The Mobile Street Vendors’ Contribution to The Urban Economy: The Case of Pettah, Sri Lanaka

Abstract

Every city plays specific roles and it has been organized according to its characters under different historical periods. Within the city, different activities are agglomerated such as formal and informal sector activities. With the evaluation process of cities, from the early days, a group of people specialized for carrying goods from place to place to the customers and selling with cheap price within the city mainly in the urban public spaces in the central business district (CBD). Today these groups of people are identified as Mobile Street Vendors (MSV) being a particular part of the city with playing a specific role within the city. These people have occupied in urban public space such as transportation hub, pedestrian side walk and public gathering places. With the development process of the cities, new shopping centers are immerged within the city, but these group of people are not totally eradicated from the cities, and they are visible in public space in every city in both developed and developing countries. Further time to time some policy decisions were enforced to remove those people from public places. Few groups are highlighted they are playing vital role in the CBD. Colombo is main transportation hub in Sri Lanka with a lot of mobile vendor are visible in the city. Therefore this study focus to identify how mobile vendors contribute to the urban economy in Pettah. Further, questionnaire survey, focus group interviews and perception were used for data collection. Two groups were selected for questionnaire survey and four groups were selected for interview. The Network diagram and Mapping was used to interpret the economic linkages of mobile vendors and the narrative analysis techniques were used to interpret the collected data. The other required analysis were done by using simple analysis techniques. Through the understanding derived from the analysis, this study explore Mobile Street Vendors contribute to the urban economy through their economic linkages, employment, creating jobs and income poverty reduction.

Key words: Mobile street vendors, urban economy, public space