Governing street trading in contemporary cities. Anatomy of the policy instruments used by the City of Johannesburg in the post-apartheid era

Abstract

The paper interrogates how street trading is governed in contemporary cities of the South, based on the example of Johannesburg. It excavates policy choices made by municipal officials and politicians, understood through the set of policy instruments (not only policy documents, institutions and tools, but also non-tools) that they have framed and used for almost two decades, beyond public rhetoric that is arguably misleading. The paper provides a critical analyzis of policy instruments for governing street trading, scantly absent from existing literature, it also brings back into the urban studies debate issues of municipal officials’ agency, political objectives and policy choices.