The Mismatch Between Planning Practice and ‘Actually Existing Urbanisms': Planning Responses to the Phenomenon of Street Trade in Kisumu, Kenya

Street trade has increasingly become an integral part of urban economies in Kenya following the onset of the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s, and the more recent proliferation of globalization and neoliberal development policies. In Kisumu, the increased presence of street traders in urban public spaces has however fomented a ‘clash of cultures’. On the one hand are private property interests (of capitalist investors) and the planners’ modernist vision of an orderly city, while on the other hand are urban residents seeking alternative livelihood opportunities in the wake of diminishing formal jobs. The aim of this paper is to unravel the conflicts that arise out of these two contradictory worldviews on the use of urban public space. Using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, mapping and ethnographic fieldwork, the paper interrogates a range of planning responses that have been used by municipal authorities to regulate and contain the phenomenon of street trade in Kisumu over the past few decades. By extension, the paper situates the politics and spatial practices that have since been devised by street traders to fight back state repression and marginalization and to stake out traders’ claims to urban public spaces. The central argument in the paper is that while street trade and other forms of informal space production and use constitute the predominant mode of urbanism in contemporary Kisumu, official planning practice is still steeped in prescriptive ethos aimed at producing the ‘modern’ city. There is thus a mismatch between official planning policy and the practical realities of what Shatkin calls ‘actually existing urbanisms’. The paper contributes to current debates on inequality, informality, urban citizenship and the challenges of governance, particularly as they relate to contemporary planning practice and scholarship on rapidly urbanizing cities of the global South.