Please click here to open The Informal City Reader.

Over the past year, Next City has chronicled stories from the informal realm as part of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Informal City Dialogues. Through photography, film and well over a hundred blog posts, those stories became a running narrative of the lives of informal workers and settlers in the six cities that participated in the project. From those cities, we offered a window into the lives of street vendors, slum-dwellers, waste-pickers, even home-based beer brewers.

Now, Next City has released an ebook that compiles the best reporting, research and photojournalism from the Informal City Dialogues in a single online digest. From do-it-yourself disaster recovery plans to private water markets, Twitter-based emergency services and street vendors with MBAs, the interplay between formal and informal systems tells the story of how many of the developing world’s cities are growing. In the ebook, you’ll also find short films that speak to the informal realm’s remarkable resilience, and provocative commentary from some of the most influential names working in the field today, including from Mike Davis, Sheela Patel and Benjamin Barber.

The informal sector is immense. As our blogger from Lima put it in his final post: “The number of informal transactions taking place in Lima at any given second, pushing the economy forward in ways big and small, is virtually incalculable.” This ebook provides a glimpse of those transactions — a realm of activity that grows in importance to cities every day, and will be one of urbanism’s defining issues in the 21st century. We hope you enjoy the book.

Please click here to open The Informal City Reader.

Most journalism records big events. Presidents meet with prime ministers and sign an accord. Companies merge to form a new multinational conglomerate. The iPhone 5s is released.

By contrast, the Informal City Dialogues has been about the small: Small markets, small chains of supply, small houses (albeit sometimes shared by large groups of people), small businesses organized into small, local associations. And yet, when you put it all together, all of this activity adds up to something that’s very big. Informal business transactions now account for up to 40 percent of the world’s urban economic activity. A billion people live in slums; by 2030, two billion will.

The sheer size of this burgeoning informal realm makes it all the more ridiculous that its inhabitants are, more often than not, left out of the process of planning cities and shaping policy. The typical pattern goes something like this: The city devises a scheme that, at best, ignores the needs of the informal realm, or at worst aggressively pushes it out of the way. Informal workers or settlers are scattered. A protest ensues, and they recoup some of what they lost. But rarely is the informal realm sought out during the process to contribute to what could be an inclusive solution.

We’ve spent the past year trying to provide a space where some of these people’s voices could be heard. From the beginning, the plan for the Informal City Dialogues was to let them speak without too much editorializing. We heard from vendors in Bangkok, slum-dwellers in Accra, tricycle drivers in Manila. We talked to the makers of knock-off clothing in Lima and the water vendors of Chennai. One common thread emerged: A desire to be seen as legitimate citizens of their cities. By the numbers, they clearly are. All that’s missing is the official recognition of them as such.

When this project began, I myself was unaware of just how indispensable the informal realm is. Rather than a problem to be solved, it’s a source of strength and an immeasurable resource to be tapped. I want to thank the writers who brought these stories to light, the many guest bloggers who contributed their opinions, and most of all, the informal workers and settlers who were open and generous enough to tell us their stories. We wanted to start a conversation; we ended up conducting a chorus. I hope it continues and only grows louder — it’s a message that needs to be heard.

City: Bangkok

At 4 p.m., on the wide concrete footpath of Siam Square, next to a busy arterial road, several street traders sit on collapsible stools, chatting with their neighbors and playing with their phones. They have not yet set up their stalls, and so the stream of people strolling by pays them minimal attention. Without their pirated DVDs and cheap dresses on display, they might as well be invisible.

Two hours later, however, these vendors are providing the backbeat to the thumping pulse of Siam Square as the sidewalk transforms into a full-fledged marketplace, bustling with shoppers and onlookers. DIY-style market stalls, a few hundred of them, entice bargain hunters and impulse buyers with their motley merchandise. Clothing racks are strung with women’s clothes, t-shirts and light bulbs. Some of the vendors have even brought their own mannequins, donning banal tags that boast “only 200 Baht” and “50% off.” For foreign visitors, the scene is a charming kind of chaos, an urban adventure.

Not everyone appreciates the congestion, however. For local commuters, the illegal street market is a routine chaos that only exacerbates an already onerous evening rush hour. As it happens, vendors prefer to locate themselves where pedestrian traffic is heaviest. In Siam Square, that means next to the stairways that connect the street to the massive elevated platform of Bangkok’s Skytrain, which runs along the arterial road of Rama I.

A few years ago, calls to “reclaim” the footpath were made to the landowner, Chulalongkorn University. In response, a coalition of respectable institutions was put together to try to relocate the vendors to a nearby venue. The traders refused, and the negotiation soon turned into a battle. Tens of millions of Baht were spent on anti-encroachment equipment and security personnel, according to Dr. Nantawat Boramanand, a widely respected professor of public law.

“I wouldn’t have done that if I were them,” says Peerasak, a street trader who was nominated as a representative to attend formal meetings during the negotiation. “[They] didn’t understand the implications of their actions.”

Though the battle lasted eight months, all the efforts by the authority proved to be futile. The traders showed resilience and solidarity and eventually won their right to stay on the street.

“[The vendors] even threatened to throw scorching oil [used for frying meat in their stalls] at our staff,” said Prof. Nantawat in a newspaper interview. But he also suggested that the coalition’s front-line personnel have not carried out their duties properly, and that other institutions, such as the police department and the local district office, did not cooperate. “This is an utter defeat for law enforcement,” he said. “This lax attitude that pervades the whole public sector needs to be improved.”

Thus, for the authority, the street market remains an inimical and uncontrollable chaos, one that they cannot hope to defeat only with rule of law.

Peerasak points to a simple truth that illustrates the complexity of the issue. “When the inspectors take off their uniforms,” he says, “they also buy food from street vendors.” It is almost a case of duty versus desire. “I know this city inspector whose nephew is a street vendor at Victory Monument.” He cites several other cases of such blurred lines.

“Although I didn’t graduate from a prestigious university abroad,” Peerasak continues, “[my experience] is more crystalized and I can see clearly what should be done to solve the problem.” A burly but approachable man, Peerasak quit his formal job as a salesperson at Armani Exchange six years ago to join the street scene full-time. He was chosen as a representative for the vendors partly because he is a natural leader who has earned respect for helping other vendors out of difficult situations. Moreover, with his polite but straightforward demeanor, it seems to me that he is better equipped to deal with their formal counterparts than most others. It is probably more true to say that the vendors are not illegal but semi-legal—on paper they’re banned, but the authority tolerates them, and even accepts them in practice.

In hindsight, Peerasak suggests that the attempts to reclaim the sidewalk from vendors in Siam Square needn’t have been so heavy-handed and antagonistic. “They only said no, no, no,” he recalls. “They didn’t listen to us.” According to him the negotiations lacked sincerity, and promises to help were superficial. “As big institutions, they are more concerned with their image.”

“All of the vendors have agreed not to sell before six o’clock,” says Peerasak – who also acts as a liaison between the city inspectors and the traders – as opposed to last year, when the vendors occupied the footpath starting at noon. Peerasak also asked the vendors to make more space for pedestrians and they did. The new time management and control of the space go a long way as compromises.

“People tend to say that we are unorganized and uncooperative, but look at what happens on Monday.” Monday is designated as a citywide “rest day” for street traders.

Though the sidewalk congestion has somewhat improved, the compromises made by the vendors of Siam Square could be seen as efforts to co-opt the authority, so that they can continue profiting from the public space—if it gets too congested, they risk a backlash that pushes them out of the neighborhood altogether. Peerasak recognizes that the war between the authority and the vendors is not yet over. Though the crackdown three years ago resulted in a breakdown of trust, he’s hopeful for another round of negotiation.

“The vendors will not go away,” said Peerasak, emphasizing the need for a dialogue. “One hundred percent.”

Reflections on the Informal City Dialogues

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns,” wrote Chuck Palahniuk in his novel Survivor. “What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized.” Likewise, what has happened and is happening on the sidewalk of Siam Square can be regarded as a microcosm—with patterns that get reproduced elsewhere—of informal Bangkok. “If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.”

Though a casual observer of urban realities would associate “informality” with chaos, dirtiness and disorder, which by definition are bad and undesirable, experience from my work with the Informal City Dialogues strongly suggests otherwise. Unfortunately, the prevailing policy mentality seems to be that it is better for “the public” (are the poor not part of the public?) to get rid of the other half and put in place new structures and patterns – ones that at least appear more formal and conventional. But this is only an illusion of having done something to bring order into the world — an illusion that if you organize something on paper or hold lots of meetings, everything else will follow.

A city like Bangkok, like most other cities and societies I am sure, cannot afford not to have the informal. One way or another, the informal supports our modern lifestyles. More effort should be put into understanding, respecting and supporting the informal — an entity which is made up of little people doing little things, their own things. It is better to convince than control.

Photos by Witchaya Pruecksamars

City: Manila

Multi-hyphenated. This is what they’ve called this generation, a generation of people departing the nine-to-five existence and doing as many things as they can. Becoming writers, artists, teachers, selling things online, even becoming financial advisers – all at the same time. One person, different hats.

But before it was fashionable to do so, before “multi-hyphenated” became a buzzword, it was simply reality for people who lived their lives in informal systems. This is what I have learned while writing for the Informal City Dialogues. I’ve met people who hold down more than one job not only to survive, but more importantly, to grow and affect change on a larger scale.
One example is the women who tend the vegetable garden that sits in the middle of a community known for poverty and petty crimes. These women belong to the Kabalikat sa Pagpapaunlad ng Baseco (Allies for Improving Baseco).

Baseco is one of the biggest areas inhabited by informal settlers in Manila. The urban garden serves as a source of food and funds for the group. As they garden, the members sets aside part of their dues as savings. The money is then used as payment for the land that the government promised, way back in 2001, to turn over to them.

These women have other jobs – they tend the garden after they are done washing clothes, or after selling food they’ve cooked to sell to students, laborers and their neighbors. These are women who do manual jobs to earn money, participate in an innovation called urban gardening and contribute to disaster risk reduction. They belong to the informal sector and they are part of the multi-hyphenated generation.

There’s more. In May, just in time for the midterm elections in the Philippines, I met another woman in Navotas who worked as a street sweeper in the morning, then campaigned, house-to-house, at night for a partylist group she wants to win in the Congressional elections. She is a hardworking mother and a political animal.

These people live multi-hyphenated lives not to strengthen their brand of individualism, as many young people do, but because they must to survive, and sometimes, to shake up structures and change the status quo. The women in Baseco want the government to make good on its word. They are more than ready to pay for the land they are due with the money their group has saved, destroying the notion that informal settlers want nothing but a handout.

