Street vendors and the right to the city

By: Gideon Lasco - 4 months ago

When the street vendors in various parts of Manila were driven away in Mayor Isko Moreno’s campaign,
media reports and public reactions alike were mostly glowing with praise. “Devotees of the Black
Nazarene can now properly see its image … without vendors blocking their view,” read one report. “At
last, the law is being implemented!” read one comment on “before” and “after” images of once-
crowded streets. Of course, there are merits to cleaning up the city — just as there seems to be some
promise in the nascent mayoralty of Isko Moreno. I lived in a boarding house in Orosa Street for four
years, and having had to walk through Malate every day, I can understand the desire for order and
cleanliness particularly in our capital city. In light of the disillusionment brought about by President
Duterte, I can also understand the desire for someone like the good yorme.

I worry, however, about the impact of policies like Moreno’s on the people most affected by them.
While I use Manila as a starting point, evictions of street vendors actually happen around the world. Just
last year, Thai authorities embarked on a similar campaign in Bangkok. Moreover, I worry about the idea
that the poor themselves need to be “cleaned up.” The mostly laudatory articles, for instance, rarely ask
what will become of the vendors, and if the government has a plan for and with them. Informing this
indifference is the problematization of the urban poor as a liability.

A fuller appreciation of people’s lifeworlds and informal economies, however, should challenge this
view. In the first place, as the development practitioner Martha Chen points out, street vendors actually
contribute to the urban economy — for instance, by buying supplies from wholesalers and selling low-
cost goods (e.g. cheap food) in accessible locations. Even if many of them are below the taxable income
bracket and are financially precarious, vendors give various payments, both formal (e.g. permits) and
informal (e.g. bribes to syndicates and even barangay officials). They are also indirectly taxed through
VAT.

To blame the street vendors for the chaos of the city, moreover, is to detract attention from the failed
and inequitable policies that have led to urban poverty and exclusion, not least of which is the
privatization of our public spaces (see Lefebvre 1968). The “mallification” of Metro Manila and its lack of
public parks have meant that the streets are the only space left as a venue for buying and selling cheap
goods; in most cases, these streets were built with cars — not people — in mind. All of these points
refute the argument that the eviction of street vendors is a mere matter of implementing the law. Laws
and ordinances have a political economy; they come from and perpetuate particular — mostly elite —
sensibilities and interests. As with the dilemma surrounding informal settlers (see Harvey 2008), we
cannot take them out of their political and socioeconomic context.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that we should let chaos reign on the streets, or ignore vital imperatives
like security or food safety. All I’m arguing for is the need to place the interests of the working poor on
the same table as those of the rest of the public. As one Bangkok vendor put it: “They can clean up the
streets but please don’t get rid of us entirely.”
This is not an impossible compromise. Tangible steps forward have succeeded in other cities, such as
giving vendors access to public utilities and resources (including food safety courses); creating fair,
efficient and transparent processes to get permits; providing venues for trade (e.g. Singapore’s hawker
centers); eliminating syndicates and corrupt officials; and empowering street vendors to organize
themselves. To his credit, Moreno claims that he has plans along these lines. I can only hope that
beyond the spectacle of a “cleanup,” he will indeed follow through and work with urban planners, as
well as the vendors themselves, to make Manila a model of inclusive development. Evicting street
vendors may hold some political expediency, but mayors who truly care for their constituencies will
recognize and uphold their right to the city.

Reference: https://www.google.com/amp/s/opinion.inquirer.net/122981/street-vendors-and-the-right-to-the-city/amp
 Street vendors in Manila: The neglect of how the city’s other half live
By Redento B. Recio via The Conversation- March 22, 2019
Street vendors in Manila
While street vendors work in plain sight, they are “off the map” in the eyes of city officials and planners.
(Redento Recio via The Conversation) About 2.5 billion people, or half of the global labour force, work in
the informal economy, the International Labour Organisation estimates. In developing Asian countries,
more than 50% of the urban labour force is in informal work. Street vending is the most visible form of
this. Yet no accurate statistics on street vendors are available. Official planning documents do not
include informal trading activities; they are “off the map”. This invisibility largely stems from state rules
that consider street vending illegal. Amid the harsh policies, street vendors devise ways to cope with
poverty and their insecure livelihood.

In the Baclaran district of Metro Manila, the capital of the Philippines, informal hawkers have resorted
to several arrangements to gain financial capital or grow their small enterprises. These hawkers sell
clothes, shoes, housewares, toys, gadgets, fresh fruits and vegetables, among other things. Baclaran
street vendors occupy a street under a rail track. (Redento Recio via The Conversation)
Some hawkers who want to avoid shelling out cash resort to the hango (harvest) system. Hango is a
consignment agreement between hawkers and their suppliers where the former pays for the goods
after a day of vending. Fruit juice vendor Frederic* said: “[Under hango], we could sell without financial
capital. In the morning we obtain our goods from the suppliers, and pay them in the evening.”

What options do vendors have?

