BRINGING INFORMAL FOOD SPACES
INTO THE ORDINARY
Master Thesis | Human Geography
University of Amsterdam | Graduate School of Social Sciences
Louisa Ellerker | 11244534
louisaellerker@hotmail.com
Supervisor: dr. ir. Y.P.B. (Yves) van Leynseele
October 2017
i.
Acknowledgments
A thesis is never complete, it is merely due. So, for those who academically and personally supported me to explore, create, and endure, in order to make this thesis due – thank you. Big up to Mike, who without I would not have been able to collect the data, explore the city or share the many meals bought from the street vendors. Most of all, to the street vendors who daily provide good food and create lively, safe streets in Nairobi; thank you for giving me your time, compassion and honesty to make this research possible.
With special thanks to Imiamour for taking photos, and allowing me to use some in this thesis. To give reference, and see more of her work: http://imiamour.com/
Thank you to Yves, for allowing me the time and space for this process, and providing constructive feedback when I most needed it.
Also, thanks to Dave, for doing the mundane task of going through endless drafts fixing spelling and grammar mistakes. And to Nicolina for holding my stress when I most needed it to be taken.
ii.
Abstract
Nairobi wants to be a ‘world-class city-region’ by 2030. Neighbourhoods changes are driven largely by middle-class growth and foreign investments. This thesis examines a changing neighbourhood in Nairobi using informal food vendors as an entry point to unravel their spatial and social strategies. It will argue that informal food spaces are an integral part to the ‘ordinary’ formalisation process in African cities. Other studies on informal street food have predominantly focused on the ‘formal – informal’ binary; however, I focus on the processes of ‘opening and closing space’ that takes place largely through unplanned practices and hidden relationships of the vendors and day dwellers within the neighbourhood.
iii.
Table of Content
I. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 2
II. ABSTRACT 3
III. TABLE OF CONTENT 4
IV. OVERVIEW OF FIGURES, TABLES, IMAGES AND MAPS 6
V. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 7
VI. CHAPTER OVERVIEW 8
1. INTRODUCTION 10
2. BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH 11
2.1CASE STUDY CONTEXT 11
2.2COLONIAL SPACES 12
2.3EMERGENCE OF INFORMAL STREET FOOD IN NAIROBI 14
2.3.1 Nairobi’s Informal Street Food 15
2.4CONCLUSION &INFORMAL FOOD SPACE 18
3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 19
3.1INTRODUCTION 19
3.2CLOSING OF SPACE 19
3.2.1 ‘Ordinary’ Representations of Formalisation 19
3.2.2 Formalising the Informal Street Food Spaces 20
3.3OPENING OF SPACE 21
3.4INFORMALITY:BRINGING IT BACK TO THE ‘ORDINARY’ 23
3.5DAY DWELLERS 24
3.6CONCLUSION 25
4. RESEARCH DESIGN 26
4.1RESEARCH QUESTIONS 26
4.2OPERATIONALIZATION 27
4.2.1 Case Study Selection 28
4.2.2 Data Collection 28 4.2.3 Observations 29 4.2.4 Semi-Structured Interviews 29 4.2.5 Surveys 29 4.2.6 Visual Data 30 4.2.7 Research Analysis 30
4.3LIMITATIONS AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS 30
4.3.1 Statement of Ethics 30
4.3.2 Statement of positionality 31
4.3.3 Limitations of Research 31
5. THE FORMALISING NEIGHBOURHOOD 32
5.1INTRODUCTION 32
5.2CHANGES:RESIDENTIAL TO COMMERCIAL 32
5.2.1 Changes Through Satellite Images 33
5.3WALK THROUGH THE NEIGHBOURHOOD 35
5.3.1 On the Ground 36
5.3.1.i On Foot 36
5.3.1.ii Local Resident 39
5.4CONCLUSION 40
6.1INTRODUCTION 42
6.2STREET FOOD VENDOR LOCATION 42
6.3SPATIAL IMPLICATIONS –WRITING THE SCRIPT 44
6.4CONCLUSION 45
7. INFORMAL FOOD SPACE: EMERGENCE AND SUSTAINING IN THE SPACE 46
7.1INTRODUCTION 46
7.2THE INFORMAL FOOD SPACES 47
7.3EMERGING VENDORS 48
7.3.1 Location 49
7.3.2 Lack of Stiff Competition 49
7.3.3 Existing Relationships 49
7.4SUSTAINING VENDORS 50
7.4.1‘Sweet’ Food 50
7.4.2 Cleanliness 51
7.5CONCLUSION 51
8. INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE SPACES: WRITING THE SCRIPT 52
8.1VENDOR INFRASTRUCTURE 52
8.1.1 Seating and Storage 52
8.1.2 Stalls 54
8.1.3 Cooking 56
8.1.4 Water Networks 57
8.2CONCLUSION 58
9. DAY DWELLERS: OPENING OF SPACE 59
9.1INTRODUCTION 59
9.2CUSTOMER PROFILES: WHO ARE THE DAY DWELLERS? 59
9.3MOTIVATION OF GOING TO THE FOOD STALLS 61
9.4SPACES OF LEISURE 62
9.5CONCLUSION 63
10. THE ORDINARY SPACE 64
10.1INTRODUCTION 64
10.2DEALING WITH HARASSMENT 64
10.3CONCLUSION 67
11. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 68
11.1DISCUSSION 68
11.2FURTHER RESEARCH 70
11.3CONCLUSION 71
12. REFERENCES 73
13. APPENDIX 76
Appendix 1: Patrons Survey 76
iv.
Overview of Figures, Tables, Images and Maps
Image 1: Rhapta Road (Cover photo)Image 2: Colonial Master Plan 1948
Image 3: The segregation of residential areas in Nairobi, 1909 Image 4: Nairobi City Council ‘Food Shops and Stores’ Policy.
Image 5: Google Earth Image of Groganville Estate taken on 11/03/2002 Image 6: Google Earth Image of Groganville Estate taken on 13/01/2017 Image 7: Case-Study Streets
Image 8: Rhapta Road junction Image 9: Tune Hotel
Image 10: View of Rhapta Road Image 11: Bush Design
Image 12: I am Westlands Poster Image 13: Playing Hockey Image 14: Luxury Apartment Image 15: Church Road Building
Image 16: Collection of images of Informal Food Spaces infrastructure Images 17 a-d: Cooking and Preparation on informal food street stalls Image 18: Jerry cans seen on the street at 4am
Image 19: Larger vendor staff preparing meat Image 20: Smaller vendor staff preparing chapatti Image 21: Receipt from City Council
Map 1: Nairobi, 2012
Map 2: Map Representing Formal and Informal Food Spaces in Groganville Estate, Nairobi Table 1: Informal Food Space Categorisation
Table 2: Description and Analysis of Stall Photos. Table 3: Food Choice of Day Dwellers
Figure 1: Car and Foot Flow Figure 2: Profession of Day Dwellers
v.