The campaign volunteer in Navotas wants her partylist group to win so that they, the urban poor, will have a say in the lawmaking process, which has been dominated by political dynasties that use the 3 G’s – guns, goons and gold – to strengthen their hold on power.

Similar to these women are two men I interviewed in Philcoa, Quezon City, who are unconsciously challenging the old business models. One of them is Mark Bautista, who sells slippers and shoes on the Philcoa overpass. Bautista looks Korean, but when he spoke, he had an accent that unmistakably belongs to Filipinos who hail from the region of Visayas. It was drizzling, and Bautista was holding an umbrella and sitting on the left side of the overpass when I approached him. Beside him was a mat covered with 25 pairs of shoes and slippers.

“I sell them every day from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.,” he said. He buys P7,500 ($170 USD) worth of shoes and slippers every Wednesday and Saturday in Baclaran, where cheap goods are plenty, and sells them at P50 ($1) each, earning P600 ($13) daily, which is double what he used to earn as a factory worker.

When I asked him what does before 5 p.m., he said that he tends to his other “store,” which is located in Commonwealth, over 30 minutes away. He and his mother also sell slippers and shoes there, where they have a spot on the sidewalk in front of a mall.

“We earn more. We sell as much as P1,900 ($43) a day,” he said. With his earnings higher than his previous salary, Bautista, who is only 23, said he does not plan to seek formal employment soon. “We will never be regularized anyway.”

The overpass that Bautista works on in Philcoa is a bridge between two worlds, separated by the socioeconomic standing of the residents in the two neighborhoods that Philcoa covers. One area is Maginhawa, which in English means “prosperous.” Lining Maginhawa are food establishments that cater to students from the University of the Philippines and professionals that work or live in Quezon City. The other part of Philcoa – the one on the left side of the overpass — has food, too: The kind you eat standing up.

A popular item over there is the “street chickenjoy,” a reference to the fried chicken being sold in Jollibee, the biggest fast-food chain in the country. Street chickenjoy is sold from food carts for P10 to P12 each.

One of those who sells it is JR Francisco, a 28-year-old father of seven. Not just a vendor, Francisco provides 40 kilos of his street chickenjoy to three other vendors, who sell them in other parts of Quezon City. He also sells 15 kilos of his fried chicken to people who then sell them from their carinderias, or food stalls, earning enough to recoup his P3,500 ($79) in expenses each day.

“I learned this from another seller of street chickenjoy,” he said, gesturing to a food cart further down the street that’s twice as big as his. Francisco said he worked for them for a couple of months. When he learned how to cook street chickenjoy, he decided to sell it on his own, taking on other side jobs like construction.

“I will wake up at 3 a.m., buy chicken at the market and then prepare them. By nine, I’m off to the construction site,” he said. “My wife will sell them until 6 p.m. Then I will arrive and help her sell them until 12 midnight at times.”

Francisco said that juggling the two jobs is a must. “If you don’t work hard, you won’t be able to live,” he said.

Francisco and Bautista have honed their business sense through their experience on the streets. I wouldn’t be surprised if I someday see them with their own stalls in a market or even the mall.

Their roots are in the informal economy, however. The kind of flexibility that it provides helped them become more creative and find their niche in the world of urban consumers. They are members of the multi-hyphenated generation, unbound by time and the rules of a nine-to-five existence. These are the kind of people I met while blogging for the Informal City Dialogues. They are changing the face, culture and color of the cities they live in — and in doing so, they are changing the future of Manila.

City: Accra

“Africa is people!”

Three words, the central, frustrated and hopeful thesis of Chinua Achebe’s final compilation of essays. As I read his essays, I kept thinking, “And also, Accra is people, and ‘informal Accra’ is people.”

This is obvious, of course. But the obvious is sometimes easy to overlook, a point I’ll get back to.

It’s not easy to summarize or characterize informal Accra. It’s such a large group of people with such diverse livelihoods. But with the help of a couple of the people thinking about Accra’s future, I can point in a few directions.

The Labyrinth of the Informal

Informal Accra is a fascinating place, as labyrinthine as its markets. And like any labyrinth, as you explore it more and more often, it slowly becomes familiar. Patterns emerge. Context takes shape. Everyday objects take on new significance, become guides and signposts. Stacks of yellow jerry cans are given a name — the Kufuor Gallon – and a significance – a citywide water delivery failure. A puddle of mud is a would-be football pitch, evidence of inadequate drainage and little planning for public play. A woman selling water from a head pan is a symbol of the lack of formal sector employment and an indication that clean, potable water is a hot commodity. People sleeping in the historic streets of Jamestown point to land rights and an unfocused housing policy.

Informal workers and residents of informal settlements are also the majority. “Anecdotally,” says former Accra Mayor Nat Amarteifio, “I’m told that more than 60 percent of this city lives in informal cities… The so-called consumers of the informal sector far outnumber the consumers of the formal sector.”

Blurred Lines

But of course there is the problem of “informal” as an idea. What is informality, anyway? If a market woman is selling sandals on a little patch of sidewalk in a place not zoned for such activity, is that informal? What if the municipal authorities collect a daily or weekly tax from her? What about the fact that she’s paid rent to the land owner for that space? How “informal” is her business, really?

Then, too, the formal sector uses and relies on the informal. As individuals, our lives are usually some combination of both. There’s the corporate employee who pays the expected bribes when pulled over, who buys plantain chips in traffic from an informal street vendor. A government worker who drives an illegal motorcycle taxi at night. A retired teacher – a public servant – who now lives in a slum. A worker who participates in an informal savings group that uses a bank’s services for the collective.

Private companies recognize the informal sector’s ubiquity and power and use it strategically. The telecommunications companies and sachet-water manufacturers use the extensive penetration of the informal sector – a wholesale and distribution infrastructure in its own right – to sell their products. Banks and beer manufacturers have realized the saving and spending power of the informal sector and target products and services to them.

Ingenuity, Hope and Resilience

Much of the informal sector’s activities involve finding ingenious workarounds for dysfunctional or inadequate public services. But the informal sector also represents hope — hope for a better life. That’s why Accra is so attractive to migrants from rural communities and neighboring countries. “These [young people] are just as rational as you and I,” says Dr. George Owusu, a geography professor at the University of Ghana. “They’ve witnessed how their grandparents have fared. They see how their parents are faring. They want to try something different.”

“These are individuals who aspire for better things,” he says. “Life in the city can be a stepping stone for prosperity.”

This is why when I spoke with women who’d suffered from fires burning through their market, returning to the village was the last resort. We want to rebuild and start over, was the story I heard over and over, in spite of losses and deep setbacks. This is the refrain. Rebuild. Start over. Keep trying. Yen ko. (Let’s go.)

Voice, Power and Its Limits

“Welcome to our slum,” Kende Yusseif said to me once when she and Sammy were showing me around Agogbloshie. “Nima is only gutters,” the young Miriam told me as we cut through the tiny walkways interlaced with them.

They are well aware of their problems. And they are working to address them. There is far more organization within the informal sector than you might expect. Market leaders have trade associations that advocate for their interests, borrow money collectively, make rent deals. People like Sammy are deeply invested in regulating and helping their communities. Sammy lobbies government to put in proper drainage, is working with an NGO to set up skills-training centers for the youth there, about whose futures he is deeply worried. Professor Owusu told me that the community leaders in Old Fadama, the most notorious slum in Accra, have put a moratorium on new wood buildings because of the occasional fires that sweep through these places.

In addition to these community and individual actions, advocacy organizations – Housing for the Masses, the People’s Dialogue, Global Communities, and many others – are pushing for reform. And yet these communities struggle to get a hearing in the arenas of power. The municipal authorities regularly raze informal markets. Good work is being done by many people in both the formal and the informal sectors in service of creating a more liveable and inclusive future for Accra. The national government has adopted well-founded policies, especially with the new Ghana Urban Policy Framework. These shifts in ideology, though, according to Owusu, haven’t filtered through to municipal executives, who are, in all fairness, starved of promised funding from the national government. The political will to take the informal seriously doesn’t seem to be quite there yet. Why?

An Attitude Problem

In one of the ICD workshops, I noticed a young lady wearing Heel The World beads, a fashionable marker of middle-class consciousness, around one wrist. During one of the conversations, she said of informal vendors who encroach on the sidewalks around Accra Mall, “We have to tell them that what they are doing is wrong.”

This attitude, to me, is a failure of imagination. The street vendors set up shop there because that is where there is business and foot traffic. They sell cheap Chinese products – another common complaint – because they don’t require much capital and there is a market for inexpensive items. They don’t have many other options. The “wrongness” of their actions is highly subjective; they are deemed an eyesore and a nuisance, and what happens to them after the city sweeps their shops away is deemed hardly worth considering. “Our idea of dealing [with informal settlements] is to move them as far away from the public gaze as possible,” Amarteifio says. But, “They want to be close to their places of work.”

This young lady’s attitude is not unusual. She is not a bad person. She simply didn’t see the realities of these people’s lives. “Defining something as informal puts it into a second class,” says Amarteifio. “Unfortunately, the people who make these definitions are in the formal sector.”

But as I meet more and more people who live lives dominated by informality – slum dwellers and informal traders – I find interesting, kind and warm people who are, of course, people. In our zeal to create a beautiful and efficient city, just as Achebe reminded the world’s bankers how their experiments with structural adjustment in Africa were designed to create beautiful and efficient economies, we must not forget that the informal sector, too, is people.

The Informal City Dialogues have helped to open up a conversation about informality in Accra. They’ve opened up the lives of people in the informal sector, and has asked them to be part of imagining a better Accra. But that conversation cannot stop here. It must be a consistent dialogue that begins to create a sense of the “collective consciousness” that Amarteifio believes is missing from the city.

Listen to Their Songs

I had a recent chance encounter with an East African professor from an elite American college, and he told me an interesting story. A well-known development expert once told him about a project of his that had been going very poorly. The professor says he asked the development expert, “Have you listened to the people’s songs?” (He had not.)

In Accra, you might well ask if you’ve listened to their proverbs, often found in winding contests of wisdom and wit the Akan, Accra’s most populous ethnic group, are famous for. You might also listen to their call-and-response dialogues. The one, from the Ghana Federation for the Urban Poor, stings me the most:

Call: “Homeless!”

Response: “But not hopeless!”

Just there, in those two lines, you have a poignant statement of a problem and the seed of a solution.

