Informal Market Worlds - Reader

Informal markets arise on the fault lines inscribed by global alliances of money and power: wars and humanitarian crises, national and infrastructural borders, the worldwide trade in waste and the marginal spaces of urban transformation. They act as globalization’s safety valve while also providing livelihoods for millions of people trading in the streets of cities around the world.

This book tracks the powers, currents and actors driving informal trade. It documents the growing influence informal economies are having on human co-existence on a planetary scale. Informal markets may have turned into key urban economic frontiers, but can they also produce positive social and political change?

Exploring the conflicted realities of informal market worlds, this reader brings together texts on urban informality, global struggle and design activism by eminent scholars and practitioners, including Teddy Cruz, Alejandro Echeverri, Keith Hart, Ananya Roy, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, AbdouMaliq Simone, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean-Philippe Vassal and many others.