Refusing relocation: Urban street vendors and the problem of the neoliberal device

In 2010, the City of Dakar published its most recent master plan. On the heels of hosting the prestigious Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in 2009, the City planned to anchor its economic future on competing to host a slew of similarly global conventions. With its beautiful and expansive peninsular coastline—peppered downtown with a growing number of high-end, international hotels—Dakar offered a comfortable and cosmopolitan environment in which to welcome governmental and business elites from across the world. As one official pointed out, the City was well-positioned to compete for hosting such conferences because their main regional rival, Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), was ground zero for the country's recent civil war. In contrast, nearby Dakar appeared to offer a historically safe and secure alternative. But as with the OIC, officials understood such hospitality to require a massive investment in cleaning up the city's streets (Fredericks, 2018: 27).

To improve its global hospitality, the City of Dakar formulated a plan to address one of its most pressing infrastructural problems: road congestion. The City proposed a suite of modern infrastructures and continued an aggressive program of relocating walking street vendors (marchands ambulants). These vendors often lack the built structures common to Dakar's more established markets (wooden stands and concrete buildings) and instead display their goods in the city's vast diversity of small, interstitial spaces: in the windows of cars waiting in traffic, perched on small fences and ledges, while walking on sidewalks and, at times, on small and quickly collapsible wooden tables. Although Dakar's municipal bureaucracies have long regulated and taxed established market structures, walking vendors regularly escape such bureaucracy and are instead more commonly regulated by arrests, asset seizure, and, at times, as part of relocations.

As one official noted, the purpose of relocating (recaser) walking street vendors was to ensure the health, security, and mobility (salubrité, sécurité, circulation) of downtown Dakar. Yet vendors have long understood relocation in radically different terms: as déguerpissement, an old French word which generally connotes a combination of “forced abandonment” and “sweeping away.” “Déguerpissement” is not widely used in France today, but colonial authorities in the early 20th century first used it as an administrative term to describe the removal of African settlements from their occupation of the future site of the planned city of Dakar. This administrative usage subsequently spread throughout the francophone colonies and came to be understood as “the forced displacement of urban residents who have settled on a plot of land whose tenure is contested by public authorities.” ¹ While municipal officials in Dakar today eschew the word and its negative colonial connotation, many vendors readily employ “déguerpissement” as a transitive critique of the violence and illegitimacy of contemporary attempts to forcibly remove them from the city's public thoroughfares.

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Figure 1.

“DON'T TOUCH MY TABLE,” an image used in the media coverage of various street vendor protests since 2012 (Nzale, 2020).

In 2015, one particularly violent encounter between vendors and the police resulted in organized street protests (Dankoco and Brown 2017). Such protests are a common and widely celebrated form of democratic politics in Senegal, and vendors drew quite explicitly on this tradition of citizenship to advance their critique of déguerpissement: they articulated their own slogan—“touche pas à ma table”—as a reference to a similarly popular slogan which arose in 2012 out of Senegal's historic pro-democracy movement—“touche pas à ma Constitution” (Figure 1). But around the time of the publication of its master plan, the City of Dakar introduced a new and less violent style of relocation compared to the déguerpissement of the past. The municipality partnered with a private firm to plan, build, and operate the Félix Éboué Commercial Center—a shopping mall—in which to relocate thousands of walking street vendors.

The City's new approach to relocation offered up a gigantic, modern building and a new form of political inclusion for vendors: it was a participatory relocation in which vendor associations were included in the planning process and took a central role in administering the relocation itself. In part, this new political approach was a response to the successful activism of the dozens of vendor associations operating in Dakar. But it was also due to the involvement of an American philanthropic organization—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—which required the creation of a “pro-poor” program as a condition of its recent gift to the City of Dakar. Because of this new political approach, there seemed to be positive and widespread involvement in the relocation program from vendors, officials, and donors alike. For the City, at stake in the success of the program was not only cleaning up the city's streets, but also forging a new relationship with a wealthy development partner and delivering on the Mayor's campaign promises in preparation for the next round of local, potentially national, elections.

Yet the relocation was a spectacular failure. After the construction of the building, nearly all street vendors in Dakar unequivocally refused to relocate, citing its poor location, bad design, and high price. The building remains mostly empty to this day.

Many vendors believed in the vision of the Félix Éboué Commercial Center, as they had long desired a respectable and permanent home in which to locate their small businesses. But the participatory politics of the relocation program also required the vendors to participate in its financing. The construction of the commercial center was funded with a blend of public and private investment which vendors themselves were ultimately expected to repay. Prior to the relocation program, most walking street vendors did not pay for the use of public space. But the commercial center introduced a new suite of regular charges for their use of the building: a deposit, monthly rent, and utility and service fees. The rental payments were fashioned as a rent-to-own contract, in which vendors could eventually become owners of their small market stalls. Such payments are what economists have come to term “user charges”: money paid as a condition to gain access to a service or facility for “education and health, for entry into museums, parks, cultural and recreational facilities, and rents for housing” (Bailey, 1994: 745). With the introduction of these charges, vendors became the central source of monetary value on which the relocation program crucially depended—and just as crucially, faltered.

Despite the failure of the relocation, its participatory politics were, in a surprising way, highly effective. Not only was a new space for political deliberation carved out for vendor associations, but these deliberations were also dependent on an additional political mechanism—the payment of user charges—through which thousands of dispersed street vendors could express their individual opinions on the relocation to Félix Éboué. Because payment for the building was framed as a voluntary market exchange, vendors retained the right to refuse to consume it. And their refusal incited an extended negotiation between vendor associations, the City, and its private partner over the price of the building. Far from foreclosing politics, the user charge accommodated vendors’ consumer valuation of the commercial center as a central element of a new political arrangement through which to know and define collective values.

