Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Global Social Welfare https://doi.org/10.1007/s40609-023-00297-4 Unpacking Urban Environmental Visions and Contestations of Street Vendors in Kolkata, West Bengal Madhubarna Dhar 1  · Amrita Sen 1  · Archana Patnaik 1 Accepted: 20 June 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Abstract Street vendors, more popularly known as “hawkers” in South Asia, constitute a visible part of the urban informal popula- tion in India and often settle down for sale in public spaces like city streets, sidewalks, and overpasses. This, however, comes into confict with the “environmental” visions of middle-class citizens who desire to live in a world class city that is spectacular, hygienic, and centered around bourgeois aesthetics. As a result, street vendors are routinely targeted, dis- possessed, and evicted. This is partly due to a vision of city planning and beautifcation, which considers entry points to urban informal economies as illegitimate and problematic. Moreover, the state perceives street vending spaces in the city as antithetical to the making of a world class city. In this paper, we examine the urban environment as a socio-political category where street-based livelihood activities, despite being popularly seen as a “city hazard” formatively proliferate through powerfully shaped strategies of politics and governmentality. This work conceptualizes public spaces as part of the urban environment. It proposes the idea of city streets as an “urban resource” which a multitude of actors struggle to control and access. Drawing on ethnographic feldwork in Kolkata, we reveal how street vendors have been able to con- test class animated visions of the city through innovative political strategies and efective mobilization, overcoming the common narrative of street vending as a marginalizing practice. The fndings prompt us to ask how urban environmental movements and aligned spatial frictions forge important questions on informal organizations and the political unioniza- tion of labor in the city of Kolkata. Keywords Informality · Street vendors · Middle class · Urban politics · Urban environment Introduction This paper explores a discursive frame of urban environ- mental justice, positioning street vendors as steady actors within the informal economies of a city. Street vendors, commonly known as hawkers in South Asia, ofer a range of goods and services primarily to the middle and mar- ginal classes of the city, often at afordable and pocket- friendly prices. The National Policy on Urban Street Vendors (2009) states that hawkers or street vendors are “self- employed workers in the urban informal sector, who ofer their labor for selling goods and services without any permanent built-up structure.” City streets, sidewalks, overpasses, markets, and pavements are ideal spaces where hawkers settle down for sale, often in temporary, static, or makeshift structures. Hawkers constitute an essential part of the urban landscape of India, yet are often threat- ened, dispossessed, and evicted, partly owing to a vision of city planning which considers entry points to urban informal economies as illegitimate and therefore problem- atic—broadly, a planning perspective that regards informal economies as “distortion of public space” and a kind of public nuisance (Onodugo et al., 2016, p. 95–96). Baviskar (2011, p. 391) pointed out that this mission of “cleaning up” city streets most often target urban marginals, includ- ing vendors, beggars, and performers. Public space in Kolkata, 1 where this work is empiri- cally positioned, had become a contested arena following * Madhubarna Dhar madhubarnadhar@kgpian.iitkgp.ac.in 1 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal 721302, India 1 It must be remembered that Calcutta was renamed Kolkata by the West Bengal Government in 2001.