List of Abbreviations
CBD – Central Business District
IIED - International Institute for Environment and Development KSHs. – Kenyan Shilling
vi.
Chapter Overview
Chapter 1 - Introduction
This will introduce the research, provide motivations for the research and give a short summary of the overall findings. Also, will outline the chapters that are in this thesis in order to provide a clear framework for the reader.
Chapter 2 - Research Context
This first half of this chapter is to give the thesis context to the case study area. It will look at how space in Nairobi was racially zoned by the British colonials. Then it will highlight the post-colonial legacy on space in the capital of Nairobi. The aim of this section is to help the reader understand why the case study neighbourhood, Groganville Estate, is a formalising. The second part of the research context discusses street food in Nairobi and considers how it has been previously studied in research. The chapter is outlined in this way as this thesis is looking at a larger phenomenon of informality by looking at food spaces as the indicator towards understanding how space is closed through
Chapter 3 - Theoretical Framework
This chapter builds from the research context and frames a theoretical structure the thesis will use in the empirical chapters. In order to research why informal street food is emerging and sustaining in formalising neighbourhoods in Nairobi, a theoretical framework is needed to frame the terms and concepts that will be used for the research. The theoretical framework is divided into three elements to deconstruct the idea around the opening and closing of space. The first section will look at the closing of space. A neighbourhood formalises through eradicating or regulating informality in order to create a middle-class vision; this is seen as the ‘ordinary’ way to formalise. Massey’s (2005) concept of ‘re-imagining space’ will be used to force the reader to think about the imagined assumptions embedded in this way of formalisation and closing of space. The second section of the theoretical framework will explain de Haan’s (2005) notions of ‘open script’ spaces, ‘collective action’ and the ‘appropriation of space’, to aid the reader to understand how through different assumptions of space, formalisation also occurs. This allows the reader to see that informal spaces open up the closing spaces and therefore can form part of a new ‘ordinary’ formalisation process.
Chapter 4 - Research Design
This chapter will outline the research questions, and provide a methodical explanation of how the research was actually conducted through data collection and data analysis.
Chapter 5 – Closing of Space: The Formalising Neighbourhood
The aim of the first empirical chapter is to highlight how the case study area is formalising. To begin, this chapter starts with satellite images of the neighbourhood from 2002 and 2017 to show the changes in area over the last 14
years, from this is gives visual town-down evidence that the neighbourhood is becoming more formal through new buildings being built and the function of buildings becoming commercial; creating more white spaces.
The second part of the chapter is a walk through the neighbourhood of Groganville Estate. It takes the reader from the Westlands bus station and explains the observations of the neighbourhood particularly the ‘white’ spaces; so, the formal buildings, roads, commercial offices and restaurants. The chapter aims the reader to feel like they have walked through the case-study area and observed how the ‘white spaces become ‘greyed’ through the day dwellers use the of ‘black’ spaces of informal activity. This aids to answer the first research sub-question by explaining how the urban space becomes closed through formalisation.
Chapter 6 – Informal Food Spaces: Spatial Strategies
This chapter will locate the formal and informal food spaces in the streets outlined in the case study area. It will then consider the significance of these locations in context to the changing neighbourhood. The mapping of the food outlets provides some spatial observations of tactics used by a street vendor in order to emerge and sustain itself in the neighbourhood.
Chapter 7 - Informal Food Space: Emergence and Sustaining in the Space
This chapter is aims to provide a clearer context of the food vendors, their size, longevity and strategies of how they emerged and made sure they could stay on the space.
Chapter 8 – Informal Food Space: Infrastructure of the Space
This chapter looks at the infrastructure of the food spaces. By presenting photos of the stalls, a visual analysis will be made to see the reoccurring strategies of how the vendors sustain in the neighbourhood. The chapter will delve deeper into at the food space seating, stalls, how they cook, and the water networks they have created.
Chapter 9 – Opening of Space: Day Dwellers
The chapter will first look at who the day dwellers are, through traditional data indexes of demographics like age, occupation, sex. but then the second half will discuss their motivations of going to the stall, and how they aid to appropriate and open up the socio-materiality’s of informal food spaces in a formalising neighbourhood.
Chapter 10 – The Ordinary Space
This chapter outlines the food vendors experience of semi-formality and semi-permanence, and considers what this means for the socio-materiality appropriation of the space.
Chapter 11 - Discussion and Conclusion
This chapter is the final chapter in the thesis. It starts by starting a short discussion of the findings of the research, and finish with a summary of the main findings the research, and some further questions about space.
1.
Introduction
‘African cites are still typically studied through the lens of development, or in a manner that remains stuck ‘between modernity and development,’ where ‘these “other” cities have been thought to borrow their modernity from wealthier contexts.’ (Ordinary Cities - Jenny Robinson, 2006: x)
Nairobi is the fastest growing capital city in East Africa. With recorded inhabitants of over 3.1 million from the 2009 census, the population was estimated to be 4.5 million in 2015 (UN, 2010), and estimated to double in the next 10 years. After decades of poor urban planning, the Kenyan government has recently created a master plan with the help of the Japanese. This plan aims to create a world-class city-region by 2030 which is largely based on Eastern and Western urban plans (Myers, 2015). This vision remains within the hegemonic boundaries of development (between modernity and development), and lacks the incorporation of experiences and needs of the urban poor in Nairobi. The development of the city is therefore for the middle classes, and is consequently causing the informal sector to continue growing. This makes the binary of ‘informality’ and ‘formality’ a re-occurring theme in African cities, particularly when trying to understand how the informal emerges and sustains. One form of the growing informal sector in Nairobi is through informal street food. Research papers on this topic have mostly chosen a case study within informal settlements. This has led to informal food vendors rarely being studied out of the informal context.
This thesis examines the relationship between informal food spaces in a formalising neighbourhood within Nairobi. New buildings and commercial services in this neighbourhood are part of an exclusive ‘middle-class aesthetic’ that aspires to create ‘neat, tidy and planned’ neighbourhoods with no planned space for informal activity. This thesis will call this - closing space. Focusing specifically on a formalising neighbourhood in Nairobi, this research finds that informal street food vendors are locating themselves in this neighbourhood to sell food to the workers in the area. By using Massey’s (2005) understanding of space as a ‘multi-relational dimension’, and de Haan’s (2005) theorisation of the ‘appropriation of space’; the informal food spaces will be understood through a spatial analytical lens. This approach finds that space has to be taken as a serious dimension in order to explain the formalising process as it shows the different trajectories of hegemonic views of how a neighbourhood should ‘develop’. This means that the vendors re-open the closing space by engaging in spatial and social strategies to emerge and sustain themselves as the neighbourhood continues to formalise and close down space. The thesis concludes that informal food vendors should be considered as part of the ‘ordinary’ formalisation process. By changing the assumptions of how a neighbourhood should formalise, provides an innovative and exciting development trajectory for African cities.