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Between 2013 and 2018, I spent a total of two years in Dakar conducting archival research, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, bureaucrats, financial analysts, and development experts. As part of this research, I focused my attention on the role of street vendors in the City of Dakar's new vision of urban development. I learned basic Wolof, I focused my interviews on the municipal officials and private firms involved in managing urban markets, and I supplemented these interviews by taking the perspective of vendors themselves: I regularly visited urban markets, I spent time with vendors at home and in transit, and I conducted informal interviews, walking interviews, and informal focus groups with vendors and their associations. I also spent a wonderful two months shepherding American study abroad students around Dakar, including through the city's markets and with several of its street vendors. And my colleagues, Cheikh Abdou Lahat Ngom (Department of Geography, Cheikh Anta Diop University) and Mouhamed Oury Ba assisted with many conversations in Wolof and informal analysis of the initial data.

In this article, I argue that the user charge enabled a new style of political engagement—the calculation of price—distinct from the more familiar forms of politics—street demonstrations—with which vendors have previously contested the City's plans. And I further argue that such politics should be understood as a contemporary element of the mid-century reformulation of classical liberalism commonly referred to as “neoliberalism.” Critics have previously characterized the urban variant of this neoliberalism as competitive, entrepreneurial governance in which municipalities across the world aim to attract capital investment by, in many cases, violently eliminating street vending in public space (Graaff and Ha, 2015). But in Dakar, neoliberalism appeared as something different: a blend of participatory planning and user charges which included—rather than excluded—vendors and their associations in the process of and payment for relocation. In this neoliberal political arrangement, participation and payment served the aim of providing public services which meet the needs of both users and citizens. As a result, a long-held contestation over the proper use of Dakar's urban streets became a dispute over the price of a building.

This paper is organized into six parts: first, I outline my methodological approach to neoliberalism in which I frame the user charge as a “neoliberal device”; second, I detail the participatory relocation program through which one such user charge appeared in Dakar; third, I outline how one vendor association which participated in the relocation came to disagree with the location, design, and price of the Félix Éboué Commercial Center; fourth, I follow a set of philosophical reflections on price which have come to define the politics of the user charge today: in contrast to the common understanding of the user charge as a revenue-generating mechanism, neoliberal intellectuals theorized this device as a populist solution to the societal problem of knowing and meeting collective needs; fifth, I reveal how vendors’ refusal to relocate engaged—and transformed—this neoliberal politics of the user charge by introducing their own modes of valuation into the determination of the building's market price; and I conclude by considering the global relevance of such politics despite contemporary claims to the end of neoliberal time.

How are neoliberal devices political?

Over half a century of scholarly reflection on “neoliberalism” has grouped an array of experts, intellectuals, policies, officials, subjects, cities, and governments under this ever-expanding concept. But rather than increasing the size and power of “neoliberalization” (Peck and Tickell, 2002), I begin my analysis here with a deflationary aim: to narrow down the scope, scale, and temporality of neoliberalism, and to work with an analytically and empirically precise understanding of just one neoliberal form as it appeared in my field research. Here, I take inspiration from J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996) in writing against what I will call neoliberalocentrism: a style of analysis that frames most things as existing “under neoliberalism” (Brown, 2018). With this approach, I move beyond the presumption that most social life is the same as neoliberalism; is opposite or opposed to neoliberalism; is a compliment to or serving the interests of neoliberalism; or exists in neoliberalism's space and time (cf. Gibson-Graham, 1996).

As I will elaborate below, applying a neoliberalocentric analysis to my case would obscure a key political transformation in the City of Dakar's engagement with street vendors: I do not argue that vendors became neoliberal subjects and therefore increased the size of a global neoliberal project; instead, I argue that the user charge provided new political conditions under which vendors could engage in and transform a long-held dispute over the proper use of Dakar's urban streets.

So, rather than invoking the image of the big neoliberal Leviathan as the cause of a suite of familiar effects—privatization, fiscal retrenchment, individual responsibility—I begin this analysis of neoliberalism “as though it were the same size as other things” (Collier, 2012: 186). And I outline a contrasting image of neoliberalism by tracing the empirical linkages between Dakar's relocation program and one style of political reasoning which accompanied the proliferation of user charges as a public financing mechanism. But instead of denouncing this proliferation—wholesale and in advance—I analyze how one of its forms was translated and transformed as it encountered market life in Dakar (cf. Hibou, 2015; Ong, 2007). Taking such an approach allows me to understand how a form often understood as neoliberal—the user charge—might advance elements of its assumed moral and political opposites (Anand, 2020; Ferguson, 2010; Muehlebach, 2012). And it brings into view new forms that do not conform to the “critical conventional wisdom” (Collier, 2011: 9) on neoliberalism. At stake in such an analysis is distinguishing between the political effects of neoliberal forms and those which arise from other styles of political engagement (Drozdz, 2014).

