This paper examines street vending activities as a place-making activity in Huifang, Xi’an, China, focusing on how formal and informal practices entangle to shape the use and transformation of public space. While this entanglement has predominantly been theorised at a structural or conceptual level, and the relationship between urban management officers (Chengguan) and street vendors in China is still widely framed as conflictual, how it operates in everyday spatial practice remains underexamined. Drawing on qualitative methods across three analytically distinct sites, the paper analyses how vendors, residents and local government actors (urban management officers and community service centre officers) negotiate public space through street vending activities. Structured through five literature-derived analytical dimensions (temporality, collaboration, inclusivity, creativity and sense of place), the analysis shows how negotiated governance, operating through unwritten rules, selective enforcement and everyday accommodation, produces distinct forms of negotiated place-making: grassroots (Xicang), tourism-driven (Beiyuanmen) and heritage-focused (Xuexixiang). The paper contributes by operationalising negotiated place-making as a transferable analytical framework for examining how formal–informal entanglements become visible in everyday spatial practices. The findings qualify the dominant conflict narrative surrounding urban management officers (Chengguan) and street vendors, contributing to debates on place-making, informality and governance.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted negatively on informal sector workers, especially those with micro businesses, the majority of whom are women with little or no formal social protection. Drawing on data obtained from 377 women traders from major markets in Ghana, and using a mixed-methods paradigm, we sought to ascertain the types of social protection schemes women traders subscribe to in the post-COVID era to cope with shocks and to ensure better safety nets. The findings show different forms and scales of social protection measures, with women leveraging both formal and informal systems as means to support their businesses in the event of shocks. The study offers policymakers and relevant stakeholders’ insight to provide more inclusive social security and insurance policies to enhance the resilience of informal sector workers, particularly women traders, against future shocks.
While the proliferation of community food services (CFS) during the COVID-19 pandemic has been documented as a local survival strategy, its implications for metropolitan-scale theory remain underexplored. This paper moves beyond the analysis of individual food sites to examine CFS as a structural component of socio-spatial segregation in Latin American cities. Through a comparative study of 114 boroughs in Lima, Montevideo and Santiago, we analyse how different institutional environments and historical segregation patterns shape the density and reach of these networks. Our findings identify a ‘Southern perspective’ on urban infrastructure, where food networks function as bridges across fragmented metropolitan spaces. By contrasting these South American cases with established Northern-centric literature, this research proposes a conceptual adaptation of ‘people as infrastructure’ that accounts for the entrenched inequalities of the Americas. We conclude that recognising the infrastructural scale of CFS is essential for a global comparative urbanism that addresses the structural rather than merely incidental role of community solidarity.
This paper critiques the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) by foregrounding its inadequate attention to political and physical risks in border environments, drawing on evidence from itinerant women traders in Nigeria’s informal economy along the Nigeria–Benin borderlands. Rather than simply documenting challenges that are already well established in the literature, the paper demonstrates how the SLF falls short in capturing the layered vulnerabilities that emerge from border insecurity, systemic marginalisation and state neglect. Despite their central role in sustaining cross-border commerce and household livelihoods, these traders operate in precarious contexts where institutional protections are minimal and political risks are acute. The analysis shows how women traders’ adaptive strategies such as informal networks, resource pooling and diversified trading practices both expose and complicate the SLF’s treatment of vulnerability and resilience. By engaging critically with the framework and anchoring it in the lived experiences of borderland traders, this paper extends existing critiques of the SLF and calls for its reconceptualisation to account for the political economies of risk in informal cross-border trade.
Increasingly, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have become dependent on major donors. Known as philanthrocapitalism, this was critiqued for a lack of democracy and downward accountability, leading to a concentration of power among a privileged few. Simultaneously, the call for localisation increased, which refers to more inclusion and empowerment of INGOs’ local partners. In this article, we interrogate how Dutch INGOs deal with attracting major donors on the one hand (i.e. philanthrocapitalism) and demands for increasing downward accountability (i.e. localisation) on the other. Based on interviews, work experience and report analysis, we explore these allegedly contradictory movements and analyse the power dynamics regarding its four attributes of knowledge, capacity, authority and accountability. We argue that, although power can be found at all levels in the ‘force field’ between philanthrocapitalism and localisation, funding relations create space for repression and therefore the concentration of power among major donors functions largely as an obstacle to localisation.
