The Informal Economy & Urban Space

In the marketplace, the intriguing part for me has been the creative ways that wholesale and retail vendors use as they conduct their business. They work in conditions where resources are not plentiful enough and optimum use must be made of whatever is available bringing down the price of the product to what is "affordable" and taking the profits to a daily income that is “reasonable”.

The urban selling space therefore borrows from the public spaces of the city where no price or a small price can reduce or eliminate the overheads related to rent/ownership of a space. Within this space, there are innovative ways that vendors use on an everyday basis to sell better - a balancing act - to meet the expectations of their customers (who's footpath they borrow), the formal shopowners (who's visibility they infringe upon), the municipal officials (who's planning regulations are not adhered to) and the Police (who's law and order situation is made more complex and therefore can result in an extra cost for the vendor).

This post is about the wholesale tomato market that takes place every day outside the Russell market building at Shivajinagar in Bangalore. It is about 6.30 in the morning and the time of the year is mid November. The stretch of road between the Russell market building and the St.Mary’s Basilica which is the site of the tomato market has groups of vendors, people moving from one group of vendors to another; there are auctions either just completed or on-going; there are several tempos and auto-rickshaws that are picking up the sacks of tomatoes that have been bought and need to be taken away from this site to its next destination in the chain of tomato supply for the city.

It is one of the sites where the Informal economy and the City hold their auctions for agricultural produce and for urban space. Here is where vendors and buyers negotiate a price for a daily commodity such as tomatoes and where vendors and municipal authorities negotiate a price for yet another daily commodity – the urban spaces of the city.

1  The Noronha road, the St.Mary’s Basilica, the Russell market and the rest of the city all come together – a piecing together of urban components that people live in, pray in and do their buying and selling in. 

2  In the Google Earth map of Shivajinagar, the site of the tomato market on Noronha road is highlighted in orange, its edges undefined. One can also see the centrality of the Russell market in the urban fabric of Bangalore. There is the St.Mary’s Basilica at the south end and the Market square at the north end.

3  The Russell market building is almost like the “edge” in a drawing or a map. There is the entire stretch of road which is covered, completely covered with people walking, people transacting business, people loading and unloading the trucks with plastic crates or jute sacks filled with tomatoes. 

4  It’s a morning of good sales for the tomato vendor who occupies a permanent place in a “temporary” location just outside the Russell market building but within its compound walls. 

5  One of the vegetable vendors inside the Russell market, Naseem, points out that the tomato vendors have been doing this business on the streets for many years now and have taken away the business of the vendors who are inside the market building. Some vendors who have shops inside the Russell market, also put up their produce for sale on the streets every morning. “But, we don’t do that” he said. “After all, one has to be a little dignified.”

6  The nature of the urban fabric that surrounds this urban space and its informal economy – a mixed use neighbourhood with commercial and residential interlacing with each other

7  More than anything else, it is this mass of people which seems to be the most predominant element in the urban landscape 

8 There are big players and there are small players – some operate as individual vendors and for some it is a family-operated business with several members participating actively every morning in deciding on the right price in an auction.

9 The sale does not end here. The tomatoes travel to another part of the city on a push cart or a hand cart and enter into yet another piece of negotiation. Now, in another part of the city, that street begins to participate in its own negotiation of urban space for the day.

10  I ask myself as I look at this informal but “everyday” tomato market: All seems to be going on seemlessly. How much change do we want? How much better can our city be? And, how can it be better than what it now is?

This post has featured in the DNA - Daily News & Analysis on Jan 2, 2012 and this is the link at Around the Blog

Read about:
a Street Bazaar & the CITY
a Street corner in Mumbai

Marketplaces around the world: an archival film

A really interesting film with a narration that reminded me so much of the way the film ‘Citizen Kane’ begins, the same tone, the same excitement! Perhaps, the identity of the american radio broadcasts from the 1940s and ’50s – a time that many of us know about only through the Hollywood films and now also from historical archives that get online like this one!

MARKET PLACES AROUND THE WORLD

www.britishpathe.com

Peanut festival in Bangalore

The Groundnut (Peanut) Fair, colloquially called the Kadalekai Parishe takes place once a year at Basavanagudi, in close proximity to Gandhi Bazaar. Every year during November-December over 200 vendors come to the city of Bangalore offering for sale tonnes of groundnuts. This photo essay covers the 2011 Fair that took place this week on Nov 21st and 22nd with Bull temple road becoming completely pedestrianised for the two days.

The legend goes that for some years, on every full moon day, a bull would charge into the groundnut fields located here and damage the crop. The farmers then offered prayers to the Nandi Bull to stop this and pledged to offer their first crop. Ever since, farmers and traders come here from the neighbouring villages and towns with cartloads of groundnuts a week in advance and there are visitors to the fair from within the city and from many places nearby.

Groundnut growers, Balloon sellers and the Sugarcane juice vendors

It's late afternoon and the crowds are increasing

Flower sellers in front of the Bull temple

Puffed rice, fried snacks - all part of the fair

Stall selling tapioca chips

Bull temple in the evening with the colourful lights - on the trees, across the road, everywhere!

For anyone who loves blowing bubbles!

It's the third day now and the traffic resumes on Bull temple road - the groundnut vendors will be here for a few more days

The quantum of groundnut has been increasing year after year and in 2010, the business turnover was around 100 million rupees

The numbers of people who come here has increased and last year, more than 0.6 million people participated

The Fair has been organised year after year by the growers themselves and is now also supported by two government institutions - the Department of Muzrai (Religious Endowment) and the Municipal Corporation of Bangalore

The residents of Basavanagudi believe that this tradition must continue and that the groundnut vendors who come from the nearby villages once a year must receive greater support from the city.