Consider, for example, the question of neoliberal politics: how has this 20th-century reprogramming of classical liberalism proposed to know, dispute, and serve collective needs? Many scholars have assumed that the “depoliticizing neoliberal consensus” (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017: 4) is a global form of expert economic reasoning which is intentionally and effectively “undoing democracy” (Brown, 2015). As Stephen Collier (2017) confirms, these analyses paint neoliberalism as “a purportedly neutral expert economic knowledge that serves as a cover for a radical political project” (p. 25). This conceptualization of neoliberalism has resulted in a unified focus on the same historical narrative: how intellectuals, officials, and experts have imposed sweeping policy reforms and new styles of self-conduct on states, cities, and citizens across the world (i.e. “neoliberalization”). Where such neoliberal ideals have failed to fully obtain, scholars often attribute their uneven, variegated roll-out and hybrid variants to the social movements that have re-introduced popular politics into a purportedly depoliticized economic domain (Enright and Rossi, 2018; Leitner et al., 2007).

But this portrait contrasts with how many of the mid-20th-century intellectuals commonly associated with this neoliberalism understood their own work: far from “undoing democracy” they were operationalizing a new political philosophy of it (Collier, 2017). And the user charge emerged as a central device in this new formulation of democratic politics. From this perspective, Dakar's relocation program is not a case of the popular refusal of the conventional caricature of neoliberalism (i.e. sweeping conservative policies aimed at trade liberalization, competitive redevelopment, individual responsibility, and fiscal retrenchment). Instead, it is a case of popular engagement with a key element of neoliberal political philosophy: the price mechanism. As I will demonstrate below, an influential intellectual proponent of user charges—Arthur Seldon—conceptualized price as an extension of, and not a replacement for, democratic and popular politics. So, rather than denouncing the effects of user charges as “depoliticizing,” I analyze here how the calculation of price emerged as a consequential style of political engagement briefly shared between street vendors and the City of Dakar.

To advance this analysis, I develop here the metaphor of the “neoliberal device.” The user charge is neoliberal in the sense that it creates new consumer markets for governmental services, an approach which I link directly to intellectuals commonly associated with “neoliberalism.” And the user charge is a “device” in the sense that it formats specific arrangements through which these markets for governmental services operate (Çalicşkan and Callon, 2009). For this reason, the concept of “market device” is particularly instructive (Callon et al., 2007). But “device” here does not only denote a technological or material object; it is also a rough translation of the common French term “dispositif”: a strategic objective that requires a knowledge of its objects and a method for arranging the relationships among them (Foucault, 1980: 197). I understand the politics of such devices in terms of how they provide the conditions of possibility to know, dispute, and link divergent social values (cf. Pietz, 1985; Winner, 1980). In this sense, the user charge is a neoliberal device with the objective of re-arranging the political relationships among vendors, the City, and the urban built environment by creating new knowledge about individual preferences, market price, and, by extension, collective values. However, what was less clear in the case of Dakar was the specific “pragmatics of valuation” (Çalicşkan and Callon, 2009: 387) through which the price of the building's charges would ultimately be defined.

As Antina Von Schnitzler (2016) reveals, some citizens have opposed the marketization, depoliticization, and payment for public services which have arisen from the expansion of user charges in South Africa. In response, these citizens turned to diverse political terrains to oppose the moral agenda of the country's sweeping neoliberal reforms. But in Dakar, I discovered something different: there were no sweeping reforms at any scale that effectively transformed the state, city, or citizens into something that could or should be called “neoliberal.” Further, the user charge did not depoliticize vendors’ opposition to relocation, nor did it introduce market calculation where one previously did not exist—in Dakar's markets, refusal is a common, legitimate, and necessary technique with which to negotiate and calculate prices. The user charge thus enabled vendors to engage and transform the “pragmatics of pricing” (Muniesa, 2007: 378) now central to their political relationship with the City of Dakar. In this new relationship, “the problem is that of the construction of prices as accurate and fair representations of the collective appraisal” (Muniesa, 2007: 378) of a public service. As I will demonstrate in the following sections, vendors disagreed with the City's valuation of this public service and introduced their own method for determining its market price.

The proper use of the urban street

Street markets have long posed problems for the City of Dakar. And with the publication of the master plan, street vendors appeared as a stark contradiction to its new image as a “modern metropolis” (Marfiang, 2015). But more than just a problem for the city's modern image, officials also understood street vendors as a problem for economic growth. A World Bank report estimated that, in 2008, traffic congestion in the City of Dakar was estimated to cost a total of fCFA 142.9 billion, amounting to 2.2% of that year's Gross National Product (2009). According to this report, Dakar's “crisis-level” traffic congestion was caused, in part, by vendors, and it introduced what economic geographers describe as the infrastructural “disfunctionalities [sic]” (p. 9) which limit measured monetary exchange in “the economy as a whole” (Scott and Storper, 2015: 7). ² Top City officials adopted this view of urban streets: rather than providing a space in which to facilitate often unmeasured popular exchange, they thought that increasing urban mobility would facilitate the growth of what one Deputy Mayor referred to as Dakar's “urban economy.”

Echoing the World Bank report, this official agreed that relocating the markets would “liberate public roads,” help resolve this crisis of congestion, and increase gross domestic product (GDP). Yet the extent of this economic reasoning was relatively limited in Dakar. During my fieldwork, it only appeared in one formal document and on the minds of some elite officials (the Mayor, a deputy, and their consultants). Further, posing the street market as an “economic cost” was a striking inversion of how most municipal officials in Senegal understood such markets: as a fiscal benefit, not an economic cost, because market taxes are often the largest source of municipal revenue. And yet, many of Senegal's urban municipalities have nevertheless turned to street market relocation as a solution to a variety of problems that long predate contemporary framings of the growth of “the urban economy.”