2.
Background to the Research
In this thesis, the context of Nairobi represents the case of a city becoming more formalized to achieve developmental aspirations to become a ‘world-class city-region” (Myers, 2015: 331). However, the city faces a dilemma. The current formalisation of neighbourhoods in fact encourages informality, enhancing sectors with informal street food stalls. To understand why this happens, a deeper understanding of the case study area and Nairobi is needed.
The first part of this chapter will outline a formalising neighbourhood in Nairobi – Groganville Estate – which will be used as the case study area. To aid this context, a brief account of the colonial spatial legacies of Nairobi will be discussed. In the second part of this chapter, I will examine the emergence and rise of informal street food in Nairobi, and will emphasise the different approaches which researchers and policy makers have taken in order to frame street food. This will conclude by stressing how these frameworks lack contextual understandings of street food in Nairobi and I will argue in further chapters that this is needed to understand the informal sector.
2.1 Case Study Context
The case-study area investigated in this thesis is in Groganville Estate, and covers a surface area of approximately 6.5 square kilometres, in which seventeen informal food stalls are operating. To understand why this is significant a brief context of the area is needed.
Map 1: Nairobi, 2012.
Source: ICT vile, 2012
The neighbourhood chosen for the case study – Groganville Estate (as shown on Map 1 in the orange ring) lies west of the central business district (CBD). It is situated south of the largest highway of Nairobi’s Waiyaki Way which connects the city to the west of the country. This estate falls under the division of Westlands which was a European residential area during the colonial period (see image 3), and it remains an affluent area to this day. The area was described to favour “flat-topped embellished buildings and small compounds...community clubs and sports grounds” (Nairobi City, n.d). However, it progressively shifted in the early 2000s from a residential to a more commercial area (Rodriguez-Torres, 2010: 204). There has been a rise of businesses and organisations like Google, the Westgate shopping mall, Barclays bank and embassies, all escaping the chaos and high rents of the CBD and re-locating in Westlands. This has also resulted in an increase of nightclubs, hotels and bars, as well as a large expat population in the area with luxury apartments selling for over 200,000 euros. The last census in 2009 estimated the recorded population in Westlands close to 250,000 people and the area has the lowest share of individuals under the poverty line (GOK, 2017: 2- 2 & 2- 8). The census in fact found Westlands to be one of the most affluent areas in the city, scoring the best in the development measures like household access to electricity, water, schools, formally built infrastructure, electrical goods etc. This begs the question, why is this division performing so highly in development indicators such as income, access to infrastructure such as roads and schools, yet the formalised space is still experiencing informality through street food? A brief look at the history of Nairobi is a start to understanding this affluent space in relation to the rest of the city.
2.2 Colonial Spaces
The city of Nairobi was created as a train stop on the East African railway line (Mitullah, 2003, p. 1) and was built under formal planning by the British colonial rule in the 1900s. Before this, Nairobi was pasture land for the Maasai as well as agricultural land for the Kikuyu people. As the colonial headquarters shifted from Mombasa to Nairobi the Maasai and Kikuyus were displaced as the commercial trade and colonial zoning transformed the space into an urban setting (ibid: 1) for the British. The first urban plan created by the British was for a population of under 30,000 (Dutton, 1930; Myers, 2003), followed by a further master plan in 1948 as the population grew. This plan was created by academic planners from the South African regime, and led by Thornton White (Myers, 2015: 332). This plan is still available to look at in the national archives in Nairobi and as you can see from image 2, the central business district was designed to occupy government buildings, with a long straight road through the centre. This plan was hand-drawn and coloured using pencils predominantly green and red. It can be concluded that the green areas are to resemble spaces that remain luscious and green, as Nairobi was designed as a ‘garden city’ which meant urban sprawl was limited (K’Akumu, Olima 2007: 88). The red areas which represent other areas of development, for example the train station and industrial area, are located on the peripheries of the government buildings. This master plan is a view of the proposed central area. Even though it does not give specifics about the Westlands area, it does provide an insight into the colonial project of dividing the space up for single purpose use. There is a clear divide between the green and red areas while town planning was seen as a top-down project enhancing the interests of the white Europeans.
Image 2: Colonial Master Plan 1948 Image 3: The segregation of residential areas in Nairobi, 1909
Source: Authors own photo, from colonial masterplan Source: Mazingira Institute, 1993, p. 2
Image 3 helps us understand the context of Nairobi, of how post-colonial spatial legacies still have an impact on urban realities today. Image 3 shows us how Nairobi was segregated by the British colonial regime through spatial residential zoning in 1900. This was a policy used to separate the politically and economically dominant white population from the poor indigenous black natives (Spinks, 2001), and Indian people. As a lot of building and low-income labour was needed, especially for the railway, the British coerced different Kenyan ethnic groups to the city and also Indians. As these groups of people migrated to the city, it resulted in three distinct racial groups, European, Asian and African, and the way the British tried controlling this was through zoning space according to geographical identities This had the effect of limiting people’s freedom to be able to choose where to live and work, in order to promote social identities for colonial projects (K’Akumu, Olima, 2007: 89). This residential segregation was designed in the 1900s to reproduce extreme spatial inequality under the colonial rule which then lasted another 63 years (K’Akumu et al, 2007). As represented on image 3, approximately an eighth of the residential districts was for the Africans in the east, a quarter for the Indians in the central north and the rest, in mostly the west, served the Europeans (Rodriguez-Torres, 2010: 29). It also restricted the areas where Africans and Indians could work, only household servants lived in the European residential zones in their own servant quarters (ibid). Africans even had to carry an identity card on them at all times, as laws were passed to purposely make it difficult for Africans to live, work and move in the urban areas (Otiso, 2005: 74). The racial segregation through residential zones is not a unique phenomenon for cities (cf. America with its ghettoization), however, this is unusual for most African cities. In
Nairobi it was done under direct colonial rule (K’Akumu, Olima, 2007: 89), and the British made it very difficult for the Africans to become ‘urban’ as they were alienated and seen as ‘rural’ people (Otiso, 2005: 94). It resulted in urban space forming racial hierarchy and for Africans there was little opportunity of free movement around the city. This alienated the groups from each other (Otiso, 2005: 91), and it curbed the growth of informal trade in the affluent European zones.
