“This Space Is Ours”: Street Trading and Contestation over the Right to the City in Harare’s Central Business District

Access to urban space in cities of the Global South is often contested due to multiple and competing claims from different users. Using a qualitative approach, this article examines how Harare’s specific geopolitical context shapes street trader agency, and what this tells us about the particular form that the right to the city assumes in politically fragmented urban environments. The findings show that Harare’s contested urban politics, entrenched patronage networks, and authoritarian spatial governance create difficult conditions for street traders whose livelihoods depend on access to public space. The study also demonstrates that urban claim making and appropriation of space are gendered, as female street traders endure aggressive repression and other forms of violence. Although street traders engage in modulated forms of everyday resistance against urban exclusion, this only results in incremental gains without securing long-term rights to urban space. Despite the existence of street traders’ associations, their collective bargaining power is constrained by organizational fragmentation, political cooptation, and a heavily regulated civic space that undermines political mobilization and active participation in urban governance. The article advocates for the reinterpretation of the right to the city based on local and institutional conditions that shape how the poor lay claims to urban space.