For example, colonial authorities understood street markets as a public health threat. And after independence, streets emerged again as a problem in which vagabonds, walking vendors, beggars, and people with disabilities on the city's streets were commonly understood to be “human congestion” and “human garbage” (Collignon, 1984). Dakar became the capital of a newly independent Senegal, and officials introduced public works campaigns to clean up image of the nation's capital city. Like the colonial authorities before them, these officials turned to law to address this problem of “human garbage.” As a result, the law has officially prohibited selling on city streets since 1967. In the 1970s and 1980s, the City of Dakar introduced a series of amendments to the law that permitted certain classes of traders to obtain weekly permits from public authorities, and municipal law continues to be a central style of political engagement through which organizers advocate for vendors’ rights to the city (Dankoco and Brown, 2017).

With these histories in mind, it becomes possible to understand how the desire to remove vendors from city streets may not be a straightforward effect of something called “neoliberal urbanism” (cf. Le Galès, 2016). Once linked to a post-independence vision of nation-building, then to what Rosalind Fredericks (2018) has termed the “garbage citizenship” of “Senegal's neoliberal era” (p. 3), clean streets are now tied to a different problem: the widespread frustration with Dakar's congested, “macrocephalic” growth (Diop, 2017). Even at the World Bank's release event for its new report, Africa's Cities (Lall et al., 2017), one Senegalese minister openly criticized its author's arguments for density, citing Dakar's congestion. Better, he thought, to spread the city out into the periphery. And most head administrators hosting a market in their commune cited the noise, congestion, and fires of nearby markets as their residents’ most pressing concerns. In short, market congestion arose not only as a problem for “the urban economy,” but also as a popular critique (Melly, 2017). This critique often targeted street vendors and often took violent forms. As one taxi driver confirmed after a particularly incendiary déguerpissement, “Good! Now this is a normal street where one can finally drive a car.”

In the past decade, vendors have created over a dozen associations to represent their collective interests to elected officials and have organized several large street protests to oppose déguerpissement (Dankoco and Brown, 2017). Far from diminishing this style of political engagement, the relocation program created new support for it by involving vendors’ associations in the political process of planning the relocation and by offering modest funding to further institutionalize their political advocacy. Such collective action is what Asef Bayat (1997) defines as “street politics” (p. 54), a practice which he contrasts with the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (p. 57). Bayat argues that such encroachment transforms ordinary people into a “potential social force” (p. 58), but it is only their collective confrontation with governing authorities that shifts them, infrequently, into “the realm of politics” (p. 58). And yet, with the introduction of user charges, the political relationship between vendors and the City took on a different and, I argue, neoliberal form: a disagreement about urban streets took the form of a collective calculation of market price.

The Félix Éboué Commercial Center

With the construction of the commercial center, municipal officials sought to accommodate, rather than prohibit, street vending in the city. The Mayor of Dakar had forged a relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which provided a large donation to fund a “pro-poor” program. And after a failed proposal for a parking garage—which the Gates Foundation deemed as not “pro-poor”—the City agreed to conduct a participatory relocation of street vendors. Although the Gates Foundation has been widely criticized as a “neoliberal philanthrocapitalist” for imposing market-oriented solutions to global problems, in this case, it appears the City of Dakar was equally interested in making a profitable investment. In contrast, the Gates Foundation sought to impose something different: “pro-poor” participation was a key condition of its gift and therefore required a form of popular democracy in what city officials appeared to conceptualize more centrally as a public financing mechanism for decreasing road congestion.

The construction of Félix Éboué itself was not funded directly by the Gates Foundation. Rather, a private company that specializes in the “modernization of street markets,” MADS, formed a public–private partnership with the City to finance, build, and eventually operate the commercial center. Both were invested financially in the construction of the building, and both would be receiving revenues from their prospective tenants. As part of this “pro-poor” gift, the Gates Foundation funded the Synergie des marchands dits ambulants pour le développement (Walking Vendors Union, SYMAD) to represent street vendors and participate in the design and planning of the building itself. According to SYMAD organizers, they were presented with a proposal for the layout, location, and price of the building to which the association offered their input and approval. SYMAD then worked with the City of Dakar to conduct an enumeration of vendors, register them for spaces in new market buildings, and carry out the relocation process. In this way, the City enrolled SYMAD as a spokesperson for vendors’ interests and tasked them with producing new information about the mass of vendors they represented.

SYMAD organizers took great pride in the work they had done for this program. In their small, open-air office on the second floor of a building in the center of the city's largest market, Sandaga, they prominently displayed the census figures, photographs, and publicity they had created through their participation. One organizer took great pleasure in rattling off their market statistics and even argued that they had more accurate numbers than the municipality. At one point, he noted, Bono visited. This visit was a great point of pride to the association, and they kept Bono's photo prominently displayed on the office wall. But Bono's photo also symbolized a deeper problem with the program: although the ONE Campaign (of which Bono was a representative) and the Gates Foundation had once offered financial support, SYMAD organizers felt they had been financially abandoned. They pointed to their office's state of disrepair and their single, virus-ridden computer as physical evidence of this abandonment.

Similarly, the price and final design of Félix Éboué came to many as an unwelcome surprise. Félix Éboué is unlike any market building in Dakar: it is a monolith. Its bleach white, concrete walls and imposing, compound-like aesthetic tower over its neighboring buildings, giving the impression that a giant, clean cube had simply been dropped from the sky onto Dakar's sand-swept streets. Four stories of market floor provide around 3000 market stalls, all painted bright blue, green, and orange, and welded into parallel horizontal bars on which vendors can display their merchandise. Although the brightly colored bars added some levity to an otherwise imposing building, it was often compared to a prison.

