In looking at people who participate in mobility out of necessity in the work place I find and extreme example in street vendors. Their work requires daily, weekly, and monthly shifts in where and how they conduct business, and changes in work settings are often unforeseeable and uncontrollable.

LOOKING AT STREET VENDORS

In countries around the world many people supplement or solely earn their income through selling a wide range of goods and services in the street or in other temporary settings. While in some countries regulations have forced vendors of most sorts out of the public eye, in many places vendors are thriving and providing a sensitive selection of goods to middle and lower class customers.

Around the world, a large and, perhaps, growing share of the informal workforce operates on streets, sidewalks, and public parks, outside any enclosed premise or covered workspace. This includes not only those street vendors who sell goods but also a broader range of street workers who sell services and produce or repair goods, such as: hairdressers or barbers; shoe shiners and shoe repairers; car window cleaners; tailors specializing in mending; bicycle, motorcycle, van, and truck mechanics; furniture makers; metal workers; garbage pickers and waste recyclers; head loaders and cart pullers; wandering minstrels, magicians, acrobats, and jugglers; beggars and mendicants. In Kenya, the Swahili term «Jua Kali» – which means «under the burning sun» – is the traditional name for the informal economy. This is because so many informal activities, not just street trade, take place in the open-air under the burning sun.(1)

In most countries except those where culture restricts women’s lives, women make up a large portion and play equal roles in the street vendor population. The exception is in Africa, where women though present in the informal markets, are more likely to be in high risk or unpleasant locations or situation that are either illegal, environmentally undesirable, depend on the sale of perishable goods, or working as employees under other vendors.

I borrow this excellent description of Street Vendors is borrowed from John C. Cross’s writings concerning informal politics:

Typology of Street Vendors

Street vendors are not a homogeneous group. They can be categorized or grouped according
to e.g. what types of goods they sell, where they trade, and from what type of premise as well as
by their employment status, as indicated below. Also, for some street vending is full-time primary
work; for others it is a part-time secondary job.

Types of Goods: What do They Sell?
Foodstuffs: fruit and vegetables Cigarettes and matches
Cooked food Newspapers and magazines
Snacks and soft drinks Manufactured goods
Candies and sweets Second-hand goods
Ice cream and popsicles

Location of Work: Where Do They Trade?
System of open-air markets in designated Railway stations, subway stations,
areas on designated days bus stops/lorry stations
Concentrations of vendors in particular areas: Construction sites
central business district or residential Sports complexes
neighborhoods Home
Street corners or sidewalks

Type of Premise: From What Do They Vend?
Baskets or bowls placed on the ground Bicycle
or carried on the head or body Wheeled push-carts
Mats or cloths spread on the ground Wheeled stalls with display cases
Stool or table Porch-front or window display
Pole over shoulder Fixed shed, stall, or kiosk

Employment Status: Are They Independent or Dependent?
Independent self-employed: with and Semi-dependent workers:
without employees e.g. commission agents
Dependent employees: paid workers for other
street vendors or for wholesale/retail traders

The Issues street vendors deal with are relatively uniform. In 1995, representatives from street vendor associations and activists, lawyers, and researchers working with street vendors from 11 cities around the world met at the Bellagio International Declaration of Street Vendors in Bellagio, Italy to form an international alliance (now called StreetNet) of street vendor associations and of organizations working with street vendors. The founders of the network drafted the Bellagio International Declaration of Street Vendors. The Bellagio Declaration identifies the following common problems of street vendors around the world:

• No Legal Status, No Right to Vend
• Lack of Space or Poor Location
• Restrictions on Licensing, Costs of Regulation
• Harassment, Bribes, Confiscation, and Evictions
• Lack of Services and Infrastructure
• Lack of Representation or Voice

The Declaration urged national governments to incorporate street vendors in economic policies relating to trade, financial policies relating to micro-entrepreneurs, and social policies relating to the working poor. The Declaration also urges city governments to incorporate street vendors in urban planning processes and urban policies and to promote institutional mechanisms for street vendor associations to voice grievances, make demands, and resolve disputes with other urban stakeholders.(2)

While caught up in fulgurations of government and market, it is interesting to note that there is a sort of equilibrium to be established within the shifting space and market street vendors occupy. Street vendors reside within a pattern of what I think of as “small world migration”- a phrase I’ve concocted to describe that significant travel and exposure to physical and sensory relocation is taking place, but to express that this form of mobility is also reined within a more limited distance than some of the other workplace mobility I will explore. It is certainly not the most static of work place mobility, as I will explore displacement and mobility in intimate and closed spaces in a post to come.

