Spatial technologies of power

In the previous section I outlined how the ‘informal’ became a mechanism of othering that allowed for colonial inequalities to be perpetuated amid the process of decolonisation. As AlSayyad reminds us, historically, the formal is the new mode of organising society (see 2.1.3), and this is nowhere more evident than in previously colonised countries like Namibia where the rule of law was introduced through colonial conquest. The introduction of European systems of law, administration and governance, key amongst which was the institution of private landownership (see 4.1), gave rise to what we today know as the formal sector.

Private property rendered control over space to become a central means to include and to exclude. This was taken to its utmost extreme with the redistribution of space – both urban and rural – along racial lines during the apartheid administration of

then South West Africa (see 4.1 and 4.2). I elaborated above how this resulted in the formal becoming the norm, rendering everything outside of it illegitimate and other, with the exception of rural areas under traditional authority jurisdiction where Western systems of governance had never fully taken hold. Having thus established the formal as the normative ideal, I will focus in this section specifically on the spatial technologies of power which enable the perpetuation of unequal power relations rooted in the colonial project. I argue that ‘development’ is being equated with formalisation;⁷¹ that planning practice is complicit in the exclusion of the majority from socio-economic advancement; and that the ‘informal’ economy stabilises elite economic interests.

5.2.1 Formalisation as ‘development’

We don’t have enough policies to protect them [informal traders]

Mayor, City of Windhoek

While the term ‘informal’ has become widely used in the public sphere in recent years, the realities so labelled (un-proclaimed settlements and un-regulated economic activities) are hardly acknowledged, let alone strategically considered in national policy and developmental plans. In various national development policy documents, the word ‘informal’ is mentioned only in reference to very narrowly defined formalisation initiatives, while the conditions for those living in un-proclaimed settlements and those pursuing un-regulated economic activities are hardly recognised. For instance, Namibia Vision 2030, the country’s overarching developmental policy guide launched in 2004, mentions the term ‘informal’ only

71 Formalisation here means bringing activities within the purview of the state through registration and taxation, and legal regulation.

three times in relation to economic activities: acknowledging its “absorptive potential” (Office of the President, 2004, p28); and proposing the need to “develop small enterprises” as the “key to employment and economic empowerment” (2004, p71); and four times in terms of “informal settlements”, without further elaboration or related strategic vision. In other words, an ‘informal’ sphere outside the world of regulated development is superficially recognised to exist, but the often explicit and otherwise implicit strategy is that this sphere has to be formalised in order to improve conditions. At the same time, its “absorptive potential”, in other words its ability to provide for livelihoods resources to a large majority that the formal sector has failed to provide for, is simply taken for granted without problematising inherent inequities.

The language of the current National Development Plan 5 (2017/18 – 2021/22), released in 2017, is even less cognisant of these realities and focuses on business and enterprise development, increased access to finance, research and development, industrialisation, production and adherence to regulations amongst others.⁷² This is particularly striking as it is far removed from the realities of home and street economies that are witnessed throughout urbanising spaces, that account for 67 percent of employment according to recent national labour statistics (see page 94). The municipal officials I interviewed recognised this shortcoming and suggested that the national legal frameworks and policies need to be adapted to become relevant to the ‘informal sector’. There is thus a substantial disjuncture between local governance, the everyday realities of an ever-increasing majority of

72 Throughout the five-year National Development Plans (NDPs) that Namibia has been developing since 1995 the word “informal” is hardly used. NDP 3 (2007/08 - 2011/12, 42 pages long) mentions it one time in the same breath as SME development (National Planning Commission, 2008, p9); NDP 4 (2012/13 to 2016/17, 152 pages) mentions the word two times in the context of education and training (National Planning Commission, 2012, p49; 52); and NDP 5 (2017/18 – 2021/22, 134 pages) mentions the word twice in relation to gender equality, seeking to “mainstream informal businesses led by women” to be

urban and rural residents living in ‘informal settlements’, and to a large extent pursuing ‘informal’ livelihood strategies, and primary policy frameworks that seek integration of all activities into the formal economy without substantial analysis of current realities. The formal here becomes a goal that everything needs to be turned into. Without offering concrete strategies how such formalisation is to be achieved, it enters the ideological realm.