In the preceding decade, Dakar had finally received its first large-scale, modern shopping malls. The most famous and luxurious of which, Sea Plaza, sits prominently on the city's recently constructed corniche—just adjacent to the high-end Radisson Blu hotel—and offers stunning views of the teal waters and black volcanic rock of Dakar's coastline. Like Sea Plaza, Félix Éboué embodied the iconic status of the American shopping mall. However, unlike Sea Plaza, its namesake was Black and French: born in French Guiana, Félix Éboué went on to become a colonial Governor in territories across the Caribbean and West Africa, and his ashes are today housed in the Panthéon in Paris. In this sense, the commercial center blended the global status of the American shopping mall with a Black icon of the French Republic: it promised a modern home for Dakar's walking street vendors. But, of course, the user charges on which the future of the building depended were, according to vendors, priced too high.

A political philosophy of user charges

The popularity of the user charge in public financial administration today can be traced back to several key intellectuals commonly associated with “neoliberalism.” In the case of Dakar's user charges, we can follow these associations quite clearly: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hired Cities Alliance to manage Dakar's “pro-poor” relocation program. Cities Alliance makes policy recommendations to governments in the Global South by drawing on the expertise of economists in the field of urban public finance. This expertise is based, in part, on the scholarship of Arthur Seldon, author of Charge (Seldon 1977), prominent Thatcherite, and former Vice President of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Seldon was a public intellectual heavily influenced by the political philosophy of Friedrich von Hayek, and in his work, Seldon made a populist appeal for linking individual choice and collective needs through user charges.

For this reason, it is worth considering Hayek’s (1945) reflections on the “economic problem of society” (p. 519), in which he formulated a new political philosophy opposed to the authoritarianism of his time. Knowledge and information were central to his concerns. For Hayek, the main problem of society was that knowledge only exists “as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess” (p. 519). As such, Hayek opposed the centralized planning of government with the decentralized planning he assumed arose spontaneously as markets. He wrote against any “authority made up of…experts” (p. 521) and favored instead the “special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment” (p. 522). Because it was individuals who held such “tacit knowledge” (Elyachar, 2012), Hayek thought “that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people” (Hayek, (1945: 525). But how would the people communicate their collective needs? Through what mechanisms could resource be efficiently distributed to meet such needs? For Hayek, there was only one “mechanism for communicating information” able to achieve this: “the price system” (p. 526).

In Charge (Seldon, 1977), Seldon operationalized this philosophical proposition into a programming of government centered around user charges. An economist by training, Seldon aimed to bring microeconomic reasoning to “ordinary people” (p. 14), whom he believed would “grasp it intuitively better than some graduate students” (p. 15). Seldon himself was born to a family of Jewish refugees who had escaped the Ukrainian pogroms and fled to London. He grew up poor, became an outspoken anti-fascist, and his academic career first took shape while on scholarship at the London School of Economics. Drawing on Hayek, Seldon argued that any distinction between public and private was “patently false” (Seldon, 2002: 138): no expert or government could claim to know public values better than the aggregation of individuals collectively expressing their private values. According to Seldon (2002), the “falsehood” of the distinction between public and private had been “suppressed by the persistent teaching since the eighteenth century of the precarious proposition that representative political assemblies know more about the condition of the people who elect them—their wants, needs, preferences—than the people know themselves” (p. 139).

Seldon's populist critique of knowledge sought to advance a similarly populist style of political engagement linked to market exchange. In his view, “price is neutral, useful, pacific, informative, a teacher, non-authoritarian and irrepressible,” an “indicator…which conveys knowledge” (p. 29). Like his contemporaries, Seldon shared the belief that price “emerges spontaneously” (p. 25). But he also argued that “price is a tool” (p. 24) and understood it to be an anti-fascist tool that provided a “peaceful way of resolving argument and conflict” (p. 25). Seldon was not opposed to the government provision of services, and privatization was not the central focus of his programmatic agenda. Instead, Seldon called for an expansion of services “produced by individuals, firms, voluntary organisations, cooperatives” and, in many circumstances, government (p. 23). Anticipating Bayat’s (1997) appeal to “the ordinary,” Seldon was concerned with knowing and meeting the needs of “ordinary people” (p. 14).

More recent economists have moved beyond reflections on populism to emphasize the efficiency of user charges. In one influential text, Bird and Tsiopoulos (1997) argue that “economists the world over have sung this song for years” (p. 36), and they cite Arthur Seldon as a central voice in its most consequential choir. According to this thinking, price provides “invaluable information on which services should be provided, in what quantity and quality, and to whom” (Bird, 2001: 171). These economists lament a deep misunderstanding of user charges whose primary rationale, they suggest, “is not the generation of revenue, but the promotion of economic efficiency” (Bird and Tsiopoulos, 1997: 36). They go on to describe this widespread misunderstanding of user charges as, “a remarkable comment on the general ineffectiveness of economists as public educators” (Bird and Tsiopoulos, 1997: 36). Seldon agreed. Most institutions, he thought, have “ignored a device that has been condemned in error by almost every school of thought for a century” (p. 16): the user charge.