The post-colonial legacy means the neighbourhoods of Nairobi are heavily embedded with cultural, racial and colonial ties. After independence was achieved in 1963, racial zoning was abolished but administrative divisions of Nairobi were redrawn and are now: Central, Dagoretti, Embakasi, Kasarani, Kibera, Makadara and Pumwani. Nevertheless, even though the divisions were redrawn, the spaces in the neighbourhoods remain “distinguished by the type of people who live there, how they live and what they do, as well as by the appearance of the area” (Obudho 2000: 105), unsurprisingly the most upmarket areas are in the west and north-central of Nairobi and on image 3 you can see where the European settlers resided. Nairobi therefore holds a post-colonial existence of unequal neighbourhoods, and the ‘white’ dominated areas are still intensifying in affluence, and the ‘black’ areas are rising in poverty and deprivation (Macoloo, 1998 in K’Akumu, Olima, 2007: 90). Otiso (2005) argues that post-colonial spaces are no longer controlled by race, instead income has replaced who is in the space. However, for the urban poor, there is little differences as it is argued that in European spaces during colonial times, there was a feeling alienation by the settlers for Africans in Nairobi that continues to have an impact on urban society. This alienation resulted in underdevelopment of these areas and could explain the conditions of the urban poor today, and the unequal formalization process.
The spatial legacy of Westlands, and Groganville Estate provides an understanding of why this area is formalised and why it is currently attracting commercial businesses. Post-independent Nairobi experienced economic and population growth, and struggled to implement the new independence urban plan of 1973 This allowed the pervasive effects of globalisation to plan the city through formal developments sprawling from the centre for example sky-rise buildings and more luxury private housing. The informal sector also developed alongside these formal developments creating an unequal terrain of power relations (Njeru, 2006: 1054-5 in Myers 2011). To understand the informality in the area, the following section will look at the rise of street food in Nairobi and why this means affluent areas such as Groganville Estate attracts vendors.
2.3 Emergence of informal street food in Nairobi
Since the 1990s the urban population has continued to grow in Nairobi (Potts, 2016), and is estimated by the Kenyan government (NCC, 2016: 6) to currently be just over 4.5 million people. This steady surge in the population is arguably due to the rural to urban economic migration (ibid). With high rates of inflation in Kenya, the cost of living for the majority of the population remains unaffordable even with an income (Mwangi et al, 2001) Combined with the lack of social welfare (and social urban planning) in the city, it means that the urban poor have developed modes of survival by creating informal sectors, like affordable street food.
The informal sector in Nairobi, known as “Jua Kali” (‘hot sun’ as workers stand out in the open) (Muraya, 2006) typically consists of self-employed workers who use simple infrastructure, and have easy entry into the market (Meiner & James, 2005), they can be described as creative entrepreneurs who think of innovative methods and strategies to trade under the informal conditions. Their cliental is directed towards the urban poor, those consumers who are outpriced by the formal economy, especially in the area where they work; who want to buy the daily essentials like food, tea, beverages, newspapers, cigarettes and clothes. These people are called ‘day dwellers’in this thesis – low-paid workers who commute to their work but are out-priced by the formal economy when they want to make a daily purchase. The informal sector remains informal due to the businesses not being registered with the city council, or not possessing a license to trade (GOK, 1998: 65). The Kenyan government started referring to this sector as ‘small-scale enterprises’ in 1987 when they attempted to regulate these economic activities (Livingstone, 1986). Lyon and Snoxell (2005) found that only 7,000 licenses and formal sites were made available for an estimated 500,000 street traders. Mwangi (2002) found that street food in Nairobi provided a substantial amount of income for most vendors. with most earning an income above the official minimum wage while some earned twice this amount or even more. Street vendors in sub-Saharan African cities face daily oppression and hostility from local governments (Porter et al, 2007). One manifestation of the informal sector is through informal food stalls. In Nairobi, popular street food meals like ugali, githeri, and rice dishes contain 50% of the recommended daily allowance of protein (Steyn et al: 2014).
2.3.1 Nairobi’s Informal Street Food
Street food was first officially defined in 1986 by the Food and Agriculture Organisation on the ‘Regional Workshop on Street Food in Asia’ as: “(…) a wide range of ready-to-eat foods and beverages sold and sometimes prepared in public places, notably streets.” (FAO, 1986). Street food in Nairobi emerged in the 1960s and has rapidly increased since then (Mwangi et al, 2001), with its largest surge in 1980s-1990s. Before the 1960s there are no ‘official accounts’ of informal food being sold on the streets in the city (Mwangi et al, 2001: 503) outside the informal settlements. Rodriguez-Torres (2015: 49 - 50) highlights the fact that since Kenya’s independence in 1963, policies and tolerance regarding illegal commercial activities by the urban poor have been alternating from being banned, to being endorsed. He argues that this is dependent on the political party and leaders in power, and their relationships and attitudes towards informal vendors.
Towards the end of the 1960s, fresh maize started appearing as a snack which was sold by men, in areas where urban poor congregated (Mwangi et al, 2001: 503) for example, at bus stops. By the 1970s and 1980s maize started to be become a common snack in the CBD, with cooked foods like chapatti, boiled sweet potatoes also appearing in back streets and industrial areas; (see ibid for more food examples). As female vendors started their own stores, the type of food changed, with more cooked lunches for the growing number of casual labourers. The informal street food industry expanded by providing breakfast, lunch, and also dinner in residential areas like Eastland’s. This rise in informal street foods was due to the rise of low income skilled workers commuting to other neighbourhoods in the city who needed a place to eat during working hours (ibid: 505). This demand was quickly met by women who had
the necessary cooking skills due to their roles in society, having been taught to cook traditional Kenyan meals. By the 1990s, street food spilled over to middle-income residential areas and commercial areas, but street vendors were still absent in high-income residential areas. It was generally found that where the urban poor moved around the city, informal street food was likely to be found in that vicinity (Mwangi et al, 2001).
The informal street food sector has flourished in developing countries in the last 30 - 40 years as a result of urbanization processes and remains a topic that is largely researched due to the contentious issues between urban planning, public health and economic growth. It estimated that more than 40% of low-income households consume street food every day in Nairobi (Oyunga-Ogubi et al, 2009), and it provides a large source of nutrition in consumers’ diets. Particularly noticeable in Nairobi, and other African cities (Ayeh et al, 2011), is that street food is predominantly cooked hot meals and sold in the same location every day. These food stalls are known in Kenya as vibandas (kibanda in singular) and mostly located in the pedestrian flows, creating food arteries in the city. They are informal, semi-permanent structures often made from ad hoc wood beams, aluminium panels, and sometimes attached to a small kiosk rented from large corporations like Safaricom or Mpesa. They fall into the informal sector worker definition described previously, but street food vendors are particularly seen as illegal micro economies, mostly run by women who set up the stalls with minimal start-up costs. Selling patterns can also change throughout the day, as some vendors prepare lunches for workers in affluent neighbourhoods, while others mainly sell in the mornings or evenings, mostly in the informal settlements (Mwangi et al, 2001). The literature describes street food consumers in African cities as mostly ‘young, single, unskilled workers with low education levels (Martins, 2006, Rheinlander et al., 2008). Hill et al (2016: 26) also note that street food consumers often buy from stalls around taxi and bus stops, in other words transport interchanges. Rodriguez-Torres (2010: 49- 50) states that “all owners of kiosks have to pay a municipal tax in order to buy a licence to trade…despite this they are still threatened with expropriation”. Running an informal street food stall in Nairobi is risky for the vendors due to their illegality, yet the city council has also struggled to provide planning for food (Morgan, 2009) for the urban poor. The current food vending policy operated by the Nairobi city council has been taken from their website and is shown as image 4.
