Paper short abstract:

How does the development of the cheap trade contributes to specific territorial dynamics in African towns? A geopolitics of the streets and of marketplaces shows the conflictual production of commercial urban spaces and their inconspicuous linkages with network logics.

Paper long abstract:

How does the development of the cheap trade contributes to specific territorial dynamics in African towns? Baubles from China have flooded African markets: plastic sandals, fashion accessories, cheap clothes, etc. can be found everywhere, from busy metropolitan commercial areas to small periodic markets in rural areas. The specificity of those bauble is that they are widely available and cheap; they are adapted to low income populations living in both rural and urban areas. Thus, baubles circulate extensively; flowing and connecting the centers with some margins of the world.

From a geopolitics of the cheap trade, the paper argues that the development of the bauble trade route organizes an interstitial resource-space, through the socio-spatial mobility of actors and movements of items. This interstitial resource-space provides economic opportunities which are appropriated by an intertwined maze of traders and actors holding some political and administrative powers that facilitate or complicate the connections.

This space is characterised by rural-urban, urban-rural, formal-informal and agriculture-trade interplays. It consists of booming trading places, new urban-rural mobility and unprecedented connections to transnational networks. The later combine social with professional and political networks. The paper is based on fieldworks done in Cameroon, Kenya and Tanzania, mainly in secondary towns (Bafoussam, Kisumu and Mbeya). The analysis of the daily governance of the cheap trade represents what I call "a geopolitics of the streets and of marketplaces": it shows the conflictual production of commercial urban territories (from actors from below to public policies) and their inconspicuous linkages (sometimes undisclosable) with network logics.