One obvious reason for this misunderstanding could be that user charges have often emerged in practice as a solution to budgetary shortfalls. In Dakar, as elsewhere across the Global South, such shortfalls have resulted from exponentially increasing need coupled with only moderately increasing resources (Bahl and Linn, 1992). A recent Cities Alliance report confirms that “by the start of the 21st century, ‘wherever possible, charge’ had become a mantra within the conventional guidance provided to urban governments in the global south” (Cohen et al., 2019: 10). But such support for the user charge does not equate to a call for austerity or privatization: “Neoliberal governments and multilateral organizations,” the report argues, mistakenly assumed that private firms had better “knowledge of the market” (p. 18). And user charges are here framed as a “tool for city management” (p. 12), and more broadly, a tool to prevent “neoliberal governments” from privatizing by improving municipal management of services, retaining control over them, and expanding them. Such arguments in favor of user charges have just as often been countered with a now widespread criticism: they are regressive and rely on the low incomes of poor people to pay for public services. But in 1977, Seldon printed a solution to this problem on the cover of his book: “give money to people who need it.”

According to this reasoning, prices are flexible information about the level of individual need and willingness to pay for services. And if the government fails to adapt prices to demand, this may cause “efficiency losses from over- or under-consumption but also mistaken investment decisions” (Bahl and Linn, 1992: 249). In other words, governments could have on their ledger a service that most people unequivocally refuse to consume. These services may also have external benefits: for example, the decrease in congestion and the resultant increase in GDP that might result from the relocation of street vendors. In such cases, the common prescription is to “charge a price below marginal cost…so that consumption is stimulated to a socially optimal level” (p. 254). In Figure 2, I have included two supply and demand graphs that demonstrate this argument. ³ Panel (A) displays a positive demand for a service. We can see the point at which the price P 2 meets the demand D is above the marginal price, whereas the lower point where the price P 1 meets the demand D is right on the mark. With demand at this level, the marginal price will be positive. But panel (B) shows something different: a much lower demand and a negative price. Here, the most efficient marginal price is located below zero, at the point where P C 2 meets D C . Panel (B) therefore demonstrates a situation in which consumers have unequivocally refused to pay for a service with widespread external benefits. In this situation, it could be considered a “socially optimal outcome” to pay them to consume it at the level C P .

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Figure 2.

Positive and negative marginal price: Panel (A); adapted from Bahl & Linn (1992: 251); Panel (B) to represents an extended refusal, adapted from Bahl & Linn (1992: 255).

In Dakar, the price of Félix Éboué never reached a negative limit, and no direct payments to vendors ever resulted. Vendors did, however, exercise their right to refuse a market transaction and, as I will describe below, communicated a price at which they would be willing to pay for relocation. As Seldon (1977) insisted, refusal is a definitive characteristic of market exchange. In markets, consumers are expected to refuse: they “can indicate their opinion by making or withholding individual payment” (p. 23). Many tax-financed services by contrast, “cannot be refused” (p. 21). In Seldon's populist vision for the user charge, politics is reformatted as market exchange, and disagreements take the form of a peaceful refusal to consume. Refusal, in other words, is an essential aspect of the user charge's “problematic of social value” (Pietz, 1985: 7). So, while scholars have considered how refusal might challenge “neoliberalism” (Ball, 2016; Fredericks, 2018), it is equally evident that this neoliberal device depends on and enables refusal.

When refusal makes (neoliberal) sense

Although Seldon and his contemporaries spent their lives singing the virtues of the spontaneous appearance of price, scholars have since analyzed the contingent and contested pragmatics of valuation through which price is constructed (MacKenzie, 2012; Muniesa, 2007). Across Atlantic Africa, market price is one among many “value registers” (Guyer, 2004: 51), and these “values are determined, in part, by multiple, interacting, and inconclusive negotiations over the meanings of transactions as well as their prices” (Berry, 1995: 310). For example, in Wolof, the word for “negotiate/bargain” (waxale) is related to the words for “say/speak” (wax) and “discussion/chat” (waxtaan). Not only is waxale a mode of valuation, but it is also an important form of convivial sociality. To waxale is to engage in a relationship, argue, kaff (joke with an old friend), and when necessary, stake your claim to a low price with a performative refusal. The best way to waññi (reduce) price is simply to walk away from the waxtaan, and the only way to xam (know) price is to deggo (refuse ⁴ ) several offers from different sellers and triangulate the results. It is this common refusal of consumption that walking street vendors incorporated into the valuation of the Félix Éboué commercial center—precisely in the way that Seldon might expect them to.

When I arrived in 2015, vendor associations had already been negotiating over the price of Félix Éboué for years. After conducting the enumeration of street vendors, SYMAD organizers continued to meet monthly with municipal officials to discuss the financial terms of the relocation. This form of political engagement was exactly the kind of participation that this “pro-poor” program intended to create, and it was obvious to these organizers that the relocation was entirely dependent on voluntary payment from the thousands of vendors that SYMAD was tasked with representing. Bayat (1997) has argued that street vendors elsewhere in the world lack the power of disruption: “the withdrawal of a crucial contribution on which others depend” (p. 59). But in the case of Dakar's relocation program, vendors gained it. And they leveraged this position to advance their disagreement with a “fundamentally…different value system” (Watson, 2003: 396) by refusing to consume it. This refusal inverts any assumption that it is vendors who depend on the government for resources or recognition (cf. Simpson, 2014), and it effectively stalled the relocation for almost three years, a period which offered a brief respite from déguerpissement.

