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Informal trading is an everyday livelihood practice in South African cities. Although praised for its local economic development potential, in the post-Apartheid context, it often sits in tension with urban regeneration plans. This research examines the case of the Khayelitsha Central Business District (KCBD), just outside of Cape Town, built as part of the Mayor’s Urban Regeneration Program. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores the material and symbolic spaces and everyday practices of street trading in the KCBD—specifically, how traders negotiate their trading practices in a context of on-going development. What we see in practice is informal traders existing in a complex space—caught somewhere between exclusionary urban regeneration projects, and waiting for the state. Concurrently, traders are inventing spaces through negotiating, quietly encroaching and self-managing in an attempt to secure livelihoods and grow businesses in the meanwhile; whilst ‘waiting’ in the long-term for physical and entrepreneurial development opportunities. By focusing on these symbolic experiences and actions of street traders in the KCBD, we can understand the often invisible, ordinary, everyday realities of the traders, through which ‘street politics’ is produced and an ‘actual’ right to the city is claimed. In this transitioning space, urban regeneration sits in tension with informal trading—a context in which these traders need to be given a voice, and where such research becomes valuable, in displaying a textured reality.

Informal Trading and a Right to the City in the Khayelitsha CBD: insights from the field