Start asking questions about statements like these and and the problem will unravel, the solutions become more clear. Every slum has its own history, every trade its story. It is through the consistent sharing of these narratives and working toward compromise that Accra has a chance grow into a more inclusive city rather than a more bifurcated, divided and unequal one.

Coda: (Informal) Accra is People

Informal Accra is Miriam, who showed me how she fetches water each day before going to her informal apprenticeship in sewing. It is Alice, who sells barely enough sachet water each day to get home and back. It is Eric, who is rebuilding his business selling Dickies at Kantamanto. It is Sammy, who loves his community with more warmth than I’ve ever seen in one person. It’s Pascalina, the kayayoo (head porter) who calls me now and then just to say hello.

I want to thank all of them – and the many more who spoke with me over the course of the Dialogues. They and their communities deserve better. I know they will work hard to make that happen. I just hope someone will be listening.

Photos by Sharon Benzoni

City: Nairobi

As the Informal City Dialogues moves toward its “Embracing the Informal City” conference this month, each week we will present summaries of the scenarios created in the six participating cities. These scenarios were created in multi-day workshops planned and conducted by Forum for the Future in conjunction with the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA-Kenya), and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The outputs were collaboratively envisioned by a wide range of actors, from informal settlers and street vendors to urban planners and government officials. The following is an excerpt from Forum for the Future’s report on the scenarios developed in each city, which will be published this month. Click here to read more about how the futures scenarios process works.

Nairobi

Competence and caring citizens: These are the keys to Nairobi’s prosperous future. Lacking one or both of them, the city will struggle to succeed. In the best-case scenario, a competent county governs caring, inclusive citizens, leading to a future in which quality health care, land tenure and energy resources are secure. An incompetent county, however, suppresses even the best efforts of a caring, inclusive citizenry, who do their best to create informal solutions but are hobbled by failing systems. Conversely, a competent county can only do so much with a populace that is uncaring and exclusive — in this scenario, the informal realm is stifled, apathy is high and innovation is low. The worst-case scenario is an incompetent county in combination with an uncaring, exclusive citizenry, creating a future in which life is a constant struggle, and only the strong survive.

Najivunia

The citizens of Nairobi in 2040 have a strong sense of civic duty and are proud to call the city home. The county government is competent, trusted, and genuinely consultative. Infrastructure and services are mostly adequate—and when they’re insufficient citizens collaborate to fill the gaps. High-quality healthcare is widely available, with costs being shared between the government and the people. Land tenure policy has been reformed and now land is owned by the people who live on it. Most slums have been upgraded to decent low-income housing. Although settlements are denser they’re also better organized. The cost of living is higher, and income equality still persists, but government controls have narrowed the gap between rich and poor. A creative and entrepreneurial class has emerged in Nairobi and the city has become a hub for technology and innovation. The formal and informal sectors are more porous and collaborative, with easier licensing procedures and designated spaces for street vendors. Climate change is being taken seriously by business and government, and substantial investments have been made in renewable energy, smart buildings, wildlife conservation, habitat restoration, and water management.

Bonoko City

In 2040, Nairobi’s government is in the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations who use it to promote their own interests—rather than those of ordinary citizens. Public services have been privatized in the name of efficiency but are poorly run. Water and sewage systems are failing, causing water contamination and the threat of disease. The city’s residents, however, have successfully self-organized to provide themselves with many key services in the absence of effective government—from transportation to banking to housing. The informal sector has become increasingly attractive, and enjoys a largely symbiotic relationship with the formal sector, but is subject to continual suppression by the government.

Big Brother City

Nairobi in this scenario is prosperous but stagnant. An effective county government has delivered high-quality infrastructure and services and exercises control over much of society. The city enjoys security, low levels of inequality, and ample job opportunities. However, high taxes and government regulation are stifling innovation. The citizenry is apathetic, individualistic, and wary of outsiders. The media has largely abdicated its oversight function out of deference to the government. The informal economy is considered bad for the city’s image and has largely disappeared.

Vulture City

The prevailing ethos in this scenario is survival of the fittest. Nairobi’s citizens in 2040 are selfish, apathetic, and cynical. The government is ineffective and unable to provide basic services. Poor sanitation in informal settlements causes regular outbreaks of disease. Gangs have come to dominate much of everyday life, including the informal provision of water, electricity, and security. Expensive credit has dampened entrepreneurship and big business is consolidating its advantage through exploitative practices. The informal economy has partly collapsed, due to the high cost of doing business, and people are moving to other cities in search of better opportunities. The city has become more dangerous and the wealthy and middle class have retreated to gated compounds. Citizens innovate in this scenario, but only for survival.

City: Lima

Its never been hard to find informality in Lima. Stand on any street corner, and you’re bound to see an unlicensed taxi driver looking for his next customer, a pirated-book vendor hawking the latest bestsellers, an informal recycler rummaging through the trash in search of plastic bottles. The number of informal transactions taking place in Lima at any given second, pushing the economy forward in ways big and small, are virtually incalculable.

Looking at some figures, Lima’s ubiquitous informal economy is no surprise. Statistics vary, but most seem to indicate that informal activity accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the country’s economy. The number is so high that in a 2007 report the World Bank estimated that Peru’s informal workers comprised one of the world’s largest “shadow economies.”

Over the course of these past nine months, the Informal City Dialogues has taken me on a beautifully strange trip through Lima, and has made me realize that the word “shadow” does a disservice to the interplay between its formal and informal worlds. Beyond the staggering statistics, Lima’s informal economy is made up of real people, with real human stories, stories of what it’s like to live in this city.

Stories like those of Mr. German, who pedals his bicycle cart through downtown Lima before the sun rises to give himself just enough time to start squeezing fresh oranges during the morning rush hour. Stories like that of Freddy, the Gamarra entrepreneur who started sewing tank-tops in the mid ’90s, and turned his $11 investment into seven profitable — and formal — textile workshops.

But for every story I documented during this project there were countless more that went untold. Although I was prepared for some rejection, I was always surprised by how many people refused to talk to me. Some of them declined politely, others less so. The reluctancy many informal workers felt to speak about their lives is a testament to the persecution they feel. Their wariness about sharing their experiences points to the stigma they associate with their informal employment. Edilberto Delgado, for instance, a lifelong informal recycler, said he never told his family of his job for fear of being shamed. In many parts of the world his efforts to recycle discarded materials would be celebrated.

Looking at Lima’s massive public transport problems for a Forefront article was also a chance to appreciate just how crucial informal transportation has been in connecting the city at a time of severe growing pains. The history of the city’s transportation woes seems to perfectly exemplify the dynamic between the formal and informal worlds.

But despite how much the city relies on the informal realm, at times Lima seems to turn its back on the economic sectors that have enabled its growth over the past decade, often casting them aside. One morning, standing at the site of a proposed fence that would separate an informal settlement from an upscale neighborhood, I felt frustration at the divisions in my city. Perhaps us Limeños are able to turn a blind eye toward informality only until it is too close for comfort.

As I saw at Lima’s La Parada market, there is no doubt that at times informality can stand in the way of the city’s modernization and security. There is no doubt that the current informal situation is unsustainable. But as we move forward, perhaps we should also take a moment to thank the informal economy for adapting to change, and for including those who have been excluded elsewhere.

The driving force behind Lima’s informality is vast and varied. For some of the people I spoke to, informality was just a first step when starting a businesses they hoped would someday be formalized. But for others, informality was a byproduct of feeling excluded from the formal economy because of complicated bureaucracy or language barriers. Despite these differences, the people I spoke to all had one thing in common: Each of them are looking for a way to make a living.

As we reach the end of the Informal City Dialogues, that last word, dialogues, is the one that most stands out. I hope the stories I’ve helped to tell will be of use in the conversation that Lima continues to have.

Photos by Manuel Vigo

City: Manila

As the Informal City Dialogues moves toward its “Embracing the Informal City” conference this month, each week we will present summaries of the scenarios created in the six participating cities. These scenarios were created in multi-day workshops planned and conducted by Forum for the Future in conjunction with the Ateneo School of Government, and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The outputs were collaboratively envisioned by a wide range of actors, from informal settlers and street vendors to urban planners and government officials. The following is an excerpt from Forum for the Future’s report on the scenarios developed in each city, which will be published this month. Click here to read more about how the futures scenarios process works.

Manila

The future of Metro Manila will be primarily determined by two forces: The rate of population growth, and the effectiveness of urban planning and development. Slower population growth in combination with effective urban planning and development will lead to a city that works for everyone, with enough food, jobs and housing for all. That same effective planning can even mitigate the problems of fast population growth — renewable energy, smart transit and affordable housing keep the ballooning city livable. It’s when planning becomes ineffective that problems begin to arise. A slow-growing Manila that’s poorly planned will stagnate, suffering from labor shortages and widespread malaise. A fast-growing Manila that’s poorly planned is even worse, marked by frequent food shortages, unemployment, flooding and expensive education.

Kanlungan (Shelter)

Slow population growth and effective urban planning have enabled Manila to become prosperous, healthy, and inclusive by 2040. Progressive reforms initiated in the 2010s, including the Reproductive Health Act and a program to provide cash to indigent families for child education and maternal health, have been continued by subsequent administrations. The Farm to Market program has curtailed food insecurity. Public housing has put an end to evictions and resettlement and the few remaining informal settlers are all living in medium-rise buildings (MRBs). New housing developments are built sustainably and communities are more walkable, energy efficient, and livable. Unemployment is low, meaning that workers remain in the Philippines and families are kept together. Affordable and high-quality healthcare and education are widely available. Pollution has been largely eliminated and technological innovations have been developed to mitigate the risk of other natural hazards like earthquakes. The well-educated populace is politically engaged, ushering in an era of better governance.

Hawak Kamay (Holding Hands)

In this version of Manila’s future, the challenges of rapid population growth are met through collaboration and effective urban planning. By 2040, Manila’s population has expanded significantly—but slums have disappeared, there is ample public housing, and people are happy living in smaller spaces. Housing is generally affordable, accessible, and safe, and nearly everyone has security of tenure. Pedestrian areas and green space are both abundant and public transit is widespread, accessible, and efficient. The city has been re-designed with disaster risk reduction and climate resiliency as priorities—so that when disasters do occur, they are no longer catastrophic. All children have access to education. Solar energy provides for most of the country’s energy needs

Maghintay ka lamang (Just Wait)

In this scenario, slow population growth and ineffective urban planning have engendered widespread apathy among the people of Manila by 2040. Successful implementation of the reproductive health law has slowed down population growth but other aspects of governance and planning have been less effective, however. Manila these days feels like it did in the more “laid back” 1960s—less chaotic but also stagnant. The government tried to address the housing issue in the 2010s by constructing MRBs and relocating settlers. But by failing to do so in a truly consultative way, and ignoring key issues like the prohibitively high cost of transportation, this initiative ultimately failed and slums have proliferated. A labor shortage is compelling many of the elderly and the young to work, often in the informal sector, preventing children from going to school. Climate change has disrupted weather patterns and Manila is now subject to droughts, rather than typhoons and flooding. Increased temperatures coupled with a lack of potable water are causing disease. People accept these problems with resignation and focus on meeting their immediate needs.