In response, the City of Dakar agreed to lower the price of the building by subsidizing the cost of rent and utilities, and, for a time, vendors were offered several months rent-free as an incentive to relocate. Several vendors seized the opportunity to relax in the shade of Félix Éboué without charge, to enjoy the stunning views of the city from the roof, and to get out ahead of what they saw as the inevitable wave of déguerpissement. But this minority of vendors paled in comparison to the thousands who continued to see little value in the commercial center and, as such, continued to withhold payment for it. In other words, vendors’ individualized and dispersed refusal to consume had slowly pushed organizers to negotiate down the market price of the building. SYMAD was firmly enrolled as vendors’ spokesperson in the political process of the relocation, a role that required them to translate vendors’ preferences into a set price for the building's charges. As a result, their negotiations unexpectedly emerged as a central “mechanism for communicating information” (Hayek, 1945: 526) about the condition of ordinary street vendors—“their wants, needs, preferences” (Seldon, 1977: 139). In this way, vendors “transformed their own valuation into an obligatory passage point” and spread a definition “of value more closely aligned with their interests” (Çalicşkan and Callon, 2010: 17 citing Guyer, 2004). But how exactly did the broader mass of individual vendors conduct this valuation?

Consider one vendor, Oumar, and his encounter with the Félix Éboué Commercial Center. Oumar sold second-hand clothing near the famous downtown market of Sandaga and, although he identified as a walking street vendor, I first met him at his small table in the back of a large tent. In the few years of relative peace, while vendors negotiated with the City over the price of the building, hundreds of walking street vendors voluntarily relocated into these so-called “temporary” tents. The tents were meant to be a gradual transition away from the street and toward the commercial center, but during the years that the vendors’ associations spent in stalled negotiations with the City, these tents had become an established feature of the downtown market. Vendors had even organized to pay a set of charges for collective services such as security, electricity, and a cafeteria. These services cut into their profits but, according to Oumar, their price was worth the shade, safety, community, and good ceebu jën.

In many respects, Oumar had gained a special status in this new community. Most vendors affectionately referred to him as “the president,” even though he held no formal title in any association. He was simply the most bombastic, griot-like voice in the market with whom most vendors insisted I speak. All roads, it seemed, led to Oumar. Rejecting formal associations, Oumar was “with the people” and took great pleasure in openly insulting wealthy elites who “drove air-conditioned cars,” who “wore expensive watches,” and who “flew their wealth on airplanes out of Senegal.” Oumar, like any good negotiator in Dakar, enjoyed a convivial yet ruthless critique of basically everything existing (and I—a wealthy white foreigner with a car, a watch, and a plane ticket—was no exception!).

Like SYMAD organizers, Oumar and several other vendors brought their negotiating skills to Félix Éboué. In one meeting with a sales representative at the commercial center, vendors became visibly upset. They held stern gazes, crossed their arms, and spoke only to denounce the poor location and high cost of the building. When the sales rep countered that the recently reduced price was fair, Oumar shook his head in disapproval and twisted his hand in the air as if to unscrew a lightbulb, a common gesture in Dakar meant to communicate, “you’re crazy” or “you’re doing something unreasonable.” Then we all stormed out of the office.

Leaving the office, Oumar insisted on “studying the site.” He opened his analysis by noting that our walk to the commercial center had taken nearly 30 minutes and that none of his existing clients were likely to make the same trip. Félix Éboué did feature a small open-air parking lot, but the road connecting it to the nearby roundabout was unpaved, narrow, and often pock-marked with large puddles of sewage overflowing from a nearby drain. There was a second entrance connecting the market to the main road, but it was blocked off by a large red barricade presumably operated by a security guard. Although the center was adjacent to a heavily trafficked bus station, such limited access to clients was a stark reversal of the current position vendors enjoyed downtown. And the physical properties of the building itself—a built structure meant to fix thousands of ambulatory vendors in place and out of the way—posed an obvious challenge to finding new clients for low-cost consumer goods. According to Oumar and his colleagues, this was a bad design. And they were further angered by the needless redundancy of the building: along the nearby main road, Oumar pointed out a large and empty building overgrown with old palm trees in which the market could have reasonably been housed. Or as a more obvious solution, he argued, they could simply stay at their current location in the temporary tents downtown.

In 2016, the City finally gave notice that Félix Éboué was complete and that vendors were expected to relocate. Most refused. Later that year, however, the police came unexpectedly in the early morning before the vendors had made the long commute into town, removing the tents and destroying everything inside. Oumar's inventory was reduced to a pile of rubble, and what was not destroyed, groups of young men scavenged later that evening. This was a revanchist demolition: as it became increasingly clear that vendors were not going to agree on a price for the building, municipal officials returned to the familiar practice of what vendors described as déguerpissement. At this moment, the municipal government broke with the neoliberal politics of the user charge—in which vendors were permitted to refuse—and re-introduced this older and more violent form of forced relocation.

But the City of Dakar did not have the resources to sustain such enforcement, a result of the very real budgetary constraint which made a donor-funded, user charge-financed commercial center so appealing to municipal officials in the first place. Due to the lack of such fiscal resources, demolitions themselves often last no longer than a morning, and once the last police truck stops standing guard, vendors often return within hours. Yet the vendors in Oumar's tent were unable to rebuild. Hastily constructed concrete walls blocked vendors from setting up shop again, so Oumar and many of the other vendors simply moved back across the street to a small corner on the sidewalk where they worked in the years prior. One vendor took a construction job in Louga. Another started his own cafeteria in Guédiawaye. Several vendors remained and negotiated an agreement with the owner of a nearby currency exchange to guard his stylish black Peugeot in exchange for permission to sell clothes on it.

