Ane Edslev

In Dar es Salaam, the strained relations between informal workers and the state are under pressure by unprecedented rapid urbanisation and economic informalisation. At one end, more people depend on informal activities to make a living; at the other, the state seeks to contain and regulate urban informality to mobilise revenue and advance urban development. This has produced a climate of conflict in the city’s informal economy. Through an interpretive study of conflict between the state and market traders in Dar es Salaam, this book explores how conflict is socially constructed, what it is about, and how it manifests. Drawing on fieldwork in 14 marketplaces, extensive documentary and visual material and 160 interviews with market traders, state officials, development partner officials and other actors, it uncovers how conflict emerges through tensions in these actors’ contextual meanings of marketplace taxation and renewal. These tensions materialise, for example, in their discrepant interpretations of taxability in markets, competing narratives of the purposes and motivations of marketplace renewal, contentious everyday interaction, state disciplining and trader disengagement with state structures. In short, this book shows that conflict over urban informality does not simply arise from increased state intervention or an inherent contradiction between the state and informal workers. Rather, it emerges through the different meanings that informal workers, public officials and institutional actors – in a given historical context – ascribe to such interventions. This advances our understanding of how meaning-making shapes politics of urban informality and state-society relations in the global South.

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