Run Samson Run

In this scenario Manila is hobbled by the negative effects of rapid population growth coupled with ineffective urban planning. By 2040, the population has exploded and many people are unemployed. Environmental degradation is widespread, the supply of water and energy from public utilities is inadequate, and the number and quality of public spaces is declining. Development is mostly unplanned and uncontrolled. Hunger, unemployment, prostitution, and crime are all on the increase. Foreign investment and tourism have declined over the intervening decades causing job losses and a drop in revenue. Poverty is endemic and there is a generalized lack of access to government services. Agricultural land around Manila has been developed for other uses, leaving the city dependent on food procured from much further away in the country—a situation that is more expensive and less reliable. Education is too expensive for many families to afford. Informal settlements are common and many of them exist in hazardous areas. Regular flooding has caused widespread loss of life and billions of dollars in damages.

City: Nairobi

Jua kali is a Swahili phrase meaning “hot sun” and refers to the open-air businesses that line Nairobi’s streets. The jua kali sector provides informal employment to hundreds of thousands in Kenya’s capital, from welders to carpenters to mechanics to hairdressers. But jua kali is also a term for the improvisational spirit that all Nairobians must draw on to get by in a city crushed by corruption, poverty and bad infrastructure. Indeed, Nairobi, the capital of East Africa’s biggest economy, runs on jua kali.

It’s been my task to write about that jua kali spirit for the Informal City Dialogues, to show how Nairobians improvise to get everything from water and electricity to education and recycling. Any success I’ve had here, however, is due in large part to the help of a few good friends, my fixers. Fixers are knowledgeable locals hired by journalists to take care of logistics. They are as vital to journalism as reporters and editors, engaged in the unsung work of arranging meetings, translating interviews and occasionally talking officials out of bribes. Without fixers, there is no news.

I’d like to honor two fixers, Josh and Fred, who have helped me the most, and let them to tell you about themselves and their city. I first met Josh last year while writing a story about citizen journalists in Kibera, and interviewed him a couple weeks ago in the offices of the Kibera News Network, where he works. I met Fred about a year ago as well, during a riot after a bus bombing — I interviewed him recently in his new home in Mathare. I think their stories show the struggles and realities of being a Nairobian. Thanks for your help, guys.

Josh

My name’s Owino Joshua. I’ve lived in Kibera since 2008. I’m a humble man. I do electronics equipment repairing. I fix televisions, DVDs, speakers, stuff like that. I’m also a reporter and editor for Kibera News Network. I was born upcountry in Siaya. My parents could not afford my fees to join university so in 2002 after high school I moved to Naivasha to join my brother who was already staying there. I did a lot of odd jobs, construction, I worked in flower farms. Then I decided to train myself in electronics.

Naivasha was one of the places that was most hard hit by the post-election violence of ‘07, ‘08. One morning I was going to my job, I worked as a bartender, and there were no people around and I felt that was something strange. My friend, he came and told me, “Hey Josh, what are you doing here? Mungikis [an ethnic gang] are coming to clear people. You better close your business.” So I went to my house where I was with my cousin. I had my small radio and I heard the news: “Naivasha erupts.” I could see Mungikis outside with knives and clubs. You could even hear people crying who were being slashed to death. They came up to our gate and were knocking. The police were overwhelmed so there was reinforcement from the prison officers. I peeped through the window at some uniformed prison wardens, and some were my customers from my pub so I decided to run for it and join them, and they took us to the prison warden’s camp for safety. We stayed at the camp for four days and then went upcountry for things to settle down.

My home in Naivasha was burned so I decided to come to Kibera to stay with my cousin. I came alone. I boarded a bus and I just had my bag with my clothes and my phone. The first days it was hard. I had been to Kibera before and I was like, this is a very bad place to be. So dirty. Everywhere it was smelling, and the mud when it rains is so much you can’t even walk. I thought, how do people survive here? I never imagined that I’d ever live in Kibera. But I found myself in Kibera, and I was like, okay, this is life. I have to live it.

It took me four months to find myself a place to start my electronics work. I had saved some money from bartending to start a shop. It’s doing well. Sometimes you get 500 shillings ($5.70 USD) in a day, [sometimes] 300. It varies a lot. With KNN I average 15,000 ($170) a month.

I met my wife in Kibera in the market where I fix electronics. She had a business, she was tailoring next to me, and we became friends and then we became close. We have one daughter. She’s now two-and-a-half years old.

In 2010 I heard about KNN and I decided to join. Kibera is misrepresented, so things like KNN report issues from a Kibera point of view. My childhood dream was to become a journalist, a professional journalist, and it’s still inside me. Being in KNN as a citizen reporter, I see it as a platform to jump into where I want to be. What I want is to go back to school and study journalism, but I can’t afford the fees right now.

Now I consider myself a full Kibera resident. I’m a Nairobian, but mostly a Kiberan. I don’t know how to call it, but Kibera, is it the heartbeat of Nairobi? I just feel it’s a good place to be, especially for the people that are not financially stable. There are people who can’t afford water and electricity so Kibera gives a space for such people to be able to sustain themselves.

Many people want to know what’s happening in Kibera. What they hear in the news is so shocking, but what they hear in the news is wrong. Even Kenyan mainstream media comes to Kibera to expose Kibera in a bad way — how filthy it is, how people are living in mud houses — which is true, but there is also good things about Kibera. Let people come so that they see it themselves. They will see that nothing is so bad about Kibera. People are just living and doing their thing.

I’m happy living in Kibera but that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable. I’d be happy to move out of Kibera and become an example for others. But for now I just have to be happy. Life is a journey that somebody has to walk and sometimes it takes you the bad way, sometimes it takes you the good way. So if it takes you the bad way let it come the way it is. You should not start crying and blaming people. Just find your way out.

Fred

My names are Fred Njoroge Ndichu, but I have almost twenty nicknames, like Njoro, One-Fifty, Wanchuani. I was born in 1989. I came to Mathare back in 1994. My parents used to stay in West Pokot, but the Kikuyus were being chased away so we had to move very fast out of there to save our lives. We are ten children now, and I’m fifth born. That same house where we came in 1994 my mother has never moved from. It’s a bit of a batty house, but we are just good with it because it’s all we have.

I went to school in Mathare. It was very tough because at that time there was no free school. We had to pay for everything, including food. I got a sponsor from class one to class seven from the World Vision, an organization that helps slum children and pays school fees for them. But in class seven they moved, so my mother had to struggle again to pay. She used to cook githeri [stewed beans and corn] and would take it in buckets to where people are building houses and sell there.

I went to high school in Dandora because my father went to stay there, but I had very big problems because of school fees. I continued until second year and then I backed down. I thought, I don’t have school fees, maybe it’s time I quit. I stayed with my father and he took me to work in the dumping site. For one year we were there. We could make some cash, but I didn’t enjoy it very much because it was very smelly and all that stuff, and also there are these mungiki guys and they could come and steal from you and there was nothing you could do.

So I came back and lived with my mom in Mathare. When I came here I made new friends and we formed a youth group. Sometimes our youth group does garbage collection for business. We got a 50,000 shillings ($570) loan from the government and we split between ten people, 5,000 ($57) each. My brother and I went and bought two secondhand PlayStations and one television and started a business. Customers can pay five bob (six cents) for one movie, and each video game that the kids play, they pay ten bob. We show football matches too, but I could not afford my own DSTV. It’s almost 60,000 shillings ($685). My friend organized a cable from his place. It’s an illegal one. Each month I pay him 1,500 ($17). From the video I make 800 ($9.14) per week, and PlayStation I can make, like, 600 ($6.85) per week. But we are two people so we have to split. Business is good now because the school is closed, but come school time everything changes and we don’t make any money.

When we opened our business we had a tough time because the police found us as a place where they could just harass people. The problem with the police is that everything you do with your business in Mathare, there’s always some mistake they look for. They come and say, “You are keeping thieves here. Why are they here doing nothing?” Or, “Where does the electricity come from? Do you pay an electricity bill?” So you give them something and they leave, but it’s not the end of it. Last week they came, almost seven of them with a truck, and they took all my customers into their truck. They were like, “If you do not have 10,000 ($115), we are not releasing them.”

I even moved into this place four months ago because of the police. I used to sleep in the video hall. But one day I could hear a knock and they were like, “Why are you hiding? Where is our stuff? You want us to take you to jail?” They just got in and arrested me. So I took all my things to my friend and I stayed with him two weeks until I found this vacant room.

But it’s just normal. It’s just what the police do. Sometimes I get this feeling that I want to close that video hall down. I even talked to one policeman, I asked him, “Do you want me to close here and go and steal?” In two months I’ve been going in my own pockets to pay the rent because the police came and took my profits.

I like Mathare, but I don’t wish to stay here forever. People are friendly. They help each other. It’s not like a place where people are strange and don’t talk to you. When people talk about slums they think this place is very weird. They see open sewers, houses congested together, but I can just tell them I’m used to it. Mathare is not a bad place to stay. Crime is very high here, I cannot lie about that. And when you look around, these young people are not employed. They just wish that anything bad could happen so they could start looting.

Let’s give it years to come. I think things will be changed. My brother is in school. He got sponsored and his sponsor didn’t leave him, and now he’s in Kenyatta University. The small kids are learning. At least now school is free. Buildings are continuing to be built. Schools are being built. There’s a market that wants to be opened here. So maybe next year we’ll hear good news about Mathare.

Me, call me a hustler. I’m just there. I live, I survive, and given an opportunity to do something I can do it very well. I know that.

Photos by Jason Patinkin. Interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity.

City: Manila

Dominador Blance is an ex-soldier. He’s been trained to engage in combat, guard his fort, protect his people. At 54, however, Blance is looking out for the safety not of people on some conflict-ridden hillside, but of the passengers in one of the busy bus terminals in Cubao, a robust commercial hub in Quezon City.

