a mass market, meaning a
sufficiently large pool of
potential consumers with both the income and the desire to
purchase the product. Luxury
niche markets, on the one hand, and mass poverty markets, on the
other, both present
problems for mass production and distribution chains. For luxury
goods, the limited
market niche itself reduces the benefits of economies of scale.
In the poverty stricken
areas of the Third World, and in the inner city areas of the
First, the cost of many mass
produced articles is still to high for the consumer market,
assuming that all the production
and distribution costs of bringing the product to the consumer
are formalized.
This has
several repercussions that can be best demonstrated by the use of
examples. First, supermarket chains, which are the quintessence
of modernist retailing, are
almost always far more visible in middle class residential areas
than in either wealthy or
poor neighborhoods. Despite their efficiency when presented with
a mass consumer
market able to pay their formal costs, they cannot compete,
apparently, with either the
boutiques of wealthy areas nor the small stores and street
markets in poor areas. (Tokman
1978) Where formal regulations are strictly applied, as is more
usually the case in the
First World, this has created the curious phenomena that food and
other essential goods
are more expensive in poor neighborhoods than they are in
middle class areas. However,
where there is an active informal economy, street markets and
informal producers can
step in to fill this niche passing on the savings of their lack
of legality (and their added
flexibility) on to the poor of these areas.
To take
another example, many formal products are available in poorer
areas, but only because they are provided by informal stores and
stalls. The popularity of
Coca Cola, Pepsi and innumerable other snack and consumer
products is made possible in
Third World countries by the small-scale distribution channels of
these products that
makes ample use of informal and semiformal distributors and
retails outlets that reduce
the final cost to the consumer in poor areas. Alonso (1981), for
example, uses his study
of neighborhood stores in Mexico City to argue that they are, in
fact, a form of disguised
employees of these large corporations. Bromley (1978) makes a
similar argument with
respect to some street vendors (particularly ice cream and
newspaper vendors) in
Columbia.
Thirdly, of
course, is the production of goods by informal
enterprises—small
workshops, homeworkers and even “sweatshop”
factories—that either produce directly
for consumers or, because of competitive outsourcing by formal
firms fighting to lower
their costs, as suppliers of labor-intensive intermediate goods
for formal factories and
distributors. While this area of the informal economy lies
outside the purview of this
anthology, it is probably one of the most studied areas of the
informal economy given the
bias against retail activities in the literature (a bias that
this anthology hopes to alleviate).
Finally, in
reference to luxury markets, the growth of the informal economy
in
Southern Italy and Miami has been tied to the growth of luxury
niche markets in these
areas (Portes et al, 1989). In the case of street vending this is
most apparent in the growth
of “Farmers Markets” in the United States and their
equivalents in other First World
nations, that sell high priced vegetables and fruits to
discerning consumers who may want
organic foods of feel assured of the freshness of their produce.
Going back to
Le Corbusier’s modernist vision of urban space, the informal
economy, and street vending in particular, would very much
provoke in the modernist
that “sensation, so insupportable to man, of shapelessness,
of poverty, of disorder, of
wilfulness.” To the extent that the modernist ideal was
shared by elites in the First and
Third Worlds alike (particularly in as much as Third World elites
considered
“modernization” to imply the approximation of the
modernist ideal in external form), the
presence of large street markets were the clearest sign of the
“disorder” and “wilfulness”
of the informal economy that must needs be stamped out.
In his
classic study, Peddlers and Princes, (1963) the
anthropologist Clifford
Geertz reflected the belief shared by most scholars at the
time—that street markets and
bazaars were part of a romantic past that had little place in the
“modern” world.
According to the modernist developmental vision that permeated
the scholarship of the
1950s and 1960s, these forms of commerce were seen as backward,
inefficient and
detrimental to national development schemes, taking up and
wasting resources that could
be better spent in more productive fashion. From a cultural
perspective, Geertz argued
that the "bazaar economy" hampered the development of a
western style "firm-centered"
economy. For example, he argued that .the practice of haggling
that he saw as typical of
bazaar settings focuses competition onto the relationship between
the vendor and the
buyer over the value of the goods involved rather than between
vendors themselves. This,
he argued, leads traders to act speculatively and
opportunistically, since,"...the aim is
always to get as much as possible out of the deal immediately at
hand. The (bazaar) trader
is perpetually looking for a chance to make a smaller or larger
killing, not attempting to
build up a clientele or a steadily growing business" (35).
Even though it employs huge
numbers of individuals, Geertz maintained that this system,
"has the disadvantage that it
turns even the established businessman away from an interest in
reducing costs and
developing markets and toward petty speculation and short-run
opportunism" (28-29).
