Making Markets Modern: Development, Displacement, and the Politics of Inclusion in Togo’s Everyday Economy

Abstract

In the last decades, scholars in urban geography and informal economy studies have documented proliferating instances of street and market evictions across African cities. In distinction to the dominant focus on the exclusions of street and market trade from the city, I argue that the contradictory strategies of displacement and enclosure of public markets into new city space reveal regimes of “inclusive development” enlivening such projects of urban spatial change. As the turn to inclusion in global development policy expands the spaces and subjects targeted for intervention, this has important implications for vital institutions like the public and periodic African market, as well as those who make their living in these spaces. This dissertation considers how markets are drawn into development, and what that inclusion means in social, material, and spatial terms, through an ethnographic study of a relocated market in the northern town of Sabal, Togo. Though perhaps an unlikely starting point, attention to this market town reveals how projects of urban spatial change travel under broader strategies of national inclusive development. Three major findings emerge from the research. First, in distinction to dominant explanations of street and market evictions that center on urban neoliberal governance strategies, I argue that in making Sabal’s market “modern,” the Togolese state reveals an incoherent and shifting political project, recalling and remaking older forms of modernist development. Second, whereas scholars have drawn attention to the risk such spatial transformations pose for livelihoods, I draw attention to the affective and embodied experiences of market displacement. This reveals a series of crises: of livelihoods, yes, but also of tired bodies, stressed social relations, and upended cultural practices in the wake of relocation. Finally, challenging dominant theories of resistance and everyday politics, I analyze the subtle and uneven strategies displaced market traders take up, at times in complex negotiations with localized state agents, to remake geographies of the everyday market. Together, these findings reveal new contours and contradictions in state practices of implementing inclusive reforms, drawing attention to the serious implications for everyday economies and market traders as they become included in new regimes of development.