Unpacking Urban Environmental Visions and Contestations of Street Vendors in Kolkata, West Bengal

Street vendors, more popularly known as “hawkers” in South Asia, constitute a visible part of the urban informal population in India and often settle down for sale in public spaces like city streets, sidewalks, and overpasses. This, however, comes into conflict with the “environmental” visions of middle-class citizens who desire to live in a world class city that is spectacular, hygienic, and centered around bourgeois aesthetics. As a result, street vendors are routinely targeted, dispossessed, and evicted. This is partly due to a vision of city planning and beautification, which considers entry points to urban informal economies as illegitimate and problematic. Moreover, the state perceives street vending spaces in the city as antithetical to the making of a world class city. In this paper, we examine the urban environment as a socio-political category where street-based livelihood activities, despite being popularly seen as a “city hazard” formatively proliferate through powerfully shaped strategies of politics and governmentality. This work conceptualizes public spaces as part of the urban environment. It proposes the idea of city streets as an “urban resource” which a multitude of actors struggle to control and access. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kolkata, we reveal how street vendors have been able to contest class animated visions of the city through innovative political strategies and effective mobilization, overcoming the common narrative of street vending as a marginalizing practice. The findings prompt us to ask how urban environmental movements and aligned spatial frictions forge important questions on informal organizations and the political unionization of labor in the city of Kolkata.