Similarly, Bairoch (1973), writing for the International Labor
Office, lamented the
development of an “over-distended
tertiary”—encompassing services and commerce--
that threatened to undermine national development plans by
placing a drag on the
economy. Why this growth was occurring despite expectations to
the contrary was little
considered, however, beyond suggestions of cultural and
educational backwardness.
It is
interesting to remark on McGee’s (1973) study on street
vending in Hong
Kong, a rapidly industrializing colony at the time. He notes that
industrialists appealed to
the colonial administration to repress street vending because of
a labor shortage in the
growing industrial sector at the time, attacking vendors for
their “laziness” in choosing
street vending over factory work. The fact is, McGee points out,
that street vendors
simply felt they could earn more on the streets than in the wage
sector. In my own
research vendors have many times claimed that street vending is
also a life style choice,
allowing them greater personal freedom and flexibility (see also
Bobea, this volume).
Street
vending thus came under savage attack throughout the modernist
era. While
one of the criticisms lodged against this activity was its
purported inefficiency, the real
problem was it was too competitive with formal retail outlets,
unless they were located in
optimal “modern” areas. Supermarkets could not put
street vendors out of business
through market mechanisms, they had to use the police system to
do it. The solution,
therefore was to ban or over-regulate street vendors while at the
same time redesigning
urban spaces in which they could no longer exist. Suburban
subdivisions, urban decay and
urban renewal projects were all a vigorous part of this process
in the First World. In the
Third World, the same processes were obviously put in place, but
with varying success
due to the lack of modernist penetration of society and the
increased power of those in
the informal economy themselves to evade or resist the modernist
encroachment on their
livelihoods. In Mexico City, for example, an extraordinarily
expensive program managed
to banish street vending for just under a decade in the 1960s,
but it subsequently
reemerged stronger than ever (Cross 1998b; and this volume). In
Los Angeles, California,
on the other hand, where street vending was also effectively
banished in the late 1950s, it
didn’t become a significant factor again until the 1980s.
But reemerge
they did, as the modernist dream crumbled into postmodern
reality.
In doing so, however, they did not simply signal a return to a
romanticized past, but
created a rational reaction to the economic, cultural and social
world of today.
Postmodernism as a movement, if we can think of it as such, is
concerned first and
foremost with the individual’s attempt to regain control
over their lives—control that is
lost in today’s society of mass-production factories and
corporate offices. This is
reflected in the renewed growth of small businesses since the
1980s, as the middle class
seeks to avoid the control of salaried labor. But many are
finding that the burden of
regulations means that they have simply exchanged one form of
control for another.
Another option is the informal economy, particularly for the poor
of the Third World.
Street vending, since it takes advantage of public space—and
this is in fact where most of
the struggle lies—and thus minimizes overhead costs of rent
and utilities, is ideally suited
for informal growth, to the extent that it can withstand hostile
attempts to over-regulate
or eliminate it, either through evasion, negotiation, or
conflict.
Organization of the volume
The
research articles included in this anthology reflect a variety of
theoretical and
practical perspectives of street vending in today’s
postmodern world. While few of them
are explicitly postmodern in their approach, they offer to the
reader a broad
understanding of the dynamics of today’s street vendors and
street markets, both in the
First World and in the Third. We have organized these
contributions loosely into four
broad categories, although most of them overlap in terms of their
topic and approach into
several possible categories.
In the first
section, focusing on research questions, Ray Bromley provides a
broad
overview of street vending, public policy, and private
initiatives, based on decades of
research in a variety of different nations in Chapter 2. He
brings this research to bear on a
descriptive and explanatory analysis of the paradoxical
coexistence of policies to
persecute, regulate, tolerate, and promote street vending. He
discusses how these policies
are applied to influence the spacio-temporal distribution of
street vending, the number of
vendors, their trading practices and the types of goods and
services they can offer. He
discusses the mix of policies in the context of political and
economic conditions that vary
over time and place which reflect a dynamic equilibrium between
conflicting views and
interest groups.
In Chapter 3,
Steve Balkin and Alfonso Morales show how street vending has
become integrated into the world wide web through a web site
organized by the authors
that has assisted the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving art
vendors in New York
City and has become a forum for the exchange of research on this
activity between
scholars and practitioners in the First and Third Worlds.
In the second
section, focusing on micro and meso case studies, I provide in
Chapter 4 an ethnographic discussion of the history of a family
of street vendors in
Mexico City. The chapter illustrates a family case history of a
family based enterprise
that began during a period of severe repression against vending
but survived to go on to
become an entrepreneurial career path for their children. By
expanding laterally, rather
than vertically, the family is able to establish stalls in
various market places in the city
simultaneously while pooling common resources in order to
maximize efficiency.
