2003 CLAS Summer Research Report Heidi Hall City and Regional Planning/International Studies "Street Vendors and the 'City Beautiful': Struggles over livelihood and public space in Lima"

With the support of a CLAS travel grant, I spent a month in Lima, Peru this past summer (mid-June to mid-July) conducting fieldwork for a Master's thesis project.   This project focuses on the massive relocation of street vendors due to the revitalization of downtown Lima as a world heritage site.  It explores questions around how urban change can marginalize informal groups and how global and local processes interact at the urban scale, and draws attention to a lack of equity and accountability within processes of urban development. The goal of this trip was to conduct key interviews, gather documents and whatever information I could, and generally get a deeper understanding of what is happening in Lima around these issues of informality, displacement and revitalization.

Plaza de Armas, the central plaza after the vendors have been relocated.

Brief Background

There are over 8 million people living in the Lima metropolitan area, nearly a third of Peru's population (around 24 million).  In the past decades, rural-urban migration has been a critical piece of this growth, due to a lack of economic opportunities, declining subsistence of agriculture and violence in the countryside.  As a result of this rapid urban growth and liberalization of the Peruvian economy, the urban informal sector is growing, and street vending has been a large part of this growth, important for both the distribution of goods and services and as a means of income generation for lower income residents.  For many years there was a large concentration of vendors in the downtown center of Lima and it was an important site of lower-priced commerce that attracted residents from various areas of Lima.  In 1991, this area was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO, resulting in renewed attention to the historical preservation of the entire downtown and a redefinition of legitimate uses for the public spaces in this area.  Relocation of the 20,000+ street vendors in 1997 and integrating them into the formal economy was a priority of the 1994 Master Plan for Downtown, to clear public spaces and "reclaim" downtown for the broader public through physical revitalization.  Vendors were relocated to formal markets outside the city center, with differential impacts on particular groups and individuals.  I used the world heritage declaration as my entry point when I started my research this summer. 

The balcony restoration program in downtown Lima.

 

Research Activities

Local radio at a relocated vendor cooperative.

I stayed at a friend's hostel in the district of Miraflores, a nice area by the ocean and previously a suburb of Lima that had been engulfed by the growing city limits a long time ago.  Miraflores and San Isidro, another engulfed suburb, are the more fashionable parts of the city and the new business, shopping and tourism centers.  I spent a lot of time on the bus going to and from this area and downtown where my research was focused, and was constantly struck by the contrast.  I spent hours walking the streets of the designated historic center - or centro histórico - and visited the major relocation projects to get some sense of what the impact has been.  I tracked down various people relevant to both the revitalization of the center and the relocation of vendors, various NGOs working with informal workers and some vendor organizations to both piece together this process of change and relocation in the past 10 years, and to gather numerous perspectives on a hugely complicated social problem in developing cities such as Lima.

Key institutional actors represented by the interviews I conducted:

• Muncipality of Lima-Historic and Cultural Preservation Office, Economic Development Office, Mayor's Office; very different branches of the municipality with very little communication between them.  The Economic Development Office was responsible to coordinate and plan the relocation of vendors.  There was an individual attempt to use this as an opportunity to develop a more comprehensive economic development plan for the informal sector.

• ProLima - a quasi-public organization created by the Master Plan for Downtown and responsible for developing and implementing all plans related to the Centro Historico.  Mostly staffed by architects and engineers and pushes for 'appropriate uses of space' in the centro.

• Patronato de Lima - a business/ tourism/ preservation coalition that initiated the world heritage declaration process with UNESCO, with no support from Lima's mayor until the designation was approved.  Mostly architects, they now focus on preservation and education.

• Vendor associations - Varying levels of organization and capacity among the associations. There are several smaller associations that did not participate and another larger group that was not included in discussions with the municipality.

• Nonprofit organizations that are working with vendors - Generally felt the relocation was motivated for the wrong reasons, i.e. not for the benefit of informal workers but to empty the spaces they occupied.  Along with most of the vendor associations, they advocate for the right to pursue a livelihood and more comprehensive solutions.

• Businesses - Several business associations pushed the municipality for relocation since it affected their businesses and they viewed it as sometimes unfair competition.

