Case for rehabilitating informal street vendors through spatial planning in Kolkata, India

Informal Street Vendors of Kolkata, India

Over the decades, India has witnessed an ever-evolving relationship between the formal and informal economies at the scale of the neighborhood. This is a phenomenon also reflected in the case study of Kolkata. In the streets of Kolkata, both licensed and unlicensed street vendors and peddlers are not only essential for keeping alive the city’s street food heritage, but also often act as commission agents on behalf of the organized sector retailers to make goods affordable for the greater public (Chatterji & Roy, 2016). The city that was once known for the symbiotic codependence and coexistence of people of different socio-economic strata, is now becoming increasingly segregated. With deepening patterns of socio-economic polarization given forced evictions of squatters in response to efforts of modernization, the urban poor are becoming further marginalized.

The growth of street vending activities in Kolkata can be linked to the contraction of its manufacturing and other formal economic opportunities. The unorganized sector accounts for a staggering 90.25% of the non-agricultural employment in West Bengal, and an estimated 1,6 million people work as street vendors, while in Kolkata the numbers range between a 270,000 and 300,000 (Chatterji & Roy, 2016). Inarguably, the current spatial conditions of the hawkers are detrimental to the quality of urban life. The issue of road congestion has increased over the past decades given the dominance of carriageways by motor vehicles and the occupation of sidewalks by street vendors—leading to a spillover of pedestrians onto the streets (Sarkar, 2016). At the same time, the city notes a trend of the urban middleclass retreating to greenfield gated suburban townships which neglect to account for the informal sector (Chatterji & Roy, 2016). Overall, this has resulted in the emergence of a fragmented spatial structure with the middle classes and globalizing sectors of the economy moving towards the fringes of the city, leaving participants of the informal economy to survive in the inner core. These changing relations between the informal and formal economies demands a further evaluation of the lived spaces in the informal bazaar city and its long-term sustainability.

Many rehabilitation projects over the years have been unsuccessful. Such failures can be linked to short-sightedness and unrealistic relocation practices, for instance, with the redevelopment of municipal markets (single-storied bazaars) in the inner city into multi-storied complexes in order to rehabilitate hawkers. The on-time construction of these multi-storied blocks in congested sites proved to be difficult. Nonetheless, the hawkers refused to move into such multi-storied structures with concerns regarding the higher rental demands from authorities and apprehension at the idea of losing customers by abandoning their vantage points along the sidewalks of busy streets (Chatterji & Roy, 2016).

Such observations reinforce the importance of enhancing urban health and vibrancy by leveraging streets and marketplaces across the city. A successful case study is that of Singapore.

Learning from the Hawker Centers of Singapore

The hawkers are so centrally ingrained into the urban fabric of Singapore that the country recently led a successful campaign to have “Hawker Culture in Singapore” inscribed to the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Pillai, 2020). I bring up the example of Singapore not only because of this remarkable success, but also because not long ago, the island too had opted for the rehousing of populations to the outskirts of the city for which they had to reconsider the rehabilitation of street peddlers.

In 1965, the newly independent government of Singapore sought to redevelop the city center, which was then filled with slums, into a business district. In order to achieved this, they needed to create housing outside the center to relocate existing inhabitants. When the Housing and Development Board (HDB) began the development of public housing in the 70s, urban planners realized hawker centers as part of the housing estates (Kumar, 2016). The practice of registration for hawkers was implemented around the same time, formalizing the practices of the once itinerant food vendors and street peddlers with the construction of state-built hawker centers. Today, these hawker centers have evolved into inclusive “community dining rooms” selling affordable and culturally diverse foods. Guidelines dictated that a hawker center was to be built for every 4,000–6,000 households (Kumar, 2016). Centrally locating hawker centers in the townships and urban spaces became key to the success of the rehabilitation project—ensuring a ready supply of clients from neighboring housing estates and providing central marketplaces which serve as community hubs and meeting spaces today for people from all walks of life. In such a way, the Singaporean case study provides a solution as to how spatial developments can contribute to symbiosis and formalization of informal sectors in a city.

A strive towards symbiosis

It is interesting to ask ourselves, what will the streetscape of Kolkata look like fifty years from now? Will we have lost the need for bazaars? Will we only ever go to malls for shopping? What entails the future of street vendors? One thing is for certain that the informal sector of Kolkata cannot be neglected. The hawkers are politically, socio-culturally, and economically ingrained within the fabric of the city—helping shape vital economies, acting as symbiotic linkages in overlooked local food systems, adding to the vibrancy of the neighborhoods with eyes on the street, making retail goods affordable and accessible to the general public, and helping maintain the human scale in a city where skyscrapers are starting to dominate the skyline.

With formalizing vital informal economies comes the demand for spatial solutions and practices of creative placemaking. In Singapore, the hawker centers or food centers are built as open-air complexes with permanent stalls, which serve as a spatial manifestation of the city’s street food heritage. Similar to the Singaporean case study, Kolkata is seeking to shift populations away from the inner core of the city by means of self-contained housing estates—each large enough to sustain its own commercial, institutional and recreational facilities. As part of this effort, the hawker centers (selling retail or cooked food) and wet markets (selling produce) could be constructed, perhaps as single one-storied structures with integrated stalls for occupation, as part of these new housing estates. These will be located within walking distance to the housing blocks, which would provide daily necessities for the community to make the new towns more livable and convenient. Such steps can help not only help increase employment opportunities and lower growth barriers for the sellers and help reduce congestion in the inner city. Ultimately, this strives for symbiosis via spatial practiced can aid in resolving the gap between the formal and informal economies in the city.

Bibliography

Chatterji, T., & Roy, S. (2016). From margin to mainstream: Informal street vendors and local politics in Kolkata, India. L’Espace Politique, (29). https://doi.org/10.4000/espacepolitique.3903

Kumar , T. (2016). It’s No Mirage, It’s A Food Oasis! Singapore; Urban Solutions.

The past and future of Hawker Centres. Urban Redevelopment Authority. (n.d.). Retrieved August 10, 2022, from https://www.ura.gov.sg/Corporate/Resources/Ideas-and-Trends/Hawker-centres

Pillai, P. (2020, December 24). Explained: Singapore's Beloved Street Hawker Culture, now a UNESCO 'Intangible Heritage'. The Indian Express. Retrieved August 10, 2022, from https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/singapore-street-hawker-culture-unesco-intangible-heritage-7116621/

Sarkar, S. (2016). STREET VENDORS IN THE URBAN CORE OF KOLKATA – PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF THEIR REHABILITATION. International Journal Science, Technology and Management, 5(8).