‘No one can just occupy the space without our permission’: informal governance mechanisms and the politics of street traders’ access to space in Harare’s contested Central Business District (CBD)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing from focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines how street traders in Harare (Zimbabwe) negotiate and regulate access to trading spaces among themselves. While most studies on street trading focus on state – trader conflicts and traders’ resistance to exclusionary practices, this study shifts attention to the often-overlooked role of informal governance mechanisms that traders employ to regulate access to space. The findings reveal that access to vending space by street traders is negotiated through a range of informal mechanisms, including social control practices, personal networks, and, in some cases, heritability. The ability to negotiate and secure space is highly differentiated, often shaped by gender, experience, traders’ status and social influence within the vending community. The study therefore calls for a more nuanced understanding of intra-informal dynamics and everyday forms of governance that structure life in informal urban economies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".