Making the invisible visible in city spaces: The hidden labour practices of market traders

Abstract

Research on traditional street markets has demonstrated how markets facilitate the development of diverse social interactions among visitors and provide livelihood-building opportunities for market traders, especially for immigrant newcomers. In this article, we suggest that the literature has, thus far, tended to pay less attention to the everyday work practices of traders that are central to both their livelihood-building opportunities and the creation of street markets as important public spaces of social interactions. Through a case study of the Walthamstow market in East London, we study the labour practices of traders and the spaces they inhabit as workers, both inside the market and outside, to reveal the relatively hidden and underexplored work and skills that bring street markets into being. The ethnographic research findings show that the everyday practices conducted by traders involve night work, long working days and physically strenuous work activities. At the same time, traders are able to negotiate these precarious working conditions through their social relationships and processes of enskillment. We conclude that it is only by making the invisible visible that the labour and skills of those who make our urban spaces work can be recognised, (re-)valued and legitimised. This is not only important in providing ammunition for strategies to improve the generally precarious working conditions of traders, but it can also be used as leverage in coalition-building strategies to resist the additional threat of displacement that so many traders around the world face as the result of neoliberal redevelopment processes.

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