Why should pedestrians share streets with hawkers?

The Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) has been organising a series of public hearings since March. Pedestrian mobility has repeatedly surfaced as a contested issue in these hearings. 

"We don't have space to walk," said one woman resident during a recent hearing at Mohakhali. "Our footpaths, I am ashamed to say. It is that bad. The footpath has been occupied by businesses. Who is the footpath for? It's for people who don't have cars. But if footpaths are taken away by shops, then we have nowhere to walk." 

Another woman resident echoed this frustration: "The shops should be in a specific place. Shops need to be outlawed in walking paths for people." 

In hearing after hearing, citizens stated that hawkers occupying footpaths and streets are more than inconvenient — it is unfair for pedestrians, especially for women, children, and people without private vehicles.

In April, DNCC initiated a drive to dismantle shops and stalls occupying sidewalks and streets. In Uttara and Agragaon, for instance, DNCC reportedly dismantled around 400 shops and vending arrangements. 

Such efforts are necessary to restore what urban citizens demand: pedestrian mobility and the public right of way. But the results are not unanimously celebrated. 

On DNCC's social media posts, for instance, some complained about the sudden disappearance of food hawkers, particularly around hospitals and transit hubs, where they once provided affordable and accessible meals. Others stated that the livelihoods of low-income hawkers need to be supported. 

Herein lies a stubborn tension between pedestrian mobility and street trading in Dhaka. Can the DNCC ensure both the right to walk and the right to a livelihood? 

City authorities around the world have to grapple with the contradiction between walking and street trading. Specifically in cities of the Global South, the sheer scale of the informal economy creates an anxious urgency around this 'wicked' problem. 

In urban planning, we call 'wicked' problems those issues that lack a straightforward solution. Such problems require a collaborative, incremental approach to reach for the provisionally best 'workable' intervention over a long time. 

Street trading is here to stay

For a majority of Dhaka's residents, the informal economy is not an alternative to formal employment — it is the only and primary option. More than 80% of employment in Dhaka, according to the Detailed Area Plan 2016-35, falls in the informal sector, including street trading. 

Yet, informal economic activities like street trading are not effectively incorporated into city planning. 

Why? We know from existing research that legislation, management, and planning cultures are still weighed down by colonial legacies that marginalise the informal economy. The Detailed Area Plan 2016-35 offers a much-needed corrective in this regard by proposing management directives for hawkers. 

More importantly, many city officials have vested interests in resisting change as repressive approaches give them opportunities for various corrupt and rent-seeking practices. 

As citizens aspiring for "modern" and "western" cities, we too imagine streets free from hawkers. Ironically, though, the Global North's cities now encourage street trading. 

For post-colonial cities like Dhaka, this is a crisis of political imagination. 

In addition, the crisis of street trading is not just a managerial challenge—it is the symptom of a national labour market crisis. 

The unavailability of secure employment with dignity, the inaccessibility of the formal sector, and the erosion of rural livelihoods have driven millions into urban areas without a plan or safety net.

In the past decades of urban policy evolution, we have witnessed a global trend among international, national, and municipal institutions acknowledging that street trading is here to stay and can be managed to balance its trade-offs. 

Street trading is an urban livelihood that supports poor people and contributes to local economies. It offers immediate income with low entry barriers. For consumers, hawkers provide affordable food, everyday goods, and services in locations close to their homes and workplaces. 

Research also shows that women feel safer walking on streets with vendors compared to empty streets. To dismiss vending as merely a nuisance is to ignore its social function. 

But there is no space!

At the same time, Dhaka's lived reality is unforgiving. Roads are narrow, sidewalks are often broken, and foot traffic in some areas, like Uttara and Mirpur, reaches levels where movement becomes frustratingly impossible. 

In such conditions, trading competes directly with mobility. 

Hawkers occupy every inch of the sidewalk and even take up street space. Pedestrians elbow through hawkers and buyers, and often spill into traffic. Traffic clogs, tempers flare, and a brutal zero-sum logic takes hold: either mobility or livelihood, but not both.

Dhaka cannot design its way out of this crisis. What seems to be an urban problem is actually wickedly national and global in scope. 