In chapter 5,
Dominick Dellino provides an economic anthropology analysis of
street vending in Nicaragua during a transition period from
Sandinista to post-Sandinista
rule. Locating his work in an historical narrative, Dellino finds
that the flexibility of street
vending allows informal street traders a special advantage due to
their ability to adapt
rapidly during a period of hyperinflation—a situation that
changed with the advent of
tighter inflationary control and extremely high unemployment
under the Chamorro regime.
In chapter 6,
Recep Varcin unpacks the typical assumption of street vending:
that
it is generally individualistic and competitive in his research
on street markets in Ankara,
Turkey. Varcin carefully shows how market traders make economic
decisions in a
competitive environment, and identifies three groups of vendors
in terms of the goals and
strategies that they pursue: profit maximizers, risk minimizers,
and marginal traders. The
chapter explores the significance of economies of scale,
ethnicity and localism as three
important “externally identifiable” characteristics
around which market traders mobilize
their resources and restrict the access of opportunity to
“eligibles.”
In chapter 7,
Stein Nesvag studies another approach to street
vending—ethnic
niche markets—with an analysis of African medicine vendors
in Durban, South Africa.
Nesvag’s analysis is further enriched because the research
crosses the boundaries between
a culturally repressive apartheid period and a post-apartheid
explosion of self-realization
on the part of the majority African population. Still, he shows
that even in the post-
apartheid era street vending is seen as an eyesore and a problem,
creating a complex
political dynamic with a new regime whose legitimacy is based on
its African roots.
Finally, in
Chapter 8, Elena Obukuva provides an interesting study of another
niche market for street vendors—newspaper venders in
Nigeria. Obukuva shows how the
formal newspaper industry has become completely dependent on the
informal
distribution channels provided by distributors and vendors.
Studying this process during
a period of economic decline and heightened political insecurity
and repression, Obukuva
shows how the informal distributors have adapted to declining
incomes and government
repression, helping to assure the continuation of the newspaper
industry.
In the third
section we focus on cultural issues of how street vendors are
defined
by society, by elites and by themselves. In chapter 9, Bobea
provides an ethnographic
analysis of the “hidden transcripts” upon which
Dominican women in New York organize
their vending businesses and survive in the face of typically
oppressive state regulation
and control. Bobea counters the negative stereotype of vendors as
agents of disorder and
disease to reveal the beneficial hidden transcripts of
independence and self-esteem within
street commerce.
In chapter
11, Ann Dupuis and Anne de Bruin study an ethnic street market in
New Zealand. As New Zealand has reacted to global transformation
and the new
international division of labor, the national response to these
changes has led to radical
welfare state restructuring. The result has been high
unemployment rates, especially
among the ethnic Maoris and Pacific Islanders who live in Otara,
a suburb of Auckland.
Dupuis and de Bruin focus their analysis on how the street market
allows individuals and
the community to react and adapt to these changes, allowing for
the expression of
positive individual and ethnic identities.
In the final
section, we turn to political issues related to street vending.
In chapter
12 Loretta Bass examines the problems faced by vendors in Senegal
when city officials
widen a street adjacent to their market. Hierarchies based on
gender, age and class define
the power and available material resources that the market
sellers were able to marshal to
influence their own situations in this context of rapid social
change. Bass shows how
these factors intersect to determine whether vendors are
positively or negatively affected
by the changes.
In chapter
13, Loran Cutsinger shows how officials in Barbados have
attempted to
relocate a street market in a tourist area because of the
“inconvenience” of the market to
the tourist industry, even while street stalls are used as a
tourist symbol, reproduced on
mugs, t-shirts and other tourist items. Cutsinger shows how
street vendors have emerged
as an important part of the tourist trade in Barbados, tied into
the postmodern emphasis
on “authentic” tourist experiences, but also how the
reality of street markets clashes with
government concerns to present a “modern” image to the
tourist market.
Chapter 15 presents a reanalysis of my
research on the political struggle of street
vendors in Mexico City as a form of postmodern social movement
responding to
government attempts to “order” street vending in that
city. By looking at two historical
periods of government repression against street vending, the
first on a city-wide level and
the second in the city center, I compare between
“modernist” and “postmodernist”
government attacks on street vending, and how street vendors have
adapted to challenge
the government’s control of public space.
Finally, in
the conclusion, Alfonso Morales and Steve Balkin present a
convincing
argument in favor of street vending in the postmodern world.
Rather than being seen as a
problem, they urge government officials to understand the
benefits that street markets can
bring to urban areas in terms of jobs, service provision, and
community development, and
to work with street vendors rather than against them to resolve
problems that emerge.
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