The new criminal laws are in order, with the very first FIR filed under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) against a street vendor encroaching into public property close to the Kamla Nagar area in Delhi. Deeply intrigued, I realize the lack of space-quite literally- that we allocate for our informal, local and self-managed systems of commerce. 

Taking out your car in Delhi is like waging a war against the city, in all of its glory. Your car vs the traffic, potholes, cows, e-rickshaws and the street vendors negotiating their right to the city everyday. Perhaps this once imperial, subaltern capital is in itself in a constant battle between its post-colonial identity and the growth it promised the nation post independence, like a dependable eldest-child.

Allow me to zoom out and map out this ‘tryst’ we signed with our destiny as a global giant constantly brimming with hysteria of displacement. It was the British who decided to convert this city of bazaars, music and poetry to one of brutal efficiency while segregating the native from the aristocracy. Following the same rationality of their political predecessors, the new democratic government deemed street vending illegal, in defiance of proper civic behavior. Despite being an intrinsic part of our culture, street vendors had to survive  through self-managed systems, and other resourceful ways to compensate for their lack of legitimization through all these years. 

It took our nation 67 years to acknowledge them as such and brought in the Street Vendors Act in 2014. Under the act the vendors are now issued certificates to practice their business in specified vending zones. These sterile color-coded masterplans bear no resemblance to our indigenous Indian culture of the streets and instead replicate a Eurocentric view of the cities of the global north- the only acceptable paradigm of progress and growth (Roy,2011). Buried deep under these assumptions are the lived experiences of the cities of the south vouching for a global identity which offers humble reverence to the alternate lifestyles and values of their communities. The more notable evil rooting out of such imperialist knowledge is the stigma that we have internalized, as residents and designers. 

Stigma is one of the more popular tools of disinvestment which enables us to destabilize already struggling urban communities in defense of the ‘disgrace’ they offer to our urban landscapes. Such stereotypes sanction polarization of our urban resources to support the more universalized forms of urban geographies and marks informal housing and commerce as critical urban issues to be resolved. New, pristine urban spaces are devised to reinforce the narratives of global cities, while we deprive our urban poor of the opportunities and care the cities owe them. Another loss we seldom highlight is the loss of social capital our cities face when we disregard these self-managed systems of survival instead of enabling our urban communities to form alternate systems of partnerships with our civic-local economies.

As designers it is imperative for us to understand that this conflict between the market, state and our disadvantaged urban communities, cannot be navigated with the static planning systems that we have inherited from our colonial predecessors (Watson, 2006). This brings in a a specific responsibility for everyone contributing to the discourse regarding our subaltern cities to amplify the lived experiences of the global south and to protect our marginalized communities in the present backdrop of urban poverty. It is extremely important for urban practitioners to offer the same care to planning of our informal systems of commerce as we offer to their formal counterparts. 

Wider the gap between urban poverty, rapid urbanization, globalization of social entities and the state interventions in regulating our urban spaces, stronger is the need to develop a new interface to plug into these interactions with the aid of design and discourse. It is necessary for urban practitioners to devise alternate models of urbanity which are rooted in action and temporality instead of permanence of the physical real estate.  Instead of reinforcing the stereotype of considering informal vending as an urban inconvenience perhaps we need to consider  the idea of resourceful social-capital that these systems bring to the table. Instead of imagining our city spaces as static, permanent entities we can perhaps embrace the unpredictability of our social practices and plan our cities accordingly. 

We should plan for spaces that encourage such local practices which produce spaces instead of being passive participants. Such spaces won’t just encourage local economies but also build socio-economic resilience of the local communities. For instance what if our informal systems of commerce corresponded to the local urban issues of the communities around like food insecurity, lack of safety, vulnerability to climate change or other unpredictable conditions of urbanity like mass-migration, natural calamities etc.? Such ideas might sound incredulous considering these vulnerable systems are barely capable of protecting themselves from such adversities. But it is equally important for us to acknowledge that local communities and social systems have been known to be more capable providers of social welfare in such situations. Plugging our formal modes of welfare with our local informal actors might deem better results for our urban and pre-urban ecologies in comparison to centralized state welfare programs. What role would conventional governance play in these new models of publicness? How would these local models be then plugged into other impermanent regional networks of urban spaces and economies? (Verma,2023)

It is for us urban practitioners to challenge the conventional notions of cities and urban to negotiate the need for this new interface to counter the urban issues we have inherited. How do we extract the vulnerability of illegitimacy from our marginalized counterparts and instead accept them as custodians of our city’s cultural ethos? How do we build a city where informal vendors aren’t assumed to be encroaching on our spot but instead are acknowledged as equal contributors to our economies and cities?