This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Lyons, M. Articles by Snoxell, S. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Sustainable Urban Livelihoods and Marketplace Social Capital: Crisis and Strategy in Petty Trade

Urban and Peri-Urban Research Unit, Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, London South Bank University, Borough Road, London, SE1 OAA, UK, lyonsm{at}lsbu.ac.uk

Simon Snoxell

Department of Research and Analysis, Infrastructure Canada, Unit 2, 195 Macy Blvd, Ottawa, Ontario KIZ 7K1, Canada, snoxell. simon @infrastructure. gc. ca

Urban growth has been accompanied by the development of bimodal labour markets and increasing inequalities in both North and South. In Southern cities, many of the poor have turned to the informal sector, in particular to street trade. This has resulted in a multiplicity of urban conflicts and has led to pressure on urban managers to undertake formalisation, for which an increasingly developmental approach has been advocated. Nevertheless, for traders, the formalisation of street trade has very uneven outcomes. The starting-point for this article is the premise that not enough is known about the social fabric upon which trading careers depend. Adopting sustainable livelihoods as a conceptual framework and drawing on social capital theory, four questions are addressed. How do trading careers survive over time? Are there differences in the survival strategies for which social capital is employed among traders operating in different political, cultural and socioeconomic contexts? In the new processes of urbanisation, are the old relationships on which social capital is based, simply lost in the new, or are traditional networks and structures adapted? Finally, what policy conclusions should be drawn to inform urban management practices as they relate to trade formalisation? The primary findings are that marketplace social capital is increasingly important to traders' economic capital. However, inherited ties, although they diminish in importance, continue to be valuable and often serve as the basis for the development of contingent ties. Implications are discussed for urban management and planning practice, for planning theory and for social capital theory.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?