Street vendor problem in Bangalore city:

Change agent: Infrastructure

The problem:

Bangalore has an estimated 30,000 street vendors- as said by the National Association of Street vendors of India and form an important part of the local economy. Not only low income families but also thousands of college students, working businessmen. In a neighborhood like Koramangala, located on the lower east side of Bangalore city, sees a lot of pedestrian traffic in the evenings and encourages lively streets. The street vendors, however, face daily harassment from the local police in the form of fines and are evicted for not maintaining hygienic conditions and causing traffic blocks.

Street vending also serves as the only source of livelihood for
Koramangala in all has a presence of approximately 300 legal vendors, and another 700 who are not recognized by the government. While most of them are located on the primary roads and junctions, the vendors are dispersed widely and also share spaces as each space may be occupied by a different vendor at each hour.

This disorganized form of a market can often be viewed as problematic as there is no proper dictation of land use in the city, and therefore needs a creative design process in order to improve Koramangala’s social and economical situation. As it involves reorganizing a preexisting city and working with unskilled workers in order to best smoothen traffic flows, boost the local economy and improve the social working conditions for these vendors, a creative design for both the street vending area and economy is needed.

Unlike nationwide problems like water scarcity, road networking and sewage treatment, this street vendor problem needs to be treated on a smaller scale and design solutions should differ from neighborhood to neighborhood.

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