Blance isn’t a security guard. He has no uniform, no gun, nothing that would help him stop a thief in his tracks or detain a mugger. Blance wears an old cap on his head and is dressed in plain clothes – a white shirt and comfy shorts. Instead of carrying a weapon, he totes a basket full of fruit adorned with dangling Pikachu keychains. He is one of at least eight vendors in HM bus terminal, the transit hub that caters to passengers going to the province of Sta. Cruz, Laguna. He hops onto the buses at 7 a.m. and hawks his fruit and keychains until 5 o’clock. The fruit he gets from from Nepa-Q market at P25 (less than one cent) per kilo; he sells them for P10 apiece. As for the Pikachus, he buys them for P7 in Divisoria, a market that is famous in Manila for its cheap wares.

But the apparent simplicity of Blance’s purpose belies a dual role. Aside from earning money from vending, Blance also guards the bus terminal and serves as a lookout for pickpockets. “I’ve been working here since I was 34 years old,” he says. “We’ve memorized who goes here, who the regular passengers are. We can spot when someone looks suspicious.” One time, he saw a man dressed in formal clothes acting strangely. “He kept on leaving the bus,” says Blance. “He will go back, leave again, go back.” Blance alerted a security guard. True enough, when authorities boarded a bus, they found that the man had just stolen a bag from a female passenger.

When I asked him how he knew the man was up to no good, Blance says proudly: “I still have the blood of a soldier in me.”

He only served in the military for two years. He was stationed in Camp Capinpin in Tanay, Rizal province before he went on absence without leave, citing the difficulty of his tasks. He later became a security guard and then a private investigator, but quit after five years. “I left my job after I learned that I could earn from selling stuff on a bus.” His brother also sells items at the bus terminal, which is where he got the idea. When ask what made him stick with being a bus vendor, Blance says it’s having additional savings from not having to pay for transportation.

Blance also works as a dispatcher for 15 days a month for another bus line, and thus gets free rides on those buses as well. He assembles passengers from 10 in the evening to six in the morning and earns P90 ($2 USD) for each bus he dispatches, averaging six buses per night. He doesn’t work under any contract, but flashes his ID to me with pride.

“I’m old. It’s hard to get a job. This is enough for me,” he says. And just barely enough to support his seven children, one of whom he’s still putting through college.

Melanie Valderama, 51, knows what he means. She has eight children, three of whom are still studying, and relies on her older children for financial help. She’s been selling fried peanuts and mineral water for 15 years on the buses, and can’t think of any other form of employment that would be available to a widow who hasn’t finished high school.

Like Blance, Valderama is protective of the bus terminal. “I’m not afraid of encountering snatchers in buses. We know what to do.” She says there was an instance when a man, looking very much like an ordinary passenger, entered a bus. He was even holding a bag. When he stole from one of the passengers, it was Blance and other vendors who alerted the security guard in the terminal. The thief was caught.

But most days, says Valderama, life in the bus terminal is peaceful. Passengers rush in and out and bus vendors like her, both young and old, try to get them to buy something on the fly. At 24, Richard Aldel is one of these younger vendors. Unlike Valderama and Blance, who sell food, he has a stack of pirated DVDs in his hand. “It’s better to sell them in buses as I don’t have to pay for a stall,” he says. Though he looks as if he just graduated high school, Aldel has four kids (and never did finish high school). He goes to the bus terminal at 1 p.m., stays until seven and then goes home. He rides the buses as far as Ortigas, 15 minutes away, and has been doing this for four years.

I ask him if he’s also encountered snatchers or pickpockets on any of the buses. He shakes his head.

“I know of former snatchers who’ve became bus vendors, though,” he says, smiling mischievously.

Photos by Purple Romero

City: Accra, Chennai, Lima, Manila, Nairobi

Over the past two weeks, our bloggers read pirated books in Lima, visited public nurseries in Nairobi and shopped for iPhones in Accra. Here are some of the pictures they took along the way.

***

A natural healer in Nairobi displays one of his cures. Many residents still visit such healers, even for diseases that don’t actually exist.

Informal smart-phone salesmen in Accra. Working out of makeshift shops, these men provide the last-mile point of sale for a trillion-dollar global industry.

A lorrie truck provides water in Chennai. Even though the city receives far more than the national average in rainfall, development patterns have left it at the mercy of private water companies.

Tending a nursery on public land in Nairobi. Such nurseries can be found all over the city, but encroaching development threatens their existence.

A white-shirted protester in Manila. The city is no stranger to large political rallies, which have proven to be a boon to street vendors selling water and soda.

City: Chennai

About a month ago, popular Tamil star Vijay’s latest film Thalaivaa (“Leader”) was supposed to hit theaters. His fans had been waiting for the film for months, following every twist and turn of the shooting process in a state where cinema is like a religion. The film wasn’t released in the 500 theaters in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, but opened as scheduled around the world. And within two days, pirated DVDs were available on the black market.

Whether you want old classics or the latest films, the black market is where you’ll find them in Chennai. Pirated DVDs cost less than Rs 50 a piece (about 7 cents) while the originals are priced between Rs 300 and Rs 700 ($5 to $10) per disc depending on whether it’s an English or a local-language film. And one of the main markets for pirated discs is Burma Bazaar in north Chennai, one of the older parts of the city, close to Beach Station and Fort St. George, the original outpost of the British who founded Madras, now known as Chennai.

Burma Bazaar began life as a makeshift market in the 1960s, set up by repatriates from Myanmar who were waiting for the Tamil Nadu government to process their papers and help them resettle. Close to 150,000 Tamils were repatriated to India between 1964 and 1989 as the military junta tightened its grip over what was then Burma.

Running out of cash and hope, many of the repatriates set up stalls near Chennai’s Beach Station to sell their belongings and make money for food. Passers-by and government employees from the very offices the repatriates were petitioning bought their toys, trinkets and even footwear and extra clothing. Word of the bargain market spread, and business picked up.

Over time, the motley group of stores morphed into a market selling smuggled goods ranging from Casio watches and Samsonite suitcases to Vochelle chocolates and wind-up toys — simple pleasures that weren’t easily available in the then-tightly regulated economy of India. In the 1980s, the bazaar became the hub for electronic gadgets. The electronics were all smuggled in and authorities pretended not to notice the thriving illegal trade.

Slowly, the government set up stalls and leased them out, hoping to put the shopkeepers on the straight and narrow, but that didn’t seem to happen. The goods sold are still teetering on the wrong side of the law and rents aren’t paid to the corporation on time. “Each shop is about 200 square feet and the rent is reasonable, but most of the shopkeepers have arrears running to years,” says an official.

During the 50-odd years in which the bazaar has grown to more than 600 shops, it has adapted to the demands of the market. When liberalization eased up import controls after 1991, Sony and other global electronics giants opened up in the city. Burma Bazaar seemed to have reached its twilight, but it adapted again, this time to become one of the biggest piracy markets in the state. Though suitcases and toys are still piled up outside the shops that sit on the pavement, DVDs are the main source of business here with about 200 shops selling pirated discs.

“Most of the original copies (trade parlance for a film copied illegally from an original disc and not from another pirated disk) come to Burma Bazaar first and are then distributed across the city and state,” says Omar M, who owns three shops in Parsn Complex in Nungambakkam, another pirated DVD market. “I have my own sources now, but I used to get my copies from them before,” he says.

Even copies of Thalaivaa reached Burma Bazaar first, though the shopkeepers took care to keep them off the shelves and only sold them to regulars. Tamil films release on DVD only five years after they hit theaters, which gives video pirates much scope to make money. “We never keep new Tamil releases outside,” says M Ali, who has a shop in Burma Bazaar. “We only sell them to known customers. Police sometimes send decoys to try and catch us selling new Tamil films,” he says.

Police raids and the corner mobile-phone shop selling pirated movies on pen drives has affected business. According to some estimates, until three years ago Burma Bazaar did business worth about Rs 100 crore (one crore is equal to 10 million), but that is down to about Rs 50 lakh a day now (one lakh is 100,000). Some say it’s the video pirates who have changed the nature of the market and the customers visiting it. “Malls hit business badly. The customers who used to come here would rather shop in air-conditioned comfort,” says a trader who holds on to his shop “for old times’ sake” though he no longer deals in “imported goods” and has moved out of the market.

One former shopkeeper from Burma Bazaar who has moved into Citi Centre mall on RK Salai in the heart of the city says things were getting a little hot in the old market. “Earlier, the cream of the city would come to Burma Bazaar to buy from us,” he says. “But the crowd changed once people started selling pirated disks. It became less safe.” He still sells electronic gadgets and gizmos but since import restrictions were eased, he says he brings in good legally and sells them in the mall. “Elite customers would rather come to the mall anyway,” he says. “It made sense for me to make the move.”

City: Manila

The color of this protest is white. Stretching from Luneta, a park in Manila, to Mendiola, where the presidential palace sits, tens of thousands of Filipinos dressed in white gathered and marched on August 26 to decry the billions of pesos in pork-barrel funds that are allegedly swallowed up by government corruption every year.

From students to lawyers to celebrities, up to 100,000 Filipinos showed up in Luneta, all seeking reform after a businesswoman named Janet Lim-Napoles allegedly secured P10 billion in pork for her dubious nongovernmental organizations. The call for the “One Million March” was made over social media networks, and netizens flocked to the cause.

July Estero, 27, was also wearing white that day, and eagerly awaiting the crowd. At 11 a.m. he was at Mendiola, ready for their arrival. But he wasn’t there to join the rally. A pedicab driver, he said protests in Mendiola and other parts of Manila help double his income as thousands of people converge in one spot.

Estero and around 20 other pedicab drivers prowl the areas where protesters assemble before heading to Mendiola. “On regular days, we earn P200 ($4.48 USD) a day, but when there are rallies in front of Malacanang, this doubles to P400 ($8.96),” he said. A native of the northern province of Pangasinan where he used to work as a fisherman, Estero has been propelling people around Metro Manila in his pedicab for four years. He has witnessed a number of rallies already, some of which turned violent, especially during the Arroyo administration, which was dogged by frequent protests throughout the first decade of the 21st century. Estero said one of the more violent protests he encountered was led by students who were protesting budget cuts to state universities. “They tried to climb over the gate,” he said, referring to the locked gates of Mendiola that surround Malacanang Palace.

The bloodiest rally Estero has seen in Manila, however, was one he participated in himself. In 2010, he and the other pedicab drivers staged a protest against the local government of Manila after it banned the kuliglig (motorized pedicab). These vehicles are not registered with the government, but they bring employment to some 2,000 pedicab drivers throughout the capital. “Imagine you’re old – some here are almost 70 years old – then they will tell you can’t use your pedicab anymore to earn money,” Estero said in disbelief.

