‘Displace, Dump and Cage?’: Contested logics of formalization of street trading in Harare and Kumasi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the contested logics of spatial formalization of street trading in Harare (Zimbabwe) and Kumasi (Ghana), two cities shaped by the complex interplay of rising urban informality, colonial legacies, and modernist urban aspirations. Both cities have witnessed increasing tensions between state-driven urban planning initiatives and the everyday spatial practices of informal street traders, who rely on public spaces for their livelihoods. We argue that the spatial rationalities of urban officials in both cities fundamentally clash with the spatial practices and survival strategies of street traders. Urban authorities view spatial formalization as a governing technology aimed at exerting control over urban space, often justifying it through discourses of order, modernity, and economic development. This logic aligns with broader efforts to sanitize and regulate public spaces, reinforcing exclusionary urban policies that seek to marginalize informal trade in favor of structured, state-sanctioned economic activities. However, from the perspective of street traders, these formalization efforts are experienced as acts of displacement, economic dispossession, and spatial exclusion. Traders contest these interventions by developing their own adaptive strategies, including informal negotiations with authorities, strategic mobility, and collective resistance. However, bold resistance to spatial formalization is more prominent in Kumasi compared to Harare due to different political environment. Our study contributes to scholarly discourse on the power dynamics, urban governance tensions, and the everyday struggles of informal workers in the face of state-imposed spatial formalization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".