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Cleaning up the City: A Study on the Removal of Street Vendors from Downtown Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Author(s) -
Pádua Carrieri Alexandre,
Murta Ivana Benevides Dutra
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
canadian journal of administrative sciences / revue canadienne des sciences de l'administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.347
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1936-4490
pISSN - 0825-0383
DOI - 10.1002/cjas.207
Subject(s) - downtown , relocation , pretext , politics , work (physics) , sociology , desk , political science , public administration , media studies , geography , engineering , archaeology , law , mechanical engineering , computer science , programming language
This article presents a critical analysis of the relocation of street peddlers in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to the Shopping Popular indoor markets of the city. In its attempt to “clean up” downtown through such relocation, city council affected the dissolution of the informal work of the city's peddlers and toreros and increased the precariousness of the political and social conditions these vendors face at work. We conducted a site visit and gathered data using discourse analysis, interviews, and desk research. We argue that city council's public focus on urban revitalization served as a pretext that allowed for the serious social problems underlying the peddler issue to go unaddressed. Copyright © 2011 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.