The pedicab drivers got support from some partylist groups, which sent some of their members to the rally. Estero claimed the police used tear gas on them. Rocks were thrown, and there were many injuries.

When asked if anything changed after the protest, Estero said no, with a bitter smile. They were left with no choice but to use motorcycles. A pedicab driver who still uses a kuliglig (which means “cricket” in English) passed by us as we spoke. I asked Estero what would happen if that driver gets caught. “They will impound his vehicle and he has to pay a fine of P500 ($11), if I’m not mistaken,” he said.

Across from the line of pedicab drivers is a small store and eatery owned by Rizalina Rivera. Rivera sells siomai (dumplings), lunch and snacks. Like Estero, Rivera said she earns more when there are protests.

Her eatery, which is located in front of a bookstore, caters mostly to students from the universities in Mendiola. She earns an average of P2,000-P3,000 ($44-$67) a day. When there are rallies, however, her take goes up to P5,000-P6,000 ($112-$134).

There was one particular day this year when her income shot up: May 1, Labor Day, when an estimated 10,000 workers marched to Malacanang in the scorching heat, thirsty for soda and bottled water. “May 1 was a big day for me,” she said. “I earned P8,000 ($179).”

Rivera never earned that much in her old job as a civilian intelligence officer. With her cropped hair, apron and easy smile, it is hard to imagine her chasing after shoplifters in department stores, which she used to do on a daily basis. In that job, she earned P425 ($9) a day.

She decided to resign in 2012 and set up her own store. The start-up costs were P25,000 ($560). In a year’s time, she had earned back that capital and then some. At 34, she said she does not mind lacking health or housing benefits as she does not have a family yet.

On August 26, Rivera’s customers included a group of policemen that were deployed to maintain peace and security in Mendiola during the protest. They flocked to her small eatery and ordered lunch, which sells for cheap as P40, or less than a dollar. Should a rally ever turn ugly, Rivera chuckled, “I’ll just run. If a brawl happened or if they started to throw things at each other, I’ll leave my store. Have to save myself first before anything.”

And though they may not be directly participating, both Rivera and Estero said they believe in the cause that the people are protesting for.

“I hope the lawmakers stop having the right to receive millions in money,” Rivera said.

Estero was even more furious. “We are the bosses of those people,” he said, turning to a fellow pedicab driver. “When we buy gas, don’t you think we’re paying taxes? We are!”

Almost two hours into the protest, the police were summoned to station themselves in front of Mendiola’s locked gates. Estero and the other pedicab drivers started to leave Mendiola. The protesters were coming. For Estero and Rivera, this meant more customers — and also more questions for a government that has yet to fully respond to the demands of a protest colored white.

Photos by Purple Romero

City: Nairobi

From a grassy hilltop near the southern end of Nairobi National Park tourists can look south over the Athi River Plain, a vast swath of savannah that once stretched uninhibited from Nairobi to the border with Tanzania. But today, their view is blocked by a row of cement factories and urban sprawl.

“That’s Kitengela,” says ranger Ernest Achieng (who asks that his real name not be used, per Kenya Wildlife Service policy), pointing to what was once a small truck stop but is now a bustling blue-collar town. “Five years ago, there were no buildings there. But people are buying the land and developing and erecting fences.”

Such development now threatens Nairobi National Park, the world’s only game reserve found within a major city. Home to lions, leopards and endangered black rhinos, NNP offers tourists the opportunity to observe wildlife with the skyscrapers of Nairobi’s skyline rising in the background. But the park is slowly being chipped away by encroaching highways, housing and industry.

NNP’s 30,000 acres form the southern portion of Nairobi. The north, west and east sides of the park are all fenced in, curving like a wide horseshoe into the city. Until development cut it off, the southern side was the only open part that allowed animals, especially wildebeest, in and out.

“We had the second greatest wildebeest migration,” said Nelly Palmeris, NNP senior warden, second only to the famous great migration in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. “But over time there’s a lot of settlement on the southern side, a lot of fencing, so the free movement of animals is not existing anymore.”

Indeed, in the 1960s, over 100,000 wildebeest migrated to Nairobi National Park each year during the July to August dry season. This year, only 70 animals made the trip.

Unplanned urban sprawl isn’t the only threat to the park. There is a constant threat of poaching—a rhino was killed for its horn just two weeks ago—and Palmeris says recent years have seen massive flooding that has hurt wildlife and vegetation; the floods are the result of paving over wetlands and green space in Nairobi, causing rainwater to rush into the lowland reserve. And the construction of a leather tanning factory just a few feet from the park fence in the southeastern corner has caused so much pollution that the Kenya Wildlife Service had to close a tourist entrance there a few years ago. The fumes from the tannery, Achieng said, were so corrosive they had to replace the metal roof of the ranger station once a year.

Perhaps above all, though, a series of bypasses planned around Nairobi to ease traffic congestion could permanently alter the park. One, the Greater Southern Bypass, would run south of the park and finish the job of cutting off the migration.

The second, the Southern Bypass, running along the northern park boundary—and the south side of the city—would actually enter the park for four kilometers, taking at least sixty acres of national park land in a move that conservationists say is an illegal encroachment. Dr. Paula Kahumbu, a prominent Kenyan conservationist and chair of advocacy group Friends of Nairobi National Park (FoNNaP) says the area chosen for the bypass is especially important for the park’s lions.

“It’s not a very big chunk of land, but already moving even a fence is a loss of space for wildlife,” says Palmeris. “I wouldn’t want an inch of the park gone.”

Palmeris says that although she understands that developing the city’s infrastructure is necessary, it cannot be at the expense of the park. “The value of the park is priceless. In terms of biodiversity and in terms of value that this park has for the city, you would not want to touch this park. We are the lungs of the city. We purify the air. You don’t want to touch your lungs.”

The Kenya National Highways Authority has offered to compensate for taking the land by buying a chunk of the southern end of the park near Kitengela. “There is the urgent need to decongest the city by diverting traffic to more viable areas,” wrote KeNHA corporate affairs manager in a letter to a Kenyan paper. “It, surely, is not too much to ask, that KeNHA borrows a few metres of the national park.”

Dr. Kahumbu says that sets a worrying precedent. “Basically national parks would just become free land for development,” she says. “They take a piece of park and buy another piece of land and everything is supposed to be okay, but we think this will destroy not just this park but many parks to building roads.”

Kahumbu says part of the problem is Kenya’s decision-makers aren’t treating national parks like historical monuments in need of protection.

“Like Ft. Jesus of Mombasa,” she says, referring to a 500-year-old battlement on the coast. “Nobody would support demolishing it for a parking lot or something, even though it’s really valuable real estate.”

City: Chennai

As the Informal City Dialogues moves toward its “Embracing the Informal City” conference in September, each week we will present summaries of the scenarios created in the six participating cities. These scenarios were created in multi-day workshops planned and conducted by Forum for the Future in conjunction with Transparent Chennai, and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The outputs were collaboratively envisioned by a wide range of actors, from informal settlers and street vendors to urban planners and government officials. The following is an excerpt from Forum for the Future’s report on the scenarios developed in each city, which will be published in September. Click here to read more about how the futures scenarios process works.

Chennai

At the workshops in Chennai, four possible scenarios were imagined for the city’s future. In the first two, virtually all urban amenities, from housing to transportation to basic services, are geared toward the wealthy. But in one of these first two scenarios, government operates highly effectively (for those who can afford it, at least) while in the other it barely functions, prompting the rich to segregate themselves into gated communities with privatized services. Neither of these scenarios makes room for the poor or the informal, both of which are forced to the urban fringe.

The latter two scenarios look quite different. In both of these scenarios, the city’s poorer residents are considered every bit as legitimate as the rich. But one of these scenarios imagines an incompetent government — it cares about the poor but cannot adequately help them. In the other, however, effective government and a pro-poor agenda combine to create an inclusive city that allows for in-situ slum development and upwardly mobile informal employment.

Chennai Inc.

Chennai in 2040 is a city for the rich. They dominate the local government, which enacts policies for their benefit. The city is clean and efficient but has no room for the poor or the informal. In 2025, the slums were demolished to make room for shopping malls and high-rise buildings. Public spaces like parks and roads have been cleared of street vendors and the informal sector has been largely eliminated. Problems are outsourced to the private sector to solve and services including water, electricity, waste management, education, and healthcare have all been privatized. Service delivery is efficient and high-quality but unaffordable for the poor. They’ve been pushed to the edges of the city and now their only interaction with the wealthy is when they work as maids, cooks, or other household servants. Waste is sent offshore to be recycled and is no longer available for waste pickers to process.

Gated Chennai

In this scenario, Chennai’s government in 2040 is pro-rich, autocratic, and laissez faire. It is also inefficient and unable to deal with the needs of the growing city. The wealthy have ensconced themselves in luxurious gated communities that benefit from privatized services like clean water from desalination plants and high-quality health care. The poor are mostly confined to crowded and squalid settlements on the outskirts of the city that lack basic services. Unemployment and crime rates are high and there is a widespread sense of alienation. Public spaces and other amenities are scarce and poorly maintained. The government’s inability to manage waste has caused severe degradation of air and water, leading to widespread health problems—especially among those too poor to afford private hospitals. Waste from the gated communities is mostly dumped outside the city, preventing access to it by waste pickers.

Namma Metro

Chennai in 2040 is run by a government that has progressive policies but is highly ineffective. In this scenario, a radical leftist party took power in 2015 and has been in control ever since. The party has promoted pro-poor policies and is committed to providing public services but has a hard time delivering on its promises. Slums were officially recognized and legalized in 2020 and are now widespread throughout the city. However, conditions in the slums are poor, as the government is unable to effectively provide services to the rising population. Open spaces are scarce, as most of them now contain informal settlements. Waste management has been decentralized and provides income for waste pickers, but conditions are unhygienic and difficult. Ineffective waste management combined with climate change has caused extreme environmental degradation, including dangerous levels of air and water pollution. Disease is rampant and the poor quality of healthcare in government hospitals means that infant and maternal mortality rates are at an all-time high. The informal sector in 2040 accounts for more than half the workforce.

Rajnikanth

In this world, a transformation of Chennai began in 2014 with the implementation of a new kind of housing development called Samthuvam (“Equality”)—an in situ redevelopment of a slum guided by an inclusive and participatory process. The new development integrated people from different social and economic strata and sparked a revolution in attitudes and policies. By 2040, an efficient and pro-poor government is able to provide high-quality and affordable services to the people of the city—including universal healthcare and education, clean water, and a fair and efficient judicial system. The cityscape features high-rise buildings to house the growing population and consists of self-sustaining neighborhoods that benefit from community agriculture and localized waste treatment. Waste pickers have been able to transform themselves into community waste managers thanks a government-funded education program.