The continuity of municipal byelaws, some dating back to pre-independence times, as well as post-independence legislation embodying paradigms derived from colonial laws allow for the continued criminalisation and/or marginalisation of

‘informal’ trade.⁷³ However, abiding by all relevant formal requirements is not only bureaucratically and logistically challenging, but also expensive and thus not easily achievable by a large majority as the informal sector organiser exemplified in a number of ways during his interview. The required capital to conform to existing regulations and standards is often not available even where technical skills are.

The housing advocate and town planners exemplified the drive towards formalisation based on unrealistic standards in the field of land and housing provision, with the prime example being the minimum size for residential plots of 300m². However, given existing residential densities across most unregulated settlements, upholding this ‘standard’ would require extensive relocations of urban inhabitants, while in reality very few new plots are being developed. The housing advocate noted that “if you tell four households that only one can get a plot and you have not created space for the other three, then it’s going nowhere.”⁷⁴ In both

73 In 2018 a group of female street vendors petitioned the Ministry of Gender and Child Welfare to intervene with the City Police harassing street vendors and confiscating their goods or fining them and jailing those who do not pay the fines on time (The Namibian, 2018b)

74 This refers specifically to the common situation in informal settlements in Windhoek, where up to four households share a potential 300m² plot, requiring the relocation of more than half of the households when the settlement is upgraded to conform to the 300m² policy.

economic and urban development in Namibia there is ample evidence that for many, the formal remains an unobtainable yardstick of legitimacy. Still, most major developmental policies only focus on a formalisation agenda, instead of envisioning forms of re-distributive justice that many had expected to be the result of independence and decolonisation.

The leaning towards formalisation was echoed in my interviews with the mayor and the municipal economic development officer who determined ‘informal’ economic activity as either the lack of contractual agreements of employment and/or the lack of business registration and related non-compliance with municipal health and hygiene standards. Both interviewees highlighted the difficulty in accessing what the Labour Act defines as basic “conditions of employment”, including minimum wages, regulated working hours, and leave amongst others (Government of the Republic of Namibia, 2007), where such registrations are not in place. The mayor argued that this undermines job security, creates an unstable work situation and opens up opportunities for exploitation. The labour expert also noted that in the

‘informal sector’, where businesses have employees, often these are based on family relations that can hide exploitative practices, as minimum wages and social protection mechanisms do not apply like those enjoyed by the unionised sectors.

As outlined in the literature review, class distinctions amongst ‘informal’ workers can differ widely (see 0), which was also highlighted by the informal sector organiser: “Those that started the business are poor, but those working for them are poorer”. However, from my own empirical work at the Herero Mall it became clear that having a registered business does not necessarily impact the level of vulnerability that ‘informal’ workers are exposed to as I will elaborate in the next chapter. Business registration is only one of many instances within the network of associations between traders and the state. Here, formalisation through

compliance with regulatory frameworks is discursively projected as the only way for various activities to be recognised as a legitimate contribution to national development and to protect those involved. The assumption that extending formal rights to everyone will provide the impetus for inclusive development reveals a state-centred, rights-based developmental approach that I will argue has limited impact on the status quo.

But the formalisation agenda is also driven by global institutions that Namibia is signatory to, including by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that calls for the formalisation of the ‘informal’. The Namibia Informal Sector Organisation (NISO) (directed by the informal sector organiser I interviewed) was at the time of the interview investigating how to improve salaries and protections for workers in the

‘informal’ economy, a project funded by the ILO and guided by its Decent Work Agenda. He noted the need to observe provisions of the Labour Act and the constitution – which “must be respected” – also in the ‘informal sector’. He claimed that “ignorance” of legal provisions by ‘informal’ workers and business owners was the main factor in the lack of their implementation, and that there was a need to raise awareness through training. Again, formal legislative frameworks are positioned as paramount, which highlights the level of assimilation of local NGO’s such as NISO into state-centred development.⁷⁵ This also shines a light on the relationships between NGOs and international institutions and the extent to which these are able to influence local advocacy agendas.