1. John C. Cross, Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press.1973

2.
Source: Bellagio International Declaration of Street Vendorsdrafted by founding members from 11 countries of the inter- national alliance of street vendors, StreetNet, at a meeting in Bellagio, Italy, 1995.

A friend recently asked me to describe my concept of mobility. After writing a few drafts of my ideas I realize I haven’t knocked it down to a glib one sentence witticism. I am still in the long description phase.

I will begin by saying that I describe myself as an artist who makes portable  sculptural artworks and template like formats for performance based works that are meant to be recreated again and again in different settings. I choose this way of working because I see that it mirrors the world and people in it- we move, change respond- our lives are based in change and fluctuation.

Since childhood, an interest in travel and people who travel out of leisure and necessity have been a point of fascination to me. This fascination stands as an informing contrast to humanities dueling romance between stability and the ephemeral. I have often considered the two motivations to be great rivals in the world and to manifest themselves in rivaling human beliefs and ambitions.

On one hand we have a segment of society who are driven towards STABILITY. This segment establishes homes, solid careers, cities, all shapes and forms of material construct (and emotional construct as well)  that are meant to quell anxieties concerning uncertainty in one form or another.  This impulse to me seems both logical and instinctual- serving as a nest egg of sorts that an individual can build from, and allowing for chances to be taken with a safety net below. Establishment of a seemingly stable structure in a person’s life can battle disquietude in both immediate uncertainties,(health and financial stability, comfortable housing) and abstract uncertainties ( well-being of the soul, happiness, love).

On the other hand, there is a segment of society who either by force or choice embrace change and fluctuation in ideals and lifestyle. I see this segment as one which mimics nature and CHANGE which seems to me a constant in the world, as we can know few other constants to be.  Those who accept this mode of living have largely become comfortable with living situations that involve renting (you can always go somewhere else), work that determines where one will live, the assumption that health will take care of itself, and that financial well-being does not need very much regulation but will be a matter of consideration as employment issues present themselves.

I think that many people partake of bits and pieces of each of these approaches, but for most, an over all observation of approaches to the world could be made and could accurately describe how a person has chosen to place themselves in relation to the world.

These two approaches to lifestyle, a change based approach and a stability based approach exist independently, but are each informed by the others existence. It seems that many people have chosen one approach and before describing what they believe in, will take the time to describe to you what they do not believe in.  It is mysterious and perplexing to me to try to winnow out what’s nudged people to live the way they do.

Perhaps a third approach to the world, APATHY, indulges a bit in both of the approaches I have described above, but is generally neither and may accidentally, but only accidentally lean towards one of the two dispositions in the end. I am unsurprised to find in many cases that choices are not so much decided on as they are happened into, accepted as integral to ones identity and defended against change if a person is confronted with an alternative.

It is disturbing to have pointed out to you the ways in which you have not so much given thought to an issue as you have immediately experienced or responded to a proximate concern and created  a history of experience with an idea rather than a consideration of an idea. More plainly, the absence of consideration does not prevent the development of something, but rather sets the atmosphere for something unanticipated to take place.  I think of these unanticipated responses as psychological and physical places. In the mind and personality they are bold beliefs based on assumption or opinion, in your house they are the closet you fill with scraps and junk, in a city they are an abandoned building or a trash littered empty lot. Something could be done with the space, and something has definitely happened in the space anyway.

And so, my series of writings concerning “mobility”  and my relation to it, begins with the declaration that I am most interested in the segment of society that embraces CHANGE. While I believe many people and places to be the mix of tendencies partaking of change, stability, and apathy, I find individuals who actively embrace change to be most fascinating to me. In change is housed the possibilities of innovation, progress, improvement, relief- new learning, new understanding, and the like. I am interested in change as a vehicle for the realization of human hopes. It is an element which ensures that something new might happen, and I personally think that something new might bring something good.

This drive for something new, something that I subsume optically or through some other sense is what I gauge as the drive behind mobility in many circumstances. I apply this reasoning for mobility in relation to work environments,  technologies that allow for steady and frequent short-range mobility, travel,  and new ways of seeing(imaging of place as a surrogate for going to a place)as a way to travel in a cerebral sense. I include in my definition of mobility any physical or intellectual relocation that allows for new information and sensory experience.

In my next writing I will further describe the what I mean by physical and intellectual relocation and walk through some examples of how and why this takes place.

Blake Stimson delves into the mind of Edward Krasinski in his essay I am the Social.

“I do not know whether it is art,” states Krasinski, for example, sharing a taste for ubiquitous and ultramundane form with Buren. “But for sure it is Scotch blue, width 19 mm, length unknown.“