Small-scale traders often entertain spatially extensive connections of benefit to their businesses that are considered to be part of globalisation from below. This paper aims to understand the vulnerabilities of these processes by studying how the unsettling COVID-19 pandemic impacted on the geographies of small-scale businesses and contributed to the restructuring of these connections beyond the pandemic period. We employ assemblage thinking to unravel the continuous labour and temporalities implicated in the creation of connections across space. We studied these issues in Blantyre and Limbe, Malawi, where semi-structured interviews were conducted with street and market vendors. Results illustrate that the pandemic contributed to a restructuring of businesses of many vendors. They relied on less spatially extensive assemblages, i.e. local suppliers and clients. These changes lasted well into the post-pandemic period, and impacted on vendors’ livelihoods. We discuss the implications of these findings for street and market vending businesses and globalisation from below.

This article examines how diverse and entangled governance configurations shaped local pandemic responses in marketplaces in Lagos, Nigeria, drawing upon conceptualisations of hybrid governance, twilight institutions and governmentality. Faced with many challenges, local governments delegated the implementation and monitoring of pandemic regulations to marketplace associations and traditional leaders, whose mandate and authority expanded in several markets. However, governance arrangements and relations varied greatly across urban space, reflecting the diversity of place-specific institutional landscapes in the markets and shaping diverse outcomes. The presence or absence of centralised structures (associational or traditional) in the markets contributed to varied experiences of compliance across the markets, although compliance was also shaped by state enforcement, self-regulation and economic necessity. Overall, the pandemic exposed the uneven governance capacities across different markets, revealing how historical relationships between the state, associations and traditional leaders continue to shape market regulation in times of crisis. The article is based on qualitative interviews with vendors, and association and traditional leaders in five markets as well as with government officials.

Many residents in Southern cities work and live in an informal ‘grey space’ between recognition and unrecognition and are vulnerable to shifts towards violent ways of governing. This article delineates a necropolitics of informality as an analytical lens to unpack the processes at work when violence becomes a prominent mode of governing urban informality. This lens, it is argued, can extend familiar perspectives on the political dynamics of informality. Such an approach is then used to examine a major necropolitical turn in the governance of street work in central Maputo, Mozambique. Attention is given to the spatial strategies of banishment, carceralisation and peripheralisation – and attendant socio-material processes – through which necropower reworked the politics and spatialities of street work. The article uncovers the processes of political dispossession and the calculated destruction of collective organisation, as well as the necropolitical respatialisation of street economies and the range of (necro)spaces created. The ways in which the targeted experienced and acted upon necropolitical governance are examined. While the shift occurred during the COVID-19 crisis, necropolitical practices continued long beyond the pandemic, pointing to the relevance of necropolitics of informality as a lens for understanding violent governance in both exceptional and ordinary times. 

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected informal workers in the global South, including market and street vendors, who faced severe income losses during the crisis. In some contexts, governments moved to support vulnerable populations, particularly those whose livelihoods were gravely affected by restrictions introduced to stop the virus. In Ghana, the government introduced support schemes that officially included informal vendors. However, based on qualitative research in Accra, this paper reveals a stark disconnect between policy intent and market and street vendors’ lived experiences of accessing state support. Drawing on the concepts of infrastructural citizenship and grey space, we argue that informal vendors’ exclusion from relief was rooted in long-standing state neglect, particularly the marginalisation of these groups from public infrastructure. Despite this neglect, most vendors complied with state-imposed restrictions, relying on self-made infrastructural solutions and social networks. We conceptualise these practices as forms of ordinary citizenship, rooted in everyday acts of survival and belonging, yet embedded within broader structures of social order. The pandemic, however, exposed the limitations of vendors’ social collaboration under the weight of a widespread crisis. This underscores the importance of the state in redistributing resources and providing public goods to vulnerable groups, especially in times of emergency.

African cities, and Nairobi in particular, are witnessing a surge in large-scale connective infrastructure projects. These projects are framed as drivers of economic growth and emblems of urban modernity, requiring urgent implementation to address persistent infrastructure deficits. While delays and protracted timelines are common in such projects, instances of rapid implementation remain unexplored. This paper examines the accelerated construction of the Nairobi Expressway during the COVID-19 pandemic to unpack the temporal politics of infrastructure development. Drawing on a qualitative study, we show how infrastructure becomes a site where multiple local and global forces intersect to shape both the timing and pace of execution. We deploy the concept of acceleration as an alternative analytical lens to interrogate these infrastructural temporalities. We argue that the expressway’s accelerated implementation was a deliberate process of temporal manipulation through strategic state restructuring. Moreover, we demonstrate how moments of crisis can catalyse and reconfigure urban processes.

Urban societies are experiencing intensified social frictions which have manifested in a growing occurrence of riots. Urban riots are often treated as ephemeral outbursts which create only short-term or immediate responses by the state or residents. However, this paper aims to move beyond such present-centrism by proposing a research agenda for studying their contextually longer-term legacies. Particular consideration is given to three thematic areas: (a) policy responses, (b) temporalities and urban memory, and (c) feelings and subjectivities. Drawing upon empirical illustrations concerning riots in London (2011) and Stockholm (2013), the paper uncovers variations within and across the two cities, such as differing state and private sector interventions; reshaping of civil society; and how residents variously resist, adapt to, and promote change. The paper thus reflects upon how riots’ afterlives in different urban contexts are constructed, mobilized and contested. Such variations point to the importance of the situated study of urban riots’ diverse legacies.