Image 4: Nairobi City Council ‘Food Shops and Stores’ Policy.
Source: http://www.nairobi.go.ke/home/common-city-laws-and-regulations/by-laws
The policy shown in image 4, is aimed at ‘food shops and stores’ and therefore places informal street vendors in limbo if they do not have a registered kiosk. The policy specifies “it is an offence to trade in food unless one is in possession of the appropriate licence or permit”. If a vendor does not possess a licence or permit, a medical certificate it makes the selling of food ‘illegal’ (Rodriguez-Torres, 2010: 49- 50).
This caught the attention of international agencies like the FAO and researchers particularly in the 1990s (Winarno & Allain. 1991). Research on Nairobi’s informal street food has been approached in multiple ways; by looking at nutrition of the food, public health sanitary concerns (Githiri et al 2015), entrepreneurial economic benefits (Morange, 2015, ILO 1972, Hart 1973) and recently the use of public space (Morange, 2017, Ayeh et al 2011). As a whole, informal street food is seen as an integral part of food security for diets amongst the urban poor (Steyn et al. 2014: 1372, Riet et al. 2002). It is also argued that it can be seen as a valuable asset to the city in order to create effective policy to improve the working conditions and reduce sanitation risks. As there is arguably a gap in effective policy for informal food policy in Nairobi, and its 2030 vision.
One noticeable trend in the literature pertaining to street food in Nairobi is that the research, and subsequent policies often study food vendors as individual entities and consequently they are taken out of their spatial context. The IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development) have reacted to this and have undertaken a participatory research of informal street food ‘inside’ the informal settlements of Mathare, Kibera and Mukuru (Ahmed et al, 2015: 8). By using balloon mapping techniques, they explored the challenges of food safety. They found that food was prepared, cooked and consumed in spaces of uncontrolled environmental hazards: close to open sewage, uncollected rubbish, and possibly vulnerable to water contamination (ibid: 34). This was due to inadequate
infrastructure and services that pose a direct threat to food safety (ibid), and therefore the public health to those consuming food. Food safety is a prevalent issue in Nairobi at this moment, as a recent cholera outbreak has not only affected the vulnerable urban poor, but also the elites of the city (WHO, 2017). It is therefore important to follow the efforts of the IIED to pursue contextual understandings of informal street food. Also given the findings from Mwangi et al’s (2001) relating to the emergence of informal street food in formal residential neighbourhoods in the late 1990s, it is an epistemological step for informal street food to be understood in the context of a formalising residential neighbourhood.
2.4 Conclusion & Informal Food Space
The first section of this chapter gives historical context to Nairobi. It shows how the foundations of the city were built under British colonial rule and through racial zoning of neighbourhoods created inequalities in the urban space. The colonial rule implemented urban plans and built inhabitable neighbourhoods for the Europeans in the West of the city, where area used in the case study, Groganville is located. This explains why the neighbourhood is already well developed and already undergoing the formalisation process. The colonial rule also relied on heavy regulation (especially of Africans) and monitoring of activities, which suggests that informal activities were not a common occurrence in the European neighbourhoods. The second part of the chapter acted as a literature review of informal street food in Nairobi. In conclusion two key points emerge Firstly as Nairobi gained in independence in 1964, informal street food started becoming a highly visible trade and has flourished ever since. Secondly, informal street food in Nairobi is often studied within the informal settlement context. Combining the post-colonial legacy of freedom of movement and the rise of street food, the question to be asked is what is happening in post-European neighbourhoods that are currently formalising in order to become part of the 2030 vision?
By placing street food into its context, this thesis will shift the phrasing of informal street food vending, to ‘informal food space’. By adding the notion of space, it locates the vendors and forces the research to provide contextual analysis. The following theoretical chapter will deconstruct what is meant by space and how this incorporates not just spatial strategies, but also forces the researcher/planner to incorporate the infrastructural designs and social arrangements into the setting in which it is being studied. So, from now on, informal street food vendors will be referred to as the informal food space.
3.
Theoretical Framework
3.1 Introduction
In order to research why informal street food is emerging and sustaining in formalising neighbourhoods in Nairobi, a theoretical framework is needed to frame the terms and concepts that will be used for the research. The theoretical framework is divided into three elements to deconstruct the idea around the opening and closing of space. The first section will look at the closing of space. A neighbourhood formalises through eradicating or regulating informality in order to create a middle-class vision; this is seen as the ‘ordinary’ way to formalise. Massey’s (2005) concept of ‘re-imagining space’ will be used to force the reader to think about the imagined assumptions embedded in this way of formalisation and closing of space. The second section of the theoretical framework will explain de Haan’s (2005) notions of ‘open script’ spaces, ‘collective action’ and the ‘appropriation of space’, to aid the reader to understand how through different assumptions of space, formalisation also occurs. This allows the reader to see that informal spaces open up the closing spaces and therefore can form part of a new ‘ordinary’ formalisation process.
3.2 Closing of Space
As the empirical case-study is of a neighbourhood, the following section will look specifically at how a neighbourhood ‘ordinarily’ develops, and then move onto explain how space becomes ‘closed’ in this process. Henk de Haan (2005) uses Malone’s (2002) classification of ‘open’ or ‘closed’ spaces in street life. A closed space results from a “group of appropriation, imposing dominant values and exclusive access” (de Haan, 2005: 9) and is seen as a negative process by radical geographers as they are associated with the private sector filling spaces with “surveillance, discipline and exclusion” (ibid). This means that the process of ordinary formalisation involves regulation and planning by authorities that hold an element of power over the function of the space.