Vendors outside the monastery of San Francisco.

 

After several interviews and observation, I was struck by how regulated public space is in the centro.  The Master Plan clearly outlines a hierarchy of uses-there is a matrix of uses that are a) encouraged, b) permitted and c) not allowed.  In the centro histórico, street vending is allowed only in particular trades, such as books, postcards or shoe shining, and only by appropriately dressed vendors with a license.  For example, vendors are allowed to sell religious objects within a certain distance of churches, maps and books are allowed to be sold in the plaza.  Food is sold behind the palacio gobierno near the bridge leading to the university, where the contraband market used to be.  Clothing and shoe sales are clustered in small spaces in the nearby buildings.

Former contraband market in the centro.

 

There is a heavy security presence downtown.  This included visible security at key shopping areas, municipal police officers in the plaza de armas and several at the main tourist sites.  Many limeños I spoke with viewed downtown as incredibly dangerous, citing recent muggings and assaults, and only went there if they had business to conduct.  It is also very congested since thousands of buses, minivans and taxis pass through the city center.  I got the sense the city was trying desperately to challenge these assumptions. 

This surveillance is also definitely directed at street vendors to maintain the area clear of vendors.  Many vendors still gravitate to the centro to sell their wares, particularly near the Mercado Central a few blocks from the Plaza de Armas.  I observed vendors walking around with their wares in a box or on a blue tarp so they could quickly pack up when the police arrived and disappear into the crowd.  The photo above includes a signpost in the center that states vending is prohibited (comercio ambulatorio prohibido).

I was also struck how this was very much a contested process and how "relocation" had very different meanings for people.  When I spoke with several people at the municipality and ProLima, relocation was seen as the best solution to a problem and positive for the vendors.  Vendors themselves viewed this as an eviction (using the term desalojo instead of reubicación) and talked about their right to make a living.  Similarly, the municipality often used "relocation" and "formalization" interchangeably, viewing the relocation to formal markets as the main piece of this process.  The vendors however, had clear ideas of what such a formalization process would look like and negated this claim stating they needed access to credit, business training, health and social services, marketing and promotion.  Never were informal workers included in the policy-making and planning processes.

Many vendors resisted relocation when the March 1997 deadline approached, resulting in a violent confrontation with the municipal police and eventually with the national police that were brought in. Since this time, there has been mixed experiences reflecting differences among the vendor populations.

This summer research raised some important issues for me as I begin to write my thesis. One insight which is not surprising but still worth mentioning, is the fact that this is extremely political since there is so much at stake, which makes it even more critical to assure informal workers are included in the policy-making and planning process.  We can also see how global processes such as the UNESCO declaration and other forces such as tourism, capital and public image are mediated at a very local level and through very local institutions.  I also gained an understanding of hierarchies that exist within the informal sector, among vendors in this instance.  There were three main relocation projects: Fevacel/ Nuevo Mercado Central (vendors grouped around the Mercado Central), Polvos Azules (contraband market adjacent to the palacio gobierno), Malvinas (vendors along one of the main thoroughfares, Avenida Arequipa).  These corresponded with the strongest associations and the best-capitalized street merchants.  The more marginal vendors were not incorporated nor were several of the smaller associations. 

Avenida Aviación – the next relocation project.

This was further highlighted when I interviewed the director of the relocation project.  She talked about the need for different policies and programs for different groups of vendors to address this hierarchy, something that never happened within the relocation process.  Thus while some groups benefited by the assistance the municipality offered to find a formal location for their businesses, many others were further marginalized and simply drifted elsewhere to continue selling in the streets.

Finally, I got some sense of a growing mobilization among informal workers to fight for their right to a livelihood and rights as citizens of the city.  FEDEVAL (Federacion de Vendedores Ambulantes de Lima) is working to build a metropolitan coalition of informal workers and is developing a platform to advocate for the rights and social development of informal workers throughout the region.  I was able to attend some of their meetings and talk with several of their members.  The group is also building a relationship with StreetNet International, a transnational grassroots organization launched in November 2002.  A regional Latin American meeting was held in Lima last year organized in large part by StreetNet.

A strategy meeting of FEDEVAL (Federacion de Vendedores Ambulantes de Lima).