Negotiating space and visibility: Forms of informality in public space

Kamalipour, Hesam ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7216-7115 and Peimani, Nastaran ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1945-2181 2019. Negotiating space and visibility: Forms of informality in public space. Sustainability 11 (17) , 4807. 10.3390/su11174807

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (5MB) | Preview

Abstract

Street trading has become integral to how public space works in cities of the global South. It cannot be considered as marginal since it gears to the urban economy and works as a key mode of income generation for the urban poor to sustain livelihoods. A poor understanding of how forms of street trading work in public space can lead to poor design and policy interventions. While many practices of formalization aim at the elimination of informality, the challenge is to explore the complex informal/formal relations and the dynamics of street trading to understand how forms of informality negotiate space and visibility in the public realm. In this paper, we propose a typology of street trading, based on the criteria of mobility within public space and proximity to public/private urban interfaces. While exploring the degrees of mobility in informal street trading can be crucial to the modes of governance and adaptability involved, of critical importance is to investigate how street trading takes place in relation to the built form—particularly the edges of public space where public/private interfaces enable or constrain exchange and appropriation. The developed typology provides a better understanding of the dynamics of street trading and contributes to the ways in which the built environment professions can most effectively engage with interventions in public space without eradicating the scope for informal adaptations

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL) Architecture
Additional Information:	This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
Publisher:	MDPI
ISSN:	2071-1050
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 September 2019
Date of Acceptance:	28 August 2019
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 02:46
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/125286

Citation Data

Cited 15 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item