The mayor elaborated that ‘informal’ work includes “business activities conducted at various street corners and within road reserves” including the sale of fruits and

75 Namibia has an established tripartite alliance of government, employers’ organisations and organised labour unions that deals with labour-related conflicts.

vegetables, cooked food, fresh meat and services such as car washes, salons, and tyre repairs. The economic development officer mentioned with some frustration that “we still have informal traders operating from street corners, pavements, which can bring conflict with other users within the city, be it motorists or pedestrians, passing along those pavements”. Both officials thus directly addressed the aspect of space, more specifically the fact that such activities often occur on public land which was designated for other land uses. Firstly, this means that besides the often-mentioned aspects of business registration and employment, access to land plays a central role. They also seem to implicitly suggest that the assigned uses, in this case pedestrian and vehicle traffic, have priority in such spaces over largely survivalist economic activity. What is presented here discursively as antagonistic conflict between users, hides the fact that traders would not be in those locations if some of the pedestrians and motorists would not require their goods or services.

In other words, it hides a transactional logic.

In addition, hawking is often presented as competition for formal businesses. The economic development officer mentioned that “it might be that informal traders operate next to formal setups like big supermarkets, which is often perceived to be direct competition”. The labour expert stated that “many formal sector operators […] see the informal competitors as a threat, especially in the retail sector”.

However, he argued that the odds are stacked against ‘informal’ trade: “if informal traders sell their goods in front of a formal retailer, the formal retailer tends to call the police and they will be able to chase people away on the basis of lacking licences etc., or fine them or even arrest them”.⁷⁶ But he highlighted that

“supermarkets also use the informal networks to their own advantage. Some sell

their own goods through informal traders in other areas on a commission basis at a different price on the street”. The relationship between formal retailers and hawkers varies between protectionist interventions on the one hand and collaborating in the economic interest of large retail on the other.

According to the labour expert the dominant thinking regarding economic development is thus to move traders to “a nice place elsewhere” where basic infrastructure is provided, but usually accessibility and thus potential for economic success is reduced, often leading to tensions between traders and authorities.⁷⁷ Indeed, over the years a number of formalised markets have been built in Windhoek and other towns in areas where open land was available, similar to strategies followed elsewhere (see p43). But where these were located off the main pedestrian and traffic arteries such markets have never succeeded in taking off, even where they were subsidised by the local authority.⁷⁸ In addition, under the CoW’s regulations, in municipal markets fixed rents are levied and business activities are restricted. Specifically, the sale of alcohol is forbidden and “light industries” are not allowed as these are deemed to be incompatible with other market functions for health and safety reasons. The economic development officer admitted that “we have some challenges from […] the way we used to plan for the markets. […] In the past people allocated whatever land was available, that could not be used for other uses”. He thus acknowledged that allocating space for trading used to be low on the priority list of the local authority. This also makes clear

77 This strategy is repeatedly reported in daily newspapers form local authorities all over the country. I supervised an independent student-led project to investigate the informal economy in Opuwo, a small rural town in the far north-west of Namibia. The town council had requested students to design a formal market at an inaccessible site, even though the research clearly showed the importance of proximity of vendors to mobility routes and formal retail outlets amongst others (Namupala et.al, forthcoming).

78 In one case in Windhoek a market has since been remodelled into a pre-primary school as it proved not to be viable for trade.

the misguided approach to develop ‘markets’ that do not engage with the spatial logics of the economic activities themselves, but rather propose projects that can be politically mobilised as ‘development’ as the informal sector organiser maintained.