Let's face the truth: DNCC's interventions alone will never be enough. 

Evictions are useless

Faced with public frustration, city authorities may resort to evictions, raids, and the removal of hawkers. 

Dhaka has seen hawker evictions many times in the past decades. But evictions do not eliminate street trading. Even relocations fail in many cases because location matters, and traders return to their profitable sites. 

Evictions only make hawkers, who already face extortion at the hands of violent syndicates, even more vulnerable. 

What should we do? 

First, urban authorities must operate from the principle that hawkers need to be recognised and accommodated with minimal relocation under the condition that their activities do not entirely impede pedestrian mobility.  

Second, inclusive management models start from knowledge gathering and developing a database of existing hawkers. Surveys can reveal "hot spots" where traders congregate, and these areas can then be targeted for recognition, reallocation, consolidation, and intensive management. 

The city management can also build an inventory of public spaces suitable for street trading.  

DAP 2016-35's Hawker Management Directives enable such formalisation (e.g. registration, issue and renewal of livelihood certificate, eviction, rehabilitation, and release of confiscated goods) and space allotment. 

According to this directive, hawkers would register with the City Corporations. The Hawker Management Directives also include policies related to the allotment of areas for mobile and stationary traders on footpaths/sidewalks, the designated width for circulation of customers and other pedestrians, the time of operation, and the monthly rent of the allotted area.

Third, fair cities promote participatory street trading management. Hawkers are diverse, and include women, youth, and people with disabilities. Street trader organisations could be organised into area-based forums that make strategic recommendations to a city-level advisory committee. 

The city-level committee, in turn, can be a multi-stakeholder advisory committee on street trading, including officials of relevant departments, trader representatives, and other civil society stakeholders. 

The committee can debate and advise Dhaka's urban authorities on street trading policies and plans. The committee, for instance, could propose one day in the week that has to be free of street trading. It could propose reasonable rental or cleaning fees from the traders. 

Nabanita Islam, who has extensively studied Dhaka's hawkers, found that hawkers are willing to pay affordable rental fees.  

The location of trading sites, design of stalls, use of streets and so on need to be worked out at the street or neighbourhood level through local forums and flexible arrangements. The 'street carrying capacity' may be different for different neighbourhoods and streets. 

Area-specific forums can also develop flexible use of space through time-sharing models. Different hawkers can sit at different times of the day, which will maximise the use of limited space. 

The city can empower the forums by providing resources and technical support, such as independent and salaried forum facilitators.      

Towards shared streets for a fair city

We fully understand that these proposals may be severely challenged in Dhaka's density and public mistrust due to partisan local politics. But that should not mean we repeat the top-down failures from before. 

In dense cities of India, Tanzania, Thailand, and others, city authorities have set in motion innovative approaches. Singapore rehabilitated hawkers into markets and recognised hawkers as intangible cultural heritage through UNESCO. 

Negative public perceptions of hawkers have been changed through such initiatives.

We look with hopeful caution towards the DNCC's initiative to create a "Dhaka Hut" for hawkers in Diabari, Uttara. It is laudable to offer alternative locations to hawkers. 

However, existing research suggests that for many traders, such relocations may not be profitable, and they may be compelled to look for more lucrative 'usual' venues.

If we take seriously the scale of Dhaka city, the structural roots of street trading, the needs of pedestrians, and the cultural value and humanity of hawkers, new possibilities of cohabiting streets may emerge. Not easy ones. Certainly uncomfortable ones. That may include dismantling shops as well as sharing the sidewalk. 

In reevaluating pain, philosopher Byung-Chul Han reminds us that pain can be a receptacle for us to arrive at a different way of being. Perhaps, the managed discomfort of sharing Dhaka's streets is a pain that can open us to a novel mode of urban living—from eviction to shared streets, from zero-sum battles to a fair city.

Dr Efadul Huq is faculty of Environmental Science & Policy and Urban Studies at Smith College, and serves in DNCC's Local Experts Advisory Committee

Dr Nabanita Islam is faculty of Architecture at North South University, and serves in DNCC's Local Experts Advisory Committe.