For vendors who need capital, typically in the range of ₱3,000 (A$79) to ₱300,000 (A$790), five options
are possible. The first is assistance from family. The second is a credit window from a vendors’
cooperative. But these mechanisms have limitations. Family assistance is often exclusive to relatives and
relies on the financial capacity of the lending individuals. The cooperative assists only those associate
members with semi-fixed stalls. The third scheme is paluwagan (to ease), a mutual savings scheme.
During the peak season (September to December), paluwagan allows vendors to put aside extra profits
to see them through lean months. The daily share ranges from ₱50 (A$1.30) to ₱1,000 (A$26). While
some vendors fail to join paluwagan due to evictions and poor sales, others initiate it even after the
peak season. Vendor Nelly* noted: “For us, it’s all year round because it augments our capital.”

Referencehttps: //www.google.com/amp/www.interaksyon.com/politics-issues/2019/03/22/146181/manila-street-vendors-neglect-loan-
sharks/amp/:
 OPINION: Let’s treat street vendors as people, not problems
Written by Ragene Andrea L. Palma
Updated Jul 15, 2019 4:04:13 PM
Our attitudes on how to plan for our street vendors reveals citizen values — who do we actually plan for? Photo by JL JAVIER
Editor’s note: Ragene Andrea L. Palma is an urban planner who advocates for inclusive cities. She has worked with the UN
HABITAT for local economic development. She volunteers with the group People Make Cities!, which works on public spaces,
placemaking, and socio-spatial issues in planning. Any opinion stated in this piece is hers. Manila (CNN Philippines Life) —
Everyday, Jun sells taho at the corner of a street block, under a tree. He has a lot of customers who line up for their rushed,
warm soy breakfast on the way to work. Jun’s dad sits beside him, white-haired, and looking up from the tree root that makes a
good seat. He used to be the one selling taho, but he’s too old now, so Jun has to take over for the family.

Aling Mila is across the street, on the edge of a sidewalk, her back to a smelly and dirty creek. She puts coins, candies, cigarette
sticks, and boiled saba bunches in a box with dividers, and waits for her loyal customers to drop by. She knows them only by
face, but she always smiles at them. She leans on a rusty rail because her back isn’t as good as it used to be. “Mas malakas ako
nung bata [ako],” she says. Jun and Aling Mila are both street vendors in Metro Manila, with day-to-day earnings that are barely
enough for their families to get by. There are so many others who share their daily struggles. But many people — even those
who buy from their sidewalk goods — agree how they should be cleared from where they stay, for the sake of having “cleaner”
cities.

With the recent clearing and cleaning of Carriedo and the directives for a disciplined city of Manila, photos of the rapid
transformation of cleared streets have drawn both criticism and praise online. Some applauded the initiative, calling it a long-
awaited “bath” of the old capital, while others made callouts to the clearing process, asking how inclusive it actually was. The
2017 Labor Force Survey showed that the country had at least 15.6 million informal sector workers (or 38 percent) in the
Philippines, contributing to 5 trillion, or a third of the country’s GDP. Our informal sector is part of what the International
Labour Organization reports to be a 2 billion worldwide informal economy, and what journalist Robert Neuwirth calls a
“powerful force.”

Debates about street vendors and the informal sector have revolved around the use of public spaces for years now. Many
throw arguments on legality (Why encourage something illegal? Why do they get to skip taxes while the rest of us pay?), the
encroachment of public space (using shared spaces as their own private stalls), and in the case of Manila, the problems of
sanitation, petty crime, and a myriad other developmental issues that have hounded the city for decades. There are also
generalizations that some street vendors are also drug dealers or part of syndicates — with Manila, this thinking is
understandable. But equating the entire sector to crime is misguided; many street vendors are simply trying to make ends
meet. Their lack of protection, which is provided in formal industries, is worsened by our general perception, making them all
the more vulnerable.

"If we deprive street vendors and the informal sector of the use of spaces where natural markets have sprouted, where foot
traffic has increased, and where culture has been created, then we deprive them of one of their basic rights: Their right to the
city."
In urban studies, the phenomenon of urbanization tells us how more and more people will stream into our overcrowded cities.
With beliefs in the opportunities that migration brings, our urban environments will be pressured to cater to the needs for
survival — and not all means of this are formal. In the urban website CityLab, studies show that “the number of people will
likely continue to outpace the availability of formal employment.”

The essence of inclusive cities is how we plan, design, and govern for the people who use spaces. If we deprive street vendors
and the informal sector of the use of spaces where natural markets have sprouted, where foot traffic has increased, and where
culture has been created, then we deprive them of one of their basic rights: Their right to the city. Often judged to be
“eyesores” in what many prefer to be manicured landscapes, people miss the value that street vendors bring to our cities. They
encourage foot traffic because of their transactions, bringing more vibrancy to streets. Vibrancy helps the local (and also
formal) economies thrive. Vibrancy encourages our urban environments to become more people-oriented, leading to
pedestrianization, and more walkable cities.

Reference:https://cnnphilippines.com/life/culture/2019/7/15/urban-planning-vendors.html?fbclid=IwAR2