Skinner (2008) argues that providing formalised markets for street traders is a widespread approach in Sub-Saharan Africa, often with negative consequences for traders, and contrasts this with the notion of “natural markets” that has been the result of bottom-up struggle for the recognition of street vending rights in India (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2015). But relocation of traders was supported by the informal sector organiser, who recalled that:

We reached some agreement that where there is a market built, traders must go into the market. They were refusing at one point, because they see the areas where they sell for free for many, many years. You see, when you are changing the culture of your people you must be also tough.

In Namibia the tendency to relocate traders away from public land to formalised spaces reserved for markets still prevails, though some shifting in the thinking of the Windhoek municipality seems underway, as I will show in the next section. What underlies this is the view, derived from modernist concerns about land use, that assigning a use to a space will make it viable as such, often disregarding existing socio-spatial and economic patterns. The informal sector organiser framed formalisation in terms of transforming culture, implying that such development is generally progressive. At the same time, he highlights the fact that selling in the public space is usually for free, making it a form of commons, whereas markets that are owned and operated by the local authority are regulated spaces that are part of the state, and thus do not allow the freedom of appropriation.

In the above I aimed to show that formalisation or inclusion within the formal economy of all economic activity is an unquestioned assumption throughout government and non-governmental sectors.⁷⁹ Given the stark income inequality (see p90), and inadequate public spending priorities based on policy frameworks that I have already shown do not adequately address the economic and urban development challenges of the ‘informal’ (see 5.2.1), this rights-based developmental drive towards formalisation effectively excludes a large majority of citizens. On a spatial level, ‘informal’ trade in public space is discursively construed as generating ‘conflict’ between different users of space, which underlies the thrust to relocate traders from the public space to dedicated market areas. However, street trade evidently requires a symbiotic relationship with those other ‘users’ who provide the customer base. Views of street trade being unruly thus seems to hide deeper, class-based differentiations between those who (have to) buy from street traders and those for whom streets are merely mobility networks aimed at getting from point A to B with maximum efficiency.

At the same time the generally restricted nature of formal municipal markets sharply contrasts with traders’ conceptualisations of economic diversity as a key factor for viable economic development that I will elaborate on in the next chapter.

Formalisation thus often negatively affects traders as it remains steeped in modernist paradigms of state control, separation of functions, and orderliness.

Ultimately, common spaces of relative freedom within the city where ‘informal’

economies thrive are increasingly being enclosed through regulatory control. In the

79 In a workshop we organised at my university with Prof James Ferguson in August 2019 on conceptualising livelihoods beyond formal employment it was striking how participants from across the academic, governmental, non-governmental and private sector insisted on the need for more and better policies, while at the same time arguing that policy was ineffective and difficult to implement (Delgado, 2019).

extremely unequal context of post-colonial Namibia, I argue that formalisation without concomitant redistribution of resources must be understood as a state-centred, exclusionary technology of power, aimed at the preservation of elite interests. As Roy (2005) reminds us, from a governance perspective the benefit of the ‘informal’ is that it can be tolerated where opportune or criminalised where necessary for power to be asserted. At times of political expediency however, the developmental promise of formalisation can always be mobilised even though in practice it often does not mean ‘progress’ on the ground.

5.2.2 Planning as mirage

No person shall use or cause or allow to be used any land or portion thereof for a use other than provided for in this Scheme.

Clause 11(3) of the Windhoek Town Planning Scheme (City of Windhoek, no date a)

In the previous section I outlined the imperative for formalisation of ‘informal’

economic activities, and how this becomes a technology of power that – under the guise of progress – excludes those who cannot conform to its imperatives. In the following section I will elaborate on how contemporary planning practice perpetuates these dynamics and with which methods. This highlights how the discourse on ‘informality’ becomes a discursive practice and what role spatial

economic activities, and how this becomes a technology of power that – under the guise of progress – excludes those who cannot conform to its imperatives. In the following section I will elaborate on how contemporary planning practice perpetuates these dynamics and with which methods. This highlights how the discourse on ‘informality’ becomes a discursive practice and what role spatial