Informal Urban Street Markets by Clifton Evers Kirsten Seale

Author:Clifton Evers, Kirsten Seale [Clifton Evers, Kirsten Seale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138546394
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

What emerge are relationships between and negotiations of “striated space” and “smooth space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Striated space is ordered, systematic, restricted, and closed. Smooth space is heterogeneous and transgressive, a multiplicity of diverse connections, encounters, and becomings. These are not opposed models but rather “the two spaces in fact coexist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to smooth space” (p. 23). It is a process “perpetually in construction or collapsing” (p. 22).

Police and chengguan (‘urban management officers’) did the enforcing of striated space.5 Chengguan have no legal authority, but are used by the government to augment police in enforcing municipal laws, regulations, and codes. The crackdowns were particularly worrisome for vendors without a Shanghai hukou card—a place- specific urban residency card connected to a registration system. Some of the street vendors who were becoming- tricycle at the Pengpu night market were migrant workers (mingong). They arrive from rural or regional areas outside Shanghai. Migrants move to Shanghai from provinces such as Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, and Sichuan. Urbanization has involved a large population movement (liudong renkou) to the major cities (Meng et al., 2010). Nationally, in 2011 there were at least 262.1 million migrant workers (Shanghai Municipal Information Office, 2012). The flow of people became regulated because of the pressures it brought to bear on city space and resources, as well as government services, planning, and finances. The regulation (blockage) to the flow of people occurs via the resident registration system (hukou) (Cai, 2000; Meng et al., 2010). Without a place- specific urban residency card the migrants have only limited access to various social services, such as schools, health care, work, and pension insurance (Meng et al., 2010).6 As Dianne Currier (2003) points out, assemblages occur in relation to “regimes of signs and relations of power,” which aim to and can “achieve a meta- stability” (p. 327).

People move to Shanghai to find employment, although some of the younger people also seek adventure and to escape the ‘boredom’ of village life, as one young vendor told me. The migrants use kin (xueyuan) and place-ties (diyuan) to raise money and purchase their tricycle and goods to sell, or to make adaptations to their tricycles in order to offer services. Some get their start- up capital by borrowing from the pooled savings (jīxù) of their working group (dānwèi). Informal banking is common in China (Tsai, 2002). Becoming- tricycle and the concomitant street vending have low barriers to entry in terms of cost and education, which makes it possible for people to generate livelihoods for themselves. Some people choose vending owing to its flexible work hours and for social and cultural reasons, such as gender, interaction, physicality, and tradition. Becoming- tricycle provides opportunities for livelihoods over which people may have more control; for example, it provides working conditions that are flexible for those with a high degree of familial duties. Also, becoming- tricycle is a way of avoiding the somewhat Kafkaesque red tape and bureaucracy of the Chinese government.

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