Few cities the world over have attempted to modernise by removing the people who make them work. Kathmandu is trying its best. Since 2022 Balen Shah, an engineer turned rapper turned mayor, has launched a ruthless campaign to “reclaim” the capital’s pavements. His target is the thousands of street vendors who trade in snacks, socks, SIM cards, vegetables and survival.
Their offence is aesthetic. Street vending, in the mayor’s eyes, disfigures the city. Their eviction, his office insists, is a step towards order and modernity. His critics see something else entirely: an unaccountable crackdown on the informal poor, pursued with bulldozers and little regard for legality or policy coherence.
Street vendors are no anomaly in Kathmandu. They are the rule. In Nepal where formal employment absorbs less than a fifth of the workforce, and where the state’s capacity to generate jobs is pathetic, the informal sector functions as the engine of urban survival. A cart on a footpath is rarely the first choice. It is what follows when the state offers nothing else.
The numbers are blurry but large. Estimates suggest more than 30,000 people depend directly on street vending in Kathmandu, with many more linked through informal supply chains. The capital’s footpaths hum with economic activity that may lack permits but not purpose. Vendors serve the city’s working majority with goods priced for thin wallets and delivered with entrepreneurial agility. They are both shopkeepers and shock absorbers.
The municipal response has been brisk and performatively punitive. Shah’s administration has torn down stalls, seized carts and vegetables, and deployed security forces to sweep pavements clean. There is no formal rehabilitation policy; no provision for relocation; and no legal framework underpinning the evictions. Vendors are being wiped out not because they are unlawful but because they are unwelcome. Their crime is visual clutter.
This is not policy. It is foolishness. Nor is it particularly novel. Across South Asia similar campaigns have failed to eliminate informality but have succeeded in intensifying hardship. Dhaka’s repeated crackdowns yield short-lived “clean-ups” followed by inevitable reappearances. Colombo has cleared vendors in anticipation of international summits, only to restore them days later. These are not urban strategies. They are public relations exercises.
There is, however, an alternative. Cities such as Ahmedabad and Bangkok have embraced the logic of integration. Ahmedabad’s “vendor zones” provide storage and security, established through collaboration with the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a pioneering trade union for informal workers. Bangkok has brought vending into its regulatory fold through licensing, uniforms and schedules. Bogotá has supplied carts, waste bins and microloans, turning vending from a headache into public service.
Those models rest on a different premise: that informality is not the enemy of urban order, but rather an outcome of developmental gaps. It can be controlled; taxed lightly; and improved incrementally. Informal workers can be identified and trained as well as given access to microcredit and social protection. Street space can be shared without being surrendered.
Kathmandu’s mayor appears unmoved. His urban vision, crisp in renderings but blurry in rights, leans on concrete rather than consensus. Yet cities are more than geometry. They are the spatial expression of economic structures and social contracts. Banning vendors does not resolve Kathmandu’s congestion or underdevelopment.
Underlying this contest is a bigger question: who belongs in the city? The answer, if it is to be democratic, cannot be limited to landowners, renters and ratepayers. As Henri Lefebvre argued half a century ago, the “right to the city” belongs to all who live in it, not as consumers of infrastructure but as co-authors of its form. Jane Jacobs warned against planners who sterilise vitality in pursuit of order. The pavement, in this reading, is not wasted space. It is where the economy lives when no one else will host it.
Of course there are costs to unregulated vending. Pavement access matters for pedestrians. Hygiene concerns are real. Tax leakage exists. But these are management problems rather than existential ones. Vendors can be zoned, licenced, trained and taxed. Their contributions can be documented and their practices improved. The state can turn disorder into design, if it has the administrative patience.
Federal and provincial authorities have occasionally flirted with this logic. The Ministry of Labour has discussed extending contributory protections to informal workers. Microfinance institutions, always comfortable lending to vendors, report high repayment rates. What remains absent is municipal imagination. Rather than integrating, Kathmandu expels.
The fallout is a city that looks more orderly but works less effectively. The visible symptoms of informality have been swept away; the structural conditions remain untouched. Employment remains scarce. Migration continues. Pavements clear temporarily and then repopulate.
Kathmandu cannot regulate its way into Singapore. Nor does it need to. It can, however, legislate its way into something more workable. The city could recognise vending as legal; designate trading zones; and install basic infrastructure. That would improve working conditions for vendors, as well as the city itself.
Mayors are fond of speaking about vision. But cities, unlike music videos, are not backdrops for performance. They are living systems of compromise. To govern them well means the ability to accommodate what exists—even when it does not fit the brochure. Mr Shah may rap about justice. If he listens more carefully, he may yet hear it spoken from a fruit cart. ■