Oumar remained an unwavering and incisive critic of the relocation. He enjoyed shouting, “you can't eat roads!” a common critique of the government's infrastructural ambitions. He even crafted his own small poem about the relocation: “les rues sont propres, mais ils sont vides nos ventres” (the streets are clean, but our bellies are empty). Despite Oumar's criticisms of the relocation program, many vendors admitted that they would prefer to operate their businesses in a secure physical structure. As Oumar once exclaimed, “Of course I want my own storefront! But how will I be able to pay the rent? The electricity? The taxes? And my children's school fees?!” Such structures are not only an unattainable luxury for most vendors, but also pose a challenge to their ambulatory business strategies which, in Dakar, remain illegal. Like many vendors, Oumar was insulted by the illegal status of his work. He often pointed out that, unlike the Senegalese who crossed the Mediterranean by pirogue, he had stayed. He saw himself as a positive example of civic engagement (civisme) and Islamic faith; his labor, a prayer, was a demonstration of his commitment to Islam and to Senegal. But the regular return to déguerpissement made evident to him that his efforts were not valued by the governing elite. He resented “l’État” for treating him like garbage in a city to which he had devoted his life and work.

Sometime after the demolition, Oumar and I drank spiced coffee from a wheeled Nescafé cart in front of the currency exchange. After finishing his drink, he took the small, tan, plastic coffee cup, held it triumphantly up in the air and shouted, “Watch! I don't pay taxes, and I throw my trash in the street! There is no civisme here!” The small cup then fell softly from his hand and tumbled down to the street's edge, alongside the rest of the day's growing pile of forgotten garbage. Oumar had, once again, refused his City's civisme.

Conclusion: An untimely device?

In Dakar, the user charge introduced a new style of political engagement with the City of Dakar through which street vendors such as Oumar came to dispute their relocation: the calculation of price. As such, the user charge allowed vendors to introduce their own “criteria of consumer valuation” (Guyer, 2004: 94) into the price of the building and to express their opinions of the relocation by refusing to consume it. This refusal incited an extended set of negotiations over the value of the commercial center, effectively suspending its calculation into an accurate and fair representation of market price. To analyze this dispute, I have posed the user charge as a neoliberal device. The purpose of this analysis is not to celebrate charging the poor for public services. Instead, it is to think with the style of political reasoning that accompanied the user charge and to demonstrate how its neoliberal politics helped unmake one peninsula as a mall.

Many scholars have framed neoliberalism as a global or national context, a planetary transformation, and a defining feature of historical time. And many more are now arguing that “neoliberalism” and “neoliberal ideology” and “neoliberal rationality” and the “neoliberal project” are “failed” or “dead” or exist today only as an “afterlife” or “ruins” (Aalbers, 2013; Brown, 2019; Smith, 2008). Such arguments periodize the present as after “the end of neoliberalism's heyday” (Enright and Rossi, 2018: 2), an ending punctuated by the failure of Euro-American political institutions to manage the fallout from the “global financial crisis” (p. 1). Yet in this article, I have sketched a very different portrait of neoliberalism which is not limited to conservative politicians and their sweeping policy agendas for economic growth. Instead, I have analyzed one style of political reasoning popularized by mid-century intellectuals commonly associated with “neoliberalism” and the political effects of a rather circumscribed experiment with one of its devices in contemporary Dakar.

In this way, I have demonstrated how the circulation of a neoliberal device briefly transformed the political relationship between the City and street vendors: where vendors’ politics had long taken the form of street protests and rights claims, the user charge introduced the additional political mechanism of pricing into vendors' ongoing disputes over urban space. The user charge therefore allowed vendors to refuse to pay for a service that they understood as a threat to their livelihoods and to gain leverage in and profitably stall negotiations over the relocation. But for vendors, refusing and negotiating price was nothing new, and the program did not replace the vendors' existing approach to price negotiation. Instead, the opposite was evident: the user charge accommodated this popular mode of valuation such that, to this day, the market price of the building remains unknown. Further, vendors were not opposed to the marketization of a public service previously available to them free of charge: many agreed to pay for the use of temporary tents, suggesting that there exists a price, form, and quantity of this service that responds to vendors’ needs and preferences. Despite such information on vendors’ preferences, the City selected to continue providing this service in the form of the commercial center. In response, vendors continue to occupy increasing amounts of space on Dakar's public thoroughfares—as they have done for over a century.

Although a neoliberal device briefly played a central role in framing these disputes, I do not argue that Dakar's municipality or its vendors advanced or obstructed a broader neoliberal political project. Instead, I have argued that the user charge introduced an additional style of political engagement in which vendors took part and transformed. After years of engaging in this negotiation over price, the City abandoned the neoliberal politics of the user charge and revived an older and distinct form of political engagement—déguerpissement. As such, the introduction of this neoliberal device is unlikely to mark any epochal shift, the user charge may not be an exemplary form of contemporary Dakar, and I am not arguing that my ethnographic past was an especially neoliberal time in the city, country, region, or continent in which I conducted my research. It is in this sense that I suggest this user charge may be an untimely device.

To conclude, I will briefly reveal the postcolonial insight framing this analysis: the very categories and forms which serve to elaborate distinct arrangements of—and desires for—political reason will persist and adapt even after their time comes to be understood as passed (cf. Mbembe, 2017; Scott, 2004). I contend that this postcolonial attitude will continue to help make sense of what some are already describing as a world “after neoliberalism” (Hall et al., 2013; Rose, 2017; Stiglitz, 2019). Despite such claims to the end of neoliberal time, the planetary landscape will remain peppered with all the devices that critics have for decades associated with something called “neoliberalism.” The analytical task I have taken up here is to understand how the urban poor in one West African city engaged and transformed the politics of one neoliberal device. It is not yet clear what these transformations will look like elsewhere in the world.