As the city of Bangalore expands, the groundnut fields near Bull Temple road move outwards and away from the temple. The relationship between the temple and the farmer still continues. The growth of the residential and the commercial neighbourhood in Basavanagudi has been a recent one, however, the urban fabric now envelops the Bull temple. One wonders if it is the groundnut vendors who are appropriating territory that is not theirs or is it the city that has appropriated land that was historically a place for the groundnut growers to make their offering to Lord Basava?

Read about:
Groundnut fair at Basavanagudi 2010
a Sea of Silence
Udaipur City
Fish market at Sasoon docks

Walking thru’ Chickpete

I had a printout of the google map of Chickpete that I studied quickly before I set out. It looked like I could start at the K.R.market and then walk through the many streets and come out towards the Majestic Bus stand at the other end. It was tempting to go into and around the K.R.market as I neared it. I had been there before. Always a hustle of activity, with its fruit and vegetable vendors making brisk sales almost at all times of the day! I loved watching that.

I was trying to be focused that day. So, knowing from my map that taking Avenue road would be a good point of entry into chickpete, I started out. As I walked here, there were stationery shops, diwali cracker shops, jewellery shops and all kinds of other shops. The footpaths are not so wide but there ARE footpaths and they had no encroachments. There is an interesting article ‘Narrow avenue, broader minds’ at Citizen Matters that talks about Avenue road and the communities who live and work here.

The place was crowded at 11.30 in the morning. I got to a “circle” and took a left towards Balepet. A four-way road junction was being referred to as a “circle” whenever I asked for directions. “You will come to a circle, take a right there” someone would guide. There was no circular traffic island or roundabout, just the chaos of a four-way junction without a centrepoint identified.

Soon, I came across a Mutt building and then, some time later saw a Jain dharamshala. These were old buildings – the only ones with elements of vernacular architecture and seemed like they’d been here for many years. That suddenly took me into the past and I began to look at every new façade I passed with a different eye and an imagination of what it might have earlier been before it became a place of “grand sale” and “bumper offer”

What was Chickpete like fifty years before? Was the fading away of the vernacular architecture also a fading away of the traditional shopping culture? Had there been a traditional shopping culture? Were the streets less crowded then? Had there been horsecarts on the avenue road and not the loud, honking autorickshaws that deafened me from sensing the past or contemplating the future?

There seem to be similarities between inner city cores in our cities – Chickpete has characteristics that remind me of Georgetown in Chennai or the Crawford market area in Mumbai. I’ve written earlier at a Street corner in Mumbai about how in the Indian city, the bazaar has been the nucleus of the city growing into many intersecting streets that tell a story of livelihoods and a story of the city's evolution.

I was nearing yet another edge of the Chickpete market precinct and the walk had been about getting a feel of the maze of the streets that made it this dense shopping experience – both in physical and cultural terms – layers of everyday life that unfolded itself in front of you with every step and every thought that time took forward for you.

I knew I was coming back again soon. It was the next day that this happened. I was now at the Mysore Bank entering Avenue road from the other end. There was informal vending all over the place. Many many book titles looking at you from the footpath curb where stands balanced themselves and the books on them. Many booksellers of secondhand books occupied the sidewalks. Were they a spill-over from the formal shops? No, these were independent street vendors, for whom public space was where their livelihoods were anchored.

Suddenly, today, it seemed as if Chickpete was only about the informal sector. Nothing else was as predominant as this incredible range of things on sale – plastic flowers, bags of all kinds, dryfruits, sunglasses, what-not. There was street food of all kinds – from boiled groundnuts to cut-fruit stalls that were on push-carts that stood in the middle of the street sometimes, it really was sometimes the middle or at least half-way to the middle of the road!

I continue to ponder about this marketplace also after my walking around is done. What was a typical street in Chickpete, if one were to do an anatomy of it? It was this undefinable mix of pedestrian, street food vendor, car, autorickshaw, imitation barbie dolls positioned on parked two-wheelers or some other attractive item for sale – all put together – bringing back memories of the dizzying hand movements of the street vendor in old-time calcutta as he would mix the jhal-muri in that tin container with the aroma of mustard oil flowing towards you to tell you that the mixing was good and right!

If you were to walk through Chickpete in the morning, any time before 10am when the shops begin to open, it is quite another place. The streets are rather empty and you might see pigeons perched in the middle of the road, as I saw this morning as I chose to explore the streets of the Pete area when business has not yet begun here. You see tender coconut vendors on bicycles parked momentarily, sipping their morning tea alongwith street sweepers. There are newspaper vendors who have the news laid out for you on the steps of the merchant establishments.

In the morning, you can walk freely with the sun coming in and gently lighting up the street facades that you now see more easily since you are not jostling your way through the street crowds. There is a Nankatai vendor with a bicycle, who is stocking up fresh baked biscuits into a large glass jar for the corner Paan shop, who sells snacks and the paan. There are empty white, wooden shelves along the white wall of a building, which I had seen the day before covered with many books. I see them now in this morning light, waiting for their owner to come fill them again for this day and waiting for those who will read the books for their stories, in a way that others would read the city through walking its streets.

Read about:
Walking in Lille
Faces in the Bazaar