City: Lima

For decades Jiron Quilca, a street in downtown Lima, has held the dubious distinction of being one of Limeños favorite places for buying pirated books. Dozens of shops selling pirated books line Quilca, their products displayed on wooden shelves that peek discreetly out of doorways onto the street.

Nestled among the shops is Libros Adam, a small store that carries a wide array of pirated books. Self-help books and international bestsellers tend to be among the biggest sellers here, including popular titles by Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stephen King. Often the pirated copies share shelf space with used books, and even some legitimate copies.

“We also have the Game of Thrones series,” the shopkeeper at Libros Adam says from his stool. The air inside the shop is dense and smells of musty pages. He’s reading his newspaper, and is wary of answering too many questions about his business. “If you want something we don’t have, we can get that for you, too,” he assures me.

Most of Lima’s informal book manufacturing is thought to take place on antique presses in illegal workshops scattered throughout the city’s low-income areas. The books are printed on cheap paper, and it’s not uncommon for the text to be printed crooked, or for entire chapters to be missing. The binding is often cheap, and whole sections of the book have been known to detach before you finish reading them.

The illegal copies aren’t restricted to high-profile places like Jiron Quilca – they’re ubiquitous, displayed by street vendors, on highway stands, inside markets and during the summer months at the city’s most popular beaches. According to one estimate, quoted by the BBC, Peru’s pirated-book publishers employ more people than their legal counterparts, and are thought to cost the industry $52 million in annual losses. In formal Peruvian bookstores the price of an average book hovers around 50 soles, or about $18, which is significantly more than what the average Peruvian makes in a day.

Many titles from Peruvian writers have also been given the full pirating treatment, including books by Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Laureate, who has said the country’s book piracy “reflects the little or no respect for the law.”

Book pirates are known for their resourcefulness. Illegal copies of major novels are known to make their way to the streets on or before the official release date. When Vargas Llosa’s last novel The Dream of the Celt came out in 2010, it was quickly copied and distributed across the country. It was common to see the book displayed by street vendors at most of Lima’s major intersections, selling for 25 soles (about $9 USD), significantly less than the 70 soles retail price.

“Piracy reflects the lack of awareness that the law is really civilization,” Vargas Llosa told a Spanish newspaper shortly after the book’s release.

Following news of the high-profile copyright infringement, INDECOPI, Peru’s intellectual-property protection agency, vowed it would fight the city’s book pirates and get illegal copies off the streets. But the vast network of informal printing presses means that even when officials raid informal book sellers, shopkeepers are able to resupply within days. Almost three years later, pirated copies of The Dream of the Celt are still available in Quilca.

For authors less celebrated than Vargas Llosa, being pirated is a sign that they’ve made it as a successful writer. In his terrific in-depth look at the country’s book pirates for an article in Granta, Daniel Alarcon, a Peruvian author, describes being pirated as “the Peruvian equivalent of making the bestseller list.”

During a visit to Polvos Azules, I learned of similar sentiments in the country’s film industry, where filmmakers voluntarily provide copies of their movies to be pirated, saying they’d rather their work reach more people than be confined to legal DVD sales.

“I think its fascinating that someone has done the math, is standing on the street corner selling 25 to 30 titles, and they’ve figured out it’s good business,” Alarcon tells me during a phone interview. “One time at a beach, I saw this guy carrying this stack of 20 books – he probably had some 30 more in his backpack.”

Pirated school and college textbooks are also big sellers in Quilca, and illegal copies make their way onto university campuses, where many of the country’s future lawyers presumably learn their trade through pirated textbooks. Rodrigo Salazar, a local journalist and author, tells me that during his college years he and many of his fellow classmates came to these very stores in search of books that were hard to find at the universities’ libraries. “My college’s library wasn’t very good, and if by some miracle they had the books I needed, they only had one or two [copies]. In class it was common to hear, ‘They have that book in Quilca, let’s go,’” he says.

Perhaps most significantly, though they’re illegal, pirated books don’t carry the same stigma as, say, illegally downloaded music or pirated copies of DVDs.

“The book is a very revered cultural object,” Alarcon points out. “Who could be against books? [But] the methods and the tactics used by pirated booksellers are similar to those used in other illegal activities, like drug-trafficking or the mafia. Books are things we associate with the cultural world… but often people who are selling books don’t care about books. They could be selling umbrellas or pantyhose.”

Still, Alarcon, who has a new novel set to be published later this year, says part of him would be disappointed if it wasn’t pirated.

“It would mean someone did the math and thought your book wouldn’t sell,” he says with a laugh. “And if they don’t read your book, you’re a failure.”

Photos by Manuel Vigo

City: Nairobi

“If I may ask,” the flower vender interrupts, “when did you last see a frog in Nairobi?”

I pause. This is a question I have never been asked before.

“You’ve never seen one,” he answers for me, then points to a row of concrete houses built over what was once a free-flowing river. “Because what they are doing is draining their sewage into a wetland. That’s why there’s no life in Nairobi.”

The flower vender, named Macharia Kamau, makes his living selling plants grown in a nursery in a triangle-shaped park between a fork in a busy road. Nurseries like his are all over Nairobi, their neat rows of leafy seedlings blanketing unused roadsides and riverbanks. The gardeners pay a fee to the county council to use the public green spaces and take it upon themselves to conserve the small public parks and natural waterways. It’s one reason Nairobi is nicknamed the “Green City in the Sun.”

But the nurseries, and the green spaces they preserve, are under threat. Already, two-thirds of Kamau’s park has been built over, and developers tried to evict him three months ago to get the rest. As the city’s economy and population expands, developers are putting up apartment blocks and parking lots anywhere they can. Though the parks and riversides are public and protected, developers get around this by exploiting the corruption that infects all levels of government in Kenya.

“If that area is targeted by somebody [for development],” says Lilian Muchungi, senior project officer for the Green Belt Movement, an environmental activist group in Nairobi, “they can buy their way into the government and evict people even though it is a public land.”

One vender who has already lost his whole nursery to such a deal is Peter Mbogwa. Mbogwa and over 300 other gardeners once cultivated seedlings in a protected wetland near Peponi Road, but they were evicted three years ago when a church with a title deed decided to build a luxury apartment complex. The once-lush riverbank is now vacant, and the only people allowed in are security guards hired by the church.

“By 10 to 15 years there will be no nurseries near the roads or the rivers,” Mbogwa says. “There is no space is Nairobi anymore.”

Losing Nairobi’s remaining green spaces to development isn’t merely an aesthetic concern. Evicting the gardeners puts hundreds of people out of work, and building over wetlands and riverbanks creates a dangerous flood risk. Already in Nairobi, people die every year as rivers that can no longer meander naturally overspill their banks and sweep away homes. Kenyan law states that development cannot take place within thirty meters of the highest flood point, but Muchungi says that is rarely enforced in Nairobi.

Threats to Nairobi’s parks—and citizens fighting back—are nothing new. Indeed, some of the most dramatic moments in Kenya’s history sprung from such struggles. In the 1990s, Kenya’s dictator Daniel Arap Moi seized public land to glorify his regime and line his pockets. He plotted to build a massive statue of himself and a 60-story headquarters for his political party in Uhuru Park—Nairobi’s equivalent of Central Park—and planned to carve up Karura Forest, Nairobi’s largest forest reserve, to sell to private developers.

In both cases, he was stopped by a college professor named Wangari Maathai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement, who peacefully resisted the land grabbing by planting trees. Moi sent hired thugs to stop the environmentalists with violence, but Maathai, who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism, and her supporters ultimately prevailed.

Alongside Maathai at those protests were many of the city’s nursery men, including Mbogwa. “The tear gas was the first thing,” he remembers. “Whoever was caught by the police was beaten. Even Wangari Maathai was beaten, but we just ran away and kept on planting trees.”

Maathai died of ovarian cancer in 2011, but the Green Belt continues to fight for public space. Today, the group is helping gardeners like Kamau and Mbogwa go to court to save their wetlands and parks from would-be developers. They are involved in about ten ongoing court cases to stop development in Kenya’s wetlands, rivers, playgrounds and parks.

But Muchungi says success is rare in Nairobi because environmental legislation isn’t strong enough to reject a title deed, no matter how shadily it was obtained. She adds that it’s difficult to mobilize without an aggressive, vocal champion for the environment like Maathai to lead the way.

So some gardeners, kicked off of public land, are now moving to privately owned plots. In those places, though, rents are rising fast. One gardener on a plot that’s less than one-eighth of an acre inside a river’s flood zone says his monthly rent increased this January from 300 shillings a month to 1000. At that rate, nurseries and green space may simply be priced out in a city desperate for space to build, even on unstable ground.

To Kamau such cold calculations miss the point. “We are not talking about business alone,” he says. “We have to look for the future. I do not want my own child to hear of frogs as a myth.”

Photos by Jason Patinkin

City: Chennai

Please click here to read the story summarized below.

In Theyagaraya Nagar, a densely populated neighborhood in the heart of Chennai, there is a street called Lakeview Road. It is one of many T. Nagar roads with the word “lake” in its name. But there is no lake to be seen from any of these roads. Today, all you’ll find in this neighborhood is a great cacophony of shoppers in stores and open-air shops, gridlocked cars and careening rickshaws.

This is a familiar story in Chennai, a coastal Indian city once known for its sparkling waterways. Over the past century, development has encroached upon those waterways in every corner of the city, shrinking them, polluting them, and creating a water crisis in a place that receives far more rain than the rest of India. Now, Chennai wants its waterways back. But reclaiming them is not so simple.

Over the past several decades, the city’s poor have built their communities along the water. Smelly and stagnant, these were undesirable areas that richer residents wanted nothing to do with. A new plan, however, would flood Chennai’s waterfronts with high-end residential and retail development, evicting the riverbank slum communities in an effort to quickly transform Chennai into a “world-class city.” Cleaning up and reclaiming waterways is a laudable goal, for sure. But as Kavitha Rajagopalan reports in this sixth and final Forefront of the Informal City Dialogues, the way that the city goes about this reclamation effort will mean the difference between an inclusive city and one that runs roughshod over its own residents in the name of progress.

Forefront stories for the Informal City Dialogues are offered free of charge. Click here to read our most recent Forefront, “Waving or Drowning?” and find our previously published long-form stories by clicking the links below.

