Negotiating the order: the politics and policing of street vending in Tehran

The literature on street vending has been engaged with 'ordinary spaces of negotiation' as a heterogeneous, contradictory and performative realm of contestation over public space between street vendors and state bureaucracy. This article adopts Ranciere's conceptualisation of politics and police for examining this realm, bringing actors in addition to, and other than, city authorities and street vendors into the investigation. Drawing on a study in three commercial strips in Tehran, this article shows that whenever the state is involved in containing - and not removing - street vendors, the entangled relationships between shopkeepers, state functionaries and street vendors shaped new dynamic orders in sidewalks, whereby trading was allowed, albeit with forms and intensity tolerated by the state and the powerful. This new order in sidewalks transformed some vendors into the agents of policing and in turn created new marginalised groups, such as individual vendors with lower resources. The article argues that by moving beyond equating politics with everyday contestations of subaltern groups, Ranciere's perspective offers an analytical instrument for understanding how entangled interactions between different actors, inscribed by complex local histories and social norms, determine the ways of enacting - or not enacting - state policies, and mediate governing the city on a daily basis.