3.2.1 ‘Ordinary’ Representations of Formalisation
Urban formalisation typically occurs when city authorities have an urban plan to implement. Part of this process is to remove informality and gain a monopoly of control over the activities that occur in the urban space. Activities include certain buildings like houses, offices and roads being built, public transport being controlled by the state, economic industries being taxed and licensed, natural resources like water being controlled, and even involves the micro management of where people spend their leisure time. This ordinary type of formalisation aspires to achieve a certain middle-class neighbourhood aesthetic, and in a city like Nairobi, requires a great deal of informal activity removal, as informality does not fit the current 2030 urban planning vision (Myers, 2015).
Without going too deep into concepts of neighbourhoods, the words of Lewis Mumford will suffice; “neighbourhoods…exist wherever human beings congregate…” (1954: 258). As explained in the research context
chapter, the bulk of Nairobi’s affluent neighbourhoods were the legacy of ‘white’ zones where British colonials dedicated state budgets to build ‘pleasant’ neighbourhoods. Post-independence arrived in 1964 and the majority of new building developments in Nairobi started becoming funded and provided by the commercial private sector. In the 1980s real estate companies started to radically change the residential landscape of the city by buying land parcels (a group of lots), dividing them up, and building large residential developments on those sites in order to meet the private housing demand in the city (Rukwaro & Washington, 2003: 144). These developments are part of the ‘clean-up’ process that is often associated with world-class city-regions (Goldman, 2011). By closing the space, the physical buildings are a powerful way to manipulate human behaviour; where humans respond to the embedded practices and rules in this space. Through this clean-up the idea is to remove certain behaviours and interactions that do not fit into the middle class vision, for example street vending. However as the following section explains, this is not as simple as it sounds.
3.2.2 Formalising the Informal Street Food Spaces
A way to clean-up a neighbourhood in Nairobi and close down space is to control the informal activities. Smart & Smart (2017: 439) state that formalisation can be achieved through eradication (by ending informal practices), or by regularization (changing the law to make it accepted or easier to regulate). Smart & Smart’s (2017) first method of formalisation is to eradicate informality by forcefully and consistently closing down, cleaning up and punishing any informal activity. This has recently been the case in Bangkok where every street vendor has to move out of the street by the end of 2017. The Thai capital is famous for its street food, yet the military authorities this year enforced existing city regulations. They started to eradicate street food vendors off the pavements in order to achieve the middle class aesthetics of “cleanliness, safety and order”. However, the authorities claimed they were not ‘eradicating’ street food entirely but instead ‘regulating’ it by moving vendors to special market stall areas in order return the pavements to pedestrians. The question of the where the location of these ‘special areas’ will be, is asked by the Guardian (Holmes, 2017), and is in fact a very crucial question. Ayeh et al (2011) found that the location of street vendors is the most integral part of their business. This research looked at the micro spatial practices of street traders in Kumasi, Ghana to investigate why street traders locate where they do. They found that the three key factors of street trader’s choice of location are determined by a large foot fall of customers, availability of access to roads, and the lack of alternative sites. The research found that 58% of street traders in Kumasi located on pavements, and even though they had no permit or licence to operate in that location, they would operate there every day despite the harassment from city authorities. They found that this causes conflict in the public spaces of Kumasi as the space in which they locate themselves often serves the function of pedestrian mobility and crowd safety. As well as, the self-made infrastructures that the street traders build degrade the ascetics that the city is aspiring to (ibid: 26). Ayeh et al (2011) also look at how the authorities deal with street vending and like in Bangkok, find relocation is a mandatory approach in order to control these spaces. This involves destroying the structures, fining the traders and eventually leading discussions about relocation sites, which prove difficult as the regular customers, often day dwellers, have created social pathways around the everyday practice for eating. They come to the stall for the convenience of location, and essentially create food arteries of the streets. Kumasi and Bangkok have similar experiences as
authorities both have used eradication as the first method to deal with informal street food vendors. This theoretical framework attempts to explain how simply eradicating the stalls is short-sighted when understanding the food arteries that exist around the physical food stalls. Social pathways have been created around street vendors through being part of day dwellers everyday routines and practises. By closing down the space, through eradicating informal activity, essentially excludes day dwellers of their daily needs. Simply getting rid of a physical stall is much easier than getting rid of an everyday routine of the day dweller, as they will still want to eat food at the stalls and interact with other people in those spaces.
This short-sighted method is realised in Smart and Smart (2017) formalisation methods and they provide a second tool to formalise a neighbourhood through regulation. This involves either changing the law to make informality accepted or easier to manage, or cracking down on the existing law, like the military authority did in Bangkok. However, this method seems unrealistic if the government has limited capacity to monitor and process official licences and permits for all informal vendors, or even lacks the monopoly of power over its citizens. Instead in many cases, the informal market ends up being tolerated, allowing bribes and other elements of corruption to happen. This is what John Cross describes as ‘semi-formality’ (1998: 35). He explains that even though there are regulations in place, the government constantly negotiates these regulations and allows informality to operate under ‘extra-legal’ norms which evolves from relationships between the legal enforcers (like the city council) and the vendors in the informal sector. This puts the informal vendors at extreme vulnerability as the toleration they receive from the legal enforces could change with a change in attitudes of government and the state (ibid & Rodriguez-Torres, 2015). The second method of regulating the informal sector through semi-formality is suggested to already operate in many cases, like in Nairobi.
Both methods have the same ultimate goal of formalisation. It seems that there is a blur, a grey area, in Smart and Smart’s (2017) separation between eradication and regulation as the stalls are first eradicated in order to be regulated through special locations for market stalls. Through this closing down of space world class cities can be achieved; however, the following section will argue how a different formalisation trajectory can be created and be valid for African cities. By ‘re-imaging’ space using theorists like Massey (2005), de Haan (2005) and Yiftachel (2009), the chapter will explain how informal vendors and day dwellers are able to create a collective agency as part of their spatial strategies by appropriating the space they find themselves in on a daily basis.
3.3 Opening of Space
The closing down of space is the binary opposite of opening up space. To quote Malone (2002, in de Haan: 6) again “open spaces by contrast allow much more diversity and the unfolding of a variety of social activities and experience”. Formalisation processes try to close down space by eradicating or regulating informality, yet the opening of space gives room for space to be newly materialised by giving value to the social interactions that occur, like informal food vending.