The Improvisers: Nairobi’s Youth Confront a Future With Few Formal Jobs

Crowded House: Accra Tries to Make Room for a Population Boom

Slow Jam: Can Lima Finally Untangle Its Transportation Mess?

Slum Lab: Manila’s Quest to Build a Better Informal Settlement

The D.I.Y. Disaster Plan: How Informal Networks Battled Bangkok’s Worst Flood

City: Lima

As the Informal City Dialogues moves toward its “Embracing the Informal City” conference in September, each week we will present summaries of the scenarios created in the six participating cities. These scenarios were created in multi-day workshops planned and conducted by Forum for the Future in conjunction with FORO Nacional Internacional in Lima, and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The outputs were collaboratively envisioned by a wide range of actors, from informal settlers and street vendors to urban planners and government officials. The following is an excerpt from Forum for the Future’s report on the scenarios developed in each city, which will be published in September. Click here to read more about how the futures scenarios process works.

LIMA

Resource availability and citizen participation: The trajectories of these two forces — and how they intersect with each other — will play major roles in determining what Lima looks like in 2040. The summarized scenarios below imagine four different futures based on these forces: One in which resources are dwindling, but citizen self-organization helps mitigate the scarcity; another in which the city has created its own resources through infrastructure and communication networks; yet another where ample resource availability fails to keep residents from leaving the city in search of better opportunities; and finally, a future in which resources are controlled by the elite, leaving the rest of the city to fend for itself.

Solidaridad para avanzar (Solidarity for Progress)

In 2040, the effects of the over-exploitation of Lima’s resources are obvious: poor soil quality, water and energy shortages, and a reduction of public space. To counter these problems in the absence of strong state institutions the population has self-organized, with some assistance from the government. Informality has become a lifestyle choice but people are unsure of how to integrate it with existing mechanisms and institutions.

Comunidad y riqueza (Community and Wealth)

In this scenario, Lima has expanded vertically and public spaces have multiplied. Large infrastructure construction has endowed the city with resources such as communications networks, environmental services, and improvement of its surrounding valleys. Civic participation and policymaking have been led by an organized middle class that leverages new communications technologies to promote its economic interests.

Aporta para el orden y sostenibilidad (Chip in for Order and Sustainability)

In this world, Lima in 2040 has plenty of resources, managed rationally by the city, but the young and talented are leaving for other cities. Order and sustainability are the principal public goods—which citizens strive to maintain at any cost. There is a crackdown on informality through regulations and legislation. This raises the cost of doing business and impels talented people to move elsewhere.

Yo mismo soy para surgir (I Can Succeed on My Own)

Lima’s vital resources in 2040 are controlled by private companies comprising an elite that also holds the political power. The masses are pacified with populist measures. Informality is associated with a precarious lifestyle but one in which everyone manages to take care of their own daily subsistence. Residents of the city pursue their individual wellbeing at the expense of the commons.

City: Accra

Chris Oppong-Agyemang’s landlady is called “Tip Toe Mama,” and for good reason. Her family owns the land where the Red Tip Toe House stands, and supposedly, it is this house that gave Tip Toe Lane its memorable name. Just a decade ago, the street was an entertainment district, I’m told. Now, though, Tip Toe Lane is shorthand for the long row of shops at Kwame Nkrumah Circle where you can go for deals in buying, selling and repairing electronics.

It’s a colorful place. There’s a comedian who also repairs phones. A Nigerian restauranteur. A man who sells phone accessories at one of his shops and cuts hair at the other. There’s always a lot of action on Tip Toe Lane. The last time I was there, I encountered an exuberant parade of young men dressed in mourning clothes drumming and dancing and taking up collections for a funeral. This time, two street performers painted in the colors of the two major political parties, NDC and NPP, were striding around together posing for pictures. “We Want Peace” was written across their chests, an effort to calm potential tension surrounding the forthcoming ruling on the legal battle between the two parties over the legitimacy of last year’s presidential election.

Entering Tip Toe Lane from the New Town side, you run a gauntlet of immaculate glass cases filled with new phones and knock-offs. Then, the signs appear. Electronics dealers advertise from all sides, from shops inside the buildings as well as tiny stalls and display cases that crowd the pedestrian-dominated road. Entering from the Circle side, there are young men lined up hawking iPhones, Samsungs and HTCs. Some are real, mostly imported by businessmen who bring them from Dubai and China, and some are impressive Chinese-made fakes, says Chris. We are sitting in the shop of the sharp and articulate young Nigerian businessman, Morgan, who recently sold me a camera and whose tales of Tip Toe Lane intrigued me enough to bring me back.

Chris is one of Morgan’s business partners. He repairs phones. “All kinds of phones,” he tells me. He has a USB-to-micro-USB cord around his neck like a necklace, an accessory of his trade. “I’m working here with my brother,” he tells me, looking over at Morgan. (Who is not, of course, his blood brother; Chris is an Ashanti man from Kumasi while Morgan is a Yoruba from Nigeria.) “I’ve been two years at this shop,” Chris says. In Kumasi, he repaired phones in other people’s shops. “I came down to Accra to see how things would go.” He worked for someone else for a while, but decided he wanted to try and make it on his own, selling parts and doing repairs. He had a tiny space he rented on the pavement in another part of Circle, until he got this shop and teamed up with Morgan.

“This is a repairer and a comedian!” Morgan interjects as a slight young man whose hair is shaped into a faux-hawk walks in. “If you want to find me, just ask for MC Mosquito,” says the comedian. Clement is MC Mosquito’s given name, and he’s also from Nigeria. He pulls out a comedy DVD he’s just produced. He performs a couple of times a week at nearby Vienna City nightclub. He really wants to do it full-time, but for now, he earns money repairing phones. He saw more opportunity and less competition in both of his professional fields in Ghana than in Nigeria, so he came here nine months ago. Mosquito and Chris are both able to repair hardware issues with all kinds of phones. In addition to professional training and apprenticeships, they’re self-taught from the internet. Mosquito says he generally repairs 10 to 15 phones each day, which he’s been doing for more than five years. “That’s a lot of phones,” I say. I turn to Chris. “So, who’s faster, you or Mosquito?” Chris laughs and says, “Mosquito, you and me, which faster fix up phones? I’m extra faster.”

Morgan hands Mosquito a small Nokia, which he opens up and attacks with a screwdriver as Chris and I resume our conversation.

Chris usually charges 10 Ghana cedis for a basic repair, like replacing the pin in the ear or mouthpiece. “Original” phones – name brands like Samsung, iPhone, or HTC – and upscale Chinese touchscreen phones are repaired at higher rates, starting at 20 Ghana cedis. He and his business partners also travel to Nigeria, which has lower customs duties on electronic imports from China. The expenses are around 300 Ghana cedis roundtrip. They sell each part at a two to five cedi markup and sell about 10 to 20 pieces a day. If they had more capital, though, they could make more, Chris says. They can’t afford to import all the different parts people regularly ask for. To bring in all the different parts they’d like to import would require about 15,000 Ghana cedis in startup capital.

A 32-year-old Togolese man, Chiido, comes in to talk to Morgan, who convinces him to talk to me. Chiido protests that he can only speak French — in nearly flawless English. He’s just made his first trip to China, to Guangzhou. He started working in Togo as a phone repairer, then he also came to Ghana because business is better here. He has a little space on the sidewalk that he rents from the land owner for 10 Ghana cedis a week, and there he sets up a stool to sit and repair phones. But he’s using his phone profits to fund his forays into trade, which is why he went to China with, he tells me, Morgan’s help.

There’s an art to this kind of business, says Joe Dontoh, who buys, sells and repairs netbooks, laptops and computer accessories. Most of the computers he purchases are secondhand, as are most of the others you find on Tip Toe Lane. “It’s a risk,” he says. “You buy a laptop from people and others say it’s stolen. You can be arrested by the police. [They] don’t require proof.”

So, he says, he’s learned how to tell when someone can’t be trusted. One way is knowing a deal that’s too good to be true. “There’s a saying we have here: kpa lo, which means something like cheap. Very cheap.” He gives me an example of someone bringing in a MacBook to sell for 500 Ghana cedis ($250 USD) and not even knowing how to operate it. “You have to differentiate. Our job here is 50-50. You gain, you lose,” he says. “It’s a good business. It’s only that you abide by the rules and regulations. You have to be careful. I’m not a greenhorn. I’m not a fresher. There are some laptops, your instincts will tell you, don’t buy it.”

Joe pauses to take a phone call. I listen while he converses in a mixture of English, Pidgin and Twi: “The guy sell am? For what?”… “Oh, massa, massa! Forget it.”… “What be the screen size?”

“Business will be good when you play your cedis well,” Joe resumes. He takes another call as we finish talking. “You go give me 70 percent down,” he says to the caller, in a playful tone. “You can even pay all!”

All businessmen, of course, have their philosophies. Joe’s is about sociability and discernment. Emeka Ani has a rather more reserved philosophy. “If you know life,” he tells me, “you know you cannot speak for yourself.” Emeka has three small shops in Tip Toe Lane, where he sells Chinese-made accessories imported through Nigeria. He travels to his home country every two weeks, importing around 6,000 to 7,000 Ghana cedis ($3,000 to $3,500) worth of electronics, which he sells wholesale. Far from the stereotype of the fast-talking Nigerian hustler, he speaks quietly and carefully, his tone only reinforcing his remarkable resemblance to the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe.

Emeka discovered the profitability of the Ghanaian market through friends of his on Facebook and Whatsapp. They told him that if he were to bring product here, “surely, surely it will move.” That was more than two years ago. Before he’d established himself, he used to sleep in a nearby mosque and leave his money with the imam for safekeeping. Inevitably he came to Tip Toe Lane. “Here is the center,” he says. “So everybody will land here.” He’s also considering doing business in smaller towns in Ghana, but found that only Accra would sustain the kind of wholesale business he wanted to run.

Now, Emeka says, he makes it a point to give some of his product at cost to young men who want to hustle. “If you don’t do it, and they see you have money, they will rise against you,” he says. “But if I have, and you have, there will be no problem… You’re my fellow youth.”

Because of this, he says, he is confident that the other businesspeople on Tip Toe Lane will have his back. “People around you,” says Emeka, “if you are good, they’ll say it about you. My grandmother told me this before she left: No matter how little you have, you should divide it.” This is a poignant re-stating of one of the common threads running through many African philosophies: Sharing and co-dependence. In Tip Toe Lane, despite the surface appearance of the supremacy of the hustle, I get the sense that the spirit of community runs deep, binding this odd collection of knock-off phone repairers, computer sellers and parts dealers.

Photos by Sharon Benzoni