The developing world continues to experience population growth and increasing urbanisation rates along with market failures. Effects of this are seen on the streets, as people living in these cities begin using the public environment as their places of work. Commonly, urban planners, architects and urban designers have attempted to tackle this problem at the street level, by trying to identify ways in which street trading – a phenomenon that is here to stay – can be made neat and orderly. Beyond the limitations of such an approach, I argue here that there are more dimensions to the understanding of informal activities in cities. Street trading is not simply an isolated activity intended to generate money for the urban poor, but also a mode of life where housing, social services, transportation and formal trading work in interrelated ways. In this chapter I use a design process in Yeoville, as part of the Yeoville Studio during 2010 and 2011 and my master's degree (Abed 2014), to illustrate how I arrived at this understanding through reflecting on trials and errors.

I begin with a design trajectory snapshot in order to introduce how Yeoville evolved into a neighbourhood containing informal activity to the extent that various municipal urban design and planning interventions have framed street trading as ‘a crisis’. I then discuss a participatory design process within Yeoville Studio, involving informal traders, urban designers, planners, architects and community leaders. Reflecting on what I learnt from it, I explain how I shifted my approach towards an urban ethnography of informal trading, which led me to the design of interventions for trading in Rockey-Raleigh Street, Yeoville's main street. The chapter then provides an urban design framework and precinct plan for Rockey- Raleigh Street as a means of creating sustainable conditions for informal trading.

Framing a design trajectory of informality in Yeoville

The history of design for trading in Yeoville reveals that the City's efforts to accommodate traders on the street were short-lived, and soon gave rise to unsuccessful attempts to contain the traders within a market.

From street to stalls to market and back to the street

Street trading in Yeoville grew rapidly in the 1990s, as the neighbourhood became host to lower-income residents and an active entry point for African migrants from the country and from the continent.