The idea of the opening of space needs to be deconstructed somewhat more in order to operationalise the term and use it to analyse the empirical data. This theoretical framework uses the sociological concept of space. This views space as a mixture of objects (like physical buildings, roads) and people (like the people using these objects). The key factor in this concept is that through people using the objects, space is created. For example, a neighbourhood has a set of physical buildings, parks and roads, but it becomes a neighbourhood once people use the buildings as homes. When buildings are used as homes, and roads as arteries to get from A to B, B being the home, it starts to create a neighbourhood. A neighbourhood is embedded with a great deal of spatial boundaries, rules, objects, and this is referred to as the ‘materiality form of space’ (for a further explanation, see de Haan, 2005: 14). What this means is that as a neighbourhood is developed through the building of new apartments, fences and streets, the space becomes divided into zones which has a direct impact on the visuals and behaviour of the people in that space. This is also called the spatial interaction of a neighbourhood. Put simply, understanding spatial interaction is to understand how humans behave in the environment they are in, and how the environment they are in affects human interaction; but also, how this affects how humans interact with one another in that environment. This means that the materiality form of space is embedded with the social form of space. For example, it is assumed that humans in a public park have different social interactions and behaviours than in a private garden. The material form of the space of the park or garden is embedded with learnt social rules and interactions of humans. However, these social rules and material functions are built on learnt assumptions. A child might act the same way in the park as they would in the private garden, but through social interaction they will learn the social order of each space they are in.
However, what happens when the intended function of the material space is treated differently through social interactions?
Bringing it back to the informal sector - when a pavement is used as a cooking site to sell food, rather than its sole function as a way for pedestrians to get from A to B, what does this mean for the materiality of the space? This is what de Haan (2005: 13) calls the‘material appropriation of space’. This means that the material function of space is never fixed as humans have the ability to appropriate the space for another function. With this understanding, this thesis will define the opening of space as the socio-material appropriation of space. To deepen this notion, Massey’s (2005) book for space (2005) argues that space is a product of multi-relations, “a sphere of the possibility of coexistence of multiplicity where trajectories are able to coexist; space is always under construction; never finished or never closed, as it is constructed through relations between each other” (2005: 8). If space is never closed, as Massey states, then it means space is either open, or in the process of closing or opening. So, as the interactions between people occur on certain spaces, through time the materiality of space is able to change. This time dimension is also key to the state of the closing or opening of the space.
de Haan (2005: 14) also states however that there are of course limits to the extent of changes of the materiality of space, as human behaviour will more or less remain the correct function, and if an individual changes the function it will not make a great impact. Again, to put simply, if a one person in a public park started acting like would in their
private garden, it would not instantly change the functionality of the park space. de Haan (ibid) states that ‘collective action’ is needed to appropriate the materiality of space. There are some examples of this which have been observed. de Haan (2005) shows how a small neighbourhood in The Netherlands resisted developments on derelict sites through using these spaces to host their social community activities, like community walks, a goat meadow and more. This means that the residents had appropriated this space through collective action by holding activities together.
Not only does there need to be a collective force to change the materiality of space, not all spaces are able to be appropriated as easily. de Haan claims easily appropriated spaces have an ‘open script’ (2005: 16). These spaces are badly organised and have no significant previous material-social functions. For example, a derelict green open space could start to be used as a park. These two factors of an open script and collective action allows de Haan (2005) to argue that when space is appropriated, it is often done so by a group of people of who the function in the space was not initially intended for. This is significant as often those people’s needs are not taken seriously by government authorities as they clash with political objectives (ibid: 2), for example teenagers who use parks to socialise and drink alcohol do this as they have no other spaces allocated for this activity. He stresses that these people are not necessarily sub-cultures or minorities in society, they are part of the ordinary where the materiality of space does not fit with their desires. This is crucial for planning interventions, as the space can create social exclusion. In the context of a developing city, this is often the case where the urban poor are excluded out of certain areas where they are not seen as the formal function of the material-social space. The point to be taken from de Haan’s (2005) neighbourhood article is that changing materiality of spaces should not be seen as a failure of planning. It is in fact an exciting innovation through the mundane processes of ordinary everyday life for an excluded group of the urban space. A village in the Netherlands is of course a different context from post-colonial space in Nairobi which this thesis investigates. This thesis aims to show how informal food spaces are part of the ordinary formalisation process. From this section, it can be suggested that informal food spaces are appropriating the spaces they locate themselves on, and changing the function of a pavement to a function of informal food vending. By seeing the space the food stalls are in as appropriated, gives the informality far more legitimacy when in the context of a formalising neighbourhood. However, before going into the empirical chapters to see if the vendors are located on open scripted spaces, and have collective action; a re-imagination of formalisation is needed, and to do this, informality has to be re-imagined first.
3.4 Informality: Bringing it Back to the ‘Ordinary’
African urban studies have used the concept of informality in order to help deconstruct the African city. The phrase the ‘informal sector’ is often claimed to derive from the work of Keith Hart (1973) in Ghana on Accra’s informal economy. He saw the informal and formal sectors in a binary fashion – directly opposite each other. So, the informal is seen as an autonomous, unregulated, often illegal, small-scale, low technology arena for jobs (Myers, 2011) for the urban poor. Compared to the formal sector which was seen as registered, regulated, licenced, taxed and legal work. This binary shows an inability to express adequate perspectives of urban complexities, and particularly when it is
studied in urban planning, this approach sees spatial segregation and inequality, but very little is understood regarding the social relations involved in the inequality (Lutzoni, 2016: 9). Since the 1970s, the informality debate has dealt with many other theories attempting to explain what is happening or how to understand it (for a full list see Lutzoni, 2016). This thesis takes Nezer AlSayyad and Ananya Roy’s (2004) approach that informal-formal spaces cannot be seen as categorical binaries, as they in fact operate through complex relations with each other and use the following definition.
“if formality operates through the fixing of value, including the mapping of spatial value, then informality operates through the constant negotiability of value and the unmapping of space” (Roy & Alsayyad 2004).
This conceptualisation shifted informality from being seen as an activity that is ‘not yet regulated’, to an activity that is an everyday normality and functions in the urban setting (Keck in Waibel, 2012: chapter 3). This shifted informality out of being part of understanding the informal economy, but also to be applied to socio-political struggles that helped unravel the reality of the urban poor (ibid). Roy (2009: 84) further went on to explain that informality is deeply part of the government as vendors appropriate public space, and from time to time, are victims of sudden regulation. The imagined assumptions of informality assigns that when an observer sees informal activity they assume that there is no regulation yet in place. However, going back to Cross’(1998) notion of semi-formality, it shows that informal activity is regulated by political authorities, but the break in the assumption is that the space the activity is on is actually intended for another purpose. What I mean by this is that when you see informality, you think it is not regulated. But in fact, informality is semi-regulated, it is informal because it is appropriating the intended function of the space they are located on. A street food vendor is located on a pavement or a side of a road, not on a market stall in a shopping centre.
By breaking down these complex assumptions of the imagined space of informality, it places a criteria for investigation. The argument I made above needs to be tested by the case study. But before this is done, there is a last element that needs to be discussed to tie the theory together, and that is the customers of the informal food spaces. If as Ayeh et al (2011) argue that location is the top reason to get customers, it must be understood who these customers are, and the role they play within a formalising neighbourhood.
