How can street routines inform state regulation? Learning from informal traders in Baclaran, Metro Manila

Abstract

Informal vendors have occupied the streets of Metro Manila’s Baclaran district since the 1950s. Their presence has generated policies seeking to manage or banish street hawking. Years of street occupancy, however, have enabled the vendors to enforce grassroots mechanisms to appropriate streetscapes. In this paper, I analyse three routinised practices – the haging occupancy, the Bermonths routine and the various finance-generating schemes – that have enabled vendors to persist amidst the changing socio-political conditions. These practices capture the Baclaran hawkers’ insecure access to contested spaces, how they capitalise on a socio-temporal dimension of informality, how they cope with economic distress, and how they enforce a set of property rights arrangements. Understanding these grassroots practices, which are embedded in the precarity of street life, can inform responsive policies on urban informal trading.