Abstract Book of the 8th World Conference on Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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Rethinking ‘Aesthetic Environments’ in Cities: Politics, Resistance, and Informal Street Vending in Kolkata, West Bengal
Madhubarna Dhar, Amrita Sen, Archana Patnaik
ABSTRACT:
Street vendors constitute a defining component in most cities of the South, and India is no exception. However, with many Indian cities being framed as the main drivers of the nation’s economy, there has been an increasing intolerance towards their presence in public spaces. Street vendors, popularly known as ‘hawkers’ in South Asia, are threatened, dispossessed, and evicted as they are perceived to be illegitimate, hazardous, and antithetical to the very making of the ‘world-class city.’ While the state favors privatized and sanitized spaces that reflect bourgeois aesthetics, street vending sites tend to be viewed as embarrassing and undesirable in the contemporary urban environment. Fueled by the urban fears of ‘congestion’ and ‘pollution,’ routine crackdowns and extensive cleanup drives have become the norm in Kolkata. Such exclusionary visions have left urban informal actors with contestations, resistance, and political mobilization as the only emancipatory weapons. Through ethnographic interviews and focus group discussions with street vendors and hawker organizations in Kolkata, this study explores how hawkers proliferate and evade eviction attempts through creative strategies and tactics. Furthermore, the empirical data demonstrates that Kolkata’s street vendors are not vote-bank communities but sophisticated political thinkers who use what we call the “politics of neutrality” to vertically voice their concerns and reshape the city from below while remaining ‘apolitically political.’
Keywords: Eviction; Hawkers; Urban Environmentalism; Urban Informality; World-Class City