3.5 Day Dwellers
In the context of Nairobi, the post-colonial space means that informal street food was able to flourish after independence when Africans and Indians were no longer banned from certain zones and therefore spaces. This suggests that as people gained social mobility in the city, new material functions started forming in different spaces, like in formalising neighbourhoods. A key point in this thesis is that in the development trajectory of Nairobi’s 2030 vision, these ideas of space are not incorporated, so space is still seen as an area to planned, where the function still has to be assigned when formalising an area. As mentioned earlier, part of the formalising process is to create
this middle-class aesthetic, not only through the material environment but also through the service environment, by employing low-income workers.
The middle-class aesthetic includes the services provided by the commercialisation functions of the buildings in the neighbourhoods. They are service workers, for example maids, cleaners, gym instructors, taxi drivers, waiters, cooks, security guards, and gardeners are employed to service the needs of the residents in these neighbourhoods. These workers are often from the urban poor, who live in informal settlements in the city and commute to and from work. This thesis defines this group of people as ‘day dwellers’, who rely on the informal sector to provide them with their daily needs like food when in at work (Brown 2005) as they are out-priced by the food outlets built by the formal commercial shops and restaurants. More research needs to be undertaken regarding their relationship with the rise of informal street food in formalising neighbourhoods as it is apparent that day dwellers are not seen as part of the ‘formalisation’ process, as their needs are not met through the urban developments. Oren Yiftachel (2009, 2010) conceptualisation of ‘grey spaces’ can be used to understand why they are not part of the process. Whilst he looked at marginalised urban communities in the Israel/Palestine conflict he observed urban informalities which he coined as grey spaces. These spaces are positioned in-between the colour white which represent legality, approval and fixed; and the colour black which represent eviction, destruction, and death. By classifying space though this way, it provides urban designers and planners with tools and technologies to classify, manage and contain unequal societies. In this thesis, the white space can be seen as the middle-class formal spaces, and the black the informal food spaces, the urban informality in this case-study can be seen as the exclusion of ‘white’ spaces for the day dwellers. Vast amounts of service workers work in formalising neighbourhoods every day, but there are no formal developments built for them to eat or socialise in that area. Instead the day dwellers shift in and out the black and white colours generating a grey space amongst them, and possibly blurring spatial-social boundaries to change the materiality’s of the formalising space they are ordinary excluded from.
3.6 Conclusion
This framework has laid the theoretical basis in order to research how to understand informal street food beyond the binaries of informal and formal. This thesis wants to investigate how the urban poor can be credibly seen as part of the ordinary formalising process in Nairobi. By investigating how food spaces emerge and sustain themselves in the formalising spaces, de Haan’s (2005) theory of spaces with an ‘open script’ and ‘collective action’ will be tested if it also applies in a developing city context. From this, the thesis wants to see if informal food spaces in this context can indeed be part of the ordinary formalising process. It will do this is by using Massey’s (2005) re-imagination of space and examine whether this can place value and significance on the informal food spaces they are currently appropriating in the formalising neighbourhood in Nairobi. The day-dwellers will be also tested to see if they create collective action to allow for the space to be appropriated. By framing the importance of informal food spaces in a spatial framework it will hopefully give the black and grey spaces some more value in their importance in not only feeding people, but also reducing inequality during the formalisation process.
4.
Research Design
The main aim of this research was to understand the rise of informal food stalls that operate in a middle-income neighbourhood in Nairobi. The research was designed in an anthropological sense in order to allow for the spontaneous aspect of human geography.
4.1 Research Questions
The research question of this paper is:How are informal food spaces emerging and sustaining in formalising neighbourhoods in Nairobi, and to what extent can informality be reimagined to be part of the ‘ordinary’ formalising process?
As this research uses a case study to answer the main research question, the sub-questions provide a contextual understanding of the food spaces that exist in the neighbourhood itself.
In order to further explore this question, the following sub-questions were created:
1. What does a formalising neighbourhood in Nairobi look like, and how does it close space in the neighbourhood?
2. What does the location of informal food spaces tell us about the spatial strategies of the food vendors and does it impact their stall infrastructure?
3. Who and why are the people (day dwellers) making use of the informal food spaces in the area and how do they open up the neighbourhood?
4. What different social arrangements enable informal food spaces to emerge and sustain themselves in this neighbourhood?
The orange coloured words in the sub-questions are to highlight the concepts used within the research background and theory chapters, which will now be used in the following empirical chapters and is briefly explained how this will be done in the following paragraphs.
The neighbourhood changes will be understood through the chosen case study. Chapter 5 will walk the reader through the area and will provide an overview of the urban developments in the neighbourhood. This will look at the first sub-question and provide support to the main question which assumes neighbourhoods are formalising in Nairobi.
In order to understand how food spaces are emerging in this neighbourhood, a spatial approach has been adopted. I will first locate the food stalls in the neighbourhood. The sub-question forces me to link the spatial location and
distribution of these vendors to infer why they have emerged and sustained in this way, with the infrastructure they have used. Linking this spatial location to the workers and residents in the area, it will provide a better picture of how food spaces become open spaces and part of the formalising process.
The third sub-question looks at the day dwellers, who are the patrons of the food spaces. It explains how the customers are people who work yet do not live in the area and use the food spaces as places to eat lunch. It also explains how the food spaces provide further than food roles, but also creates spaces for the day dwellers to relax in the formalising neighbourhood. Through analysis this chapter will show how these food spaces ‘open’ up spaces in the neighbourhood.
The fourth sub-question investigates how the food spaces operate around strong informal social arrangements amongst the day dwellers and the food vendors. Through informal networks, vendors access to resources like water and storage.
4.2 Operationalization
By translating the theory from the previous chapter into measurable forms, the main data collected had to be reduced into variables using indicators as presented below. As explained in the theoretical chapter the notion of informality in African cities is symbiotic and cannot be simplified down to a formal/informal binary. Food spaces are however an avenue to understand the informal micro enterprises that operate in Nairobi’s neighbourhoods. They are informal in the eyes of the city council due to their ad-hoc, unplanned semi-permanence nature.
Thus, concepts can be broken down into the following dimensions:
- Closing of Space
o Formalisation:
Ordinary Representation
Neighbourhood changes through time o Physical buildings o Function of buildings
Middle class aesthetics Formalising Informal Food Vendors
Eradication or Regulation
Semi-informality
Remaining ‘ordinary’ formalisation? (Massey, 2005)
- Opening of Space
o Rise of informal food spaces Spatial strategies:
Open Scripts (de Haan, 2005)
o Food arteries in relation to the locations o Stall infrastructure
Collective Agency (de Haan, 2005) o Day Dwellers: workers in the area
Grey spaces (Yiftachel, 2009, 2010) Post-colonial legacy
