Paper short abstract:

The process of informal trading policy in the Inner City of Johannesburg is crucial example to better understand the complex dynamics of governing spaces, people and activities in an aspiring “world-class” city and to explore different analytical approach in terms of urban “governance” and politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the relationships between municipal authorities, informal traders and other stakeholders in the process of informal trading policy in the Inner City of Johannesburg.

In a neo-liberal framework, municipal authorities considered informal activities as a temporary phenomenon to be phased out with a "sustainable economic growth" fostered by "a stable and predictable regulatory and management environment". But informal traders agency was resilient. In the last few years, the City moved to more "integrated" discourses showing evident contradictions between normative and empirical models of governance. In the production of public policy, a plurality of state and social actors interact at different stages. The municipal agencies and corporatised entities formulate strategies and drive the agenda of the inner-city renovation in concert with private interests, while the bureaucratic apparatus of municipal officers and most of the political councilors simply react to the social issues without a comprehensive strategy. The lack of dialogue and coordination between the metropolitan authorities causes an asymmetric system of governance. On the one side, new empirical models of management driven by "non-state" actors - the CIDs linear markets - integrate restricted numbers of informal traders in a closed, not participated system; on the other side, a chaotic mismanagement leave the majority of informal traders in unmanaged and unregulated congested areas in the CBD where they are excluded from a full access to socio-economic citizenship. This situation is not conducive to coalition formation of informal traders who struggle to achieve unity, to demand their rights and to protect their activities.