Street vending as urban inhabitation: materialities, epistemes, and city-making in Karachi and Mumbai

Abstract

This contribution approaches street vending as a form of urban inhabitation. Our focus lies in illuminating street vending as an urban episteme: a vernacular practice that showcases intimate knowledge of inhabiting urban space in conditions of extreme precarity. Drawing on ethnographic research in, and an epistemic friendship across, Karachi, Pakistan and Mumbai, India, we trace the materiality of vending practices as they unfold across two modalities of inhabitation. Firstly, we discuss street vending as inventive; assembled through (forced) daily improvisations that draw in the city’s infrastructure and transform public space in ways that enfold other citizens and enable affordances beyond economic exchange. Secondly, we dwell on vending’s hybrid objects and spaces to indicate the socio-materiality of vending as fluid and thereby holding a range of different capacities of urban inhabitation in which knowledge of the urban, bodily labour, and technologies are ever-evolving to cope with difficult environments. We contend that paying attention to this dynamic relation can foreground the often overlooked urban knowledge constituting the city’s margins. Thinking with STS scholarship and Southern urbanism, we argue for a renewed focus on materialising street vending and demonstrate that street vending constitutes a crucial form of city-making in the South.

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