‘Shadowing the state’: Subaltern surveillance and the rhythms of everyday resistance

Abstract

This paper challenges and unsettles dominant discourses on spatial control by conceptualizing subaltern surveillance as an everyday counter-practice through which street traders negotiate access to contested spaces. While literature is loaded with state-centric perspectives on surveillance – less attention has been paid to how street traders flip the surveillance gaze. How do street traders engage in subaltern surveillance to negotiate access to contested urban spaces, and what do these practices reveal about power relations in cities? Building from ethnographic inquiry in Harare, Zimbabwe, I demonstrate how street traders use sophisticated spatial and temporal knowledge of municipal enforcement rhythms and deploy this locally embedded everyday wisdom to undermine dominant surveillance and spatial control. The paper situates subaltern surveillance within broader discussions on urban informality, everyday resistance, and the right to the city, arguing that street traders’ acts of watching, predicting, and adapting are not merely survival tactics but also political maneuvers that challenge repressive domination. This framing challenges the dominant narratives that construct surveillance as a predominantly top-down practice. By so doing, the study invites new dialogues on governance and lays the groundwork for a critical analysis of the dialectical relationship between subaltern surveillance and dominant urban governance logics.

Introduction: Surveillance and the governance of urban informality

In Global South Cities, urban informality has become a dominant feature and mode of urbanization (Bandauko et al., 2024; Bandauko and Arku, 2024, 2025a; Dovey and Recio, 2024; Finn, 2025a; Lindell, 2019; Roy, 2005). For many years, urban informality has been conceptualized from a dualistic perspective, which views formality and informality as distinct, separate, and oppositional sectors of spatial organization (Hart, 1973). However, post-colonial and critical urban scholars have challenged the dualistic framing of urban informality as a separate sector (Banks et al., 2020; Roy, 2005). For example, Banks et al. (2020) use a political economy framework to characterize urban informality as a ‘site of critical analysis’, which involves multiple agents, including the poor, political, and business elites who have diverse interests and use different modes of power to negotiate their claims to urban space. Some scholars also argue that urban informality represents ‘insurgent forms of citizenship’ (Holston, 2009), marked by resistance to spatial exclusion, where the poor assert their right to the city through everyday practices of occupation, adaptation, and negotiation. From Mumbai (India) to São Paulo (Brazil) to Lagos (Nigeria) to Harare (Zimbabwe), street trading has become the main visual expression of urban informality, sustaining millions of livelihoods (Adama, 2020; Prasad et al., 2024). As street traders appropriate urban space, they are often subjected to criminalization, dispossession, and violent crackdowns because they are discursively framed as spatial nuisance, invaders of public space and a counter to urban modernity (Bandauko and Arku, 2024, 2025b; Finn, 2018; Kamete, 2013). These forms of repression are deeply intertwined with broader surveillance mechanisms that regulate informal economies and urban mobility. While much of this control is enacted through direct policing and eviction, it also operates through more pervasive forms of monitoring and spatial governance. To deepen our understanding of how surveillance shapes everyday urban life, it is useful to engage with key debates in surveillance studies.

Traditional surveillance studies, influenced by Foucault's panopticism and Deleuze's societies of control (Deleuze, 2006), largely emphasize how the state and corporate entities monitor and discipline urban populations (Foucault, 1982, 2007). Surveillance studies have also extensively focused on the role of technological devices such as CCTV cameras and other forms of digital tracking tools (Coleman et al., 2005; Lysova, 2025; Pereira et al., 2025). However, some scholars emphasize the enduring relevance of non-technological forms of surveillance – particularly the practice of ‘people watching other people’. For instance, research in neighborhood surveillance in Belfast, Northern Ireland, highlights how human observation functions as a mechanism of social control (Zurawski, 2004). Jane Jacobs's (1961) ‘eyes on the street’ is also often cited in the surveillance studies literature to exemplify the link between cities, urban planning, and surveillance. In cities across the Global South, street traders and other informal actors frequently encounter surveillance through municipal policing aimed at regulating informal economies (Coleman, 2019; Harris, 2011, 2013). These frameworks of surveillance often depict informality as a governance challenge – one to be observed, managed, and disciplined to maintain urban order (Bandauko and Arku, 2024, 2025b; Finn, 2018, 2025b). However, such perspectives tend to obscure the agency of those operating within informal economies, particularly their capacity to subvert, adapt to, and repurpose surveillance mechanisms to their advantage.

This paper builds on my previous theorization of subaltern surveillance – the strategic watching, predicting, and adapting deployed by street traders in contested urban spaces – to further unpack its implications for urban governance, power, and resistance (Bandauko and Arku, 2025c). Street traders, often framed as subjects of state surveillance, actively engage in counter-surveillance practices. This reversal of the gaze highlights the agency of informal actors, suggesting that surveillance in urban informality is not unidirectional but negotiated and contested from below. How do street traders engage in subaltern surveillance to negotiate access to contested urban spaces, and what do these practices reveal about power relations in cities? I argue that subaltern surveillance is a sophisticated form of everyday resistance that has three conceptual pillars: (a) spatio-temporal counterintelligence, (b) communicative networks and collective vigilance, and (c) strategic embedding within municipal enforcement structures. These three pillars manifest through the intertwined practices of watching, predicting, and adapting, which traders deploy not merely as survival strategies but as tactical maneuvers of subaltern surveillance in response to the spatial and regulatory constraints imposed by the state. Watching involves the careful and continuous observation of municipal officers, police patrols, and changing rhythms of enforcement. Street traders learn to monitor visual cues, listen for signals, and share information within tight networks to anticipate threats. Predicting extends this practice into the temporal domain – traders analyze patterns of municipal enforcement rhythms, time their movements, and plan when to display goods or retreat. This form of temporal intelligence reflects an embedded knowledge of the enforcement agents’ routines and an ability to manipulate time and presence in ways that minimize risk. Finally, adapting refers to the flexible reconfiguration of their spatial and material practices, whether through changing trade locations, displaying decoys/fake products or displaying only a few merchandize items that can be easily concealed in the event of unexpected raids. I concur with Dang et al. (2025) who use the concept of adapting to highlight the agency of ordinary people, particularly street traders. These embodied and ordinary practices constitute a form of political agency that contests the exclusionary logic of formal urban governance. In other words, the top-down official politics (such as regulations, state-led control, and surveillance) become entangled with bottom-up everyday politics (such as negotiation, transgression, or resistance) (Dang et al., 2025). In this dialectical process, the everyday acts of resistance through subaltern surveillance are not only reactive but actively engage with and subvert the power structures that seek to marginalize them.

These practices reveal an alternative surveillance landscape, one in which informality is not simply a site of state control but also a terrain of counter-surveillance, negotiation, and contestation (Adama, 2020; Bandauko et al., 2024; Bandauko and Arku, 2025b; Crossa, 2009; Kamete, 2012; Kiaka et al., 2021; Olajide, 2025; Steel, 2012). As Finn (2025b) argues, it is necessary to critically interrogate the everyday nature of informality, since ordinary people – despite the structural constraints they face – are capable of carving out spatial niches through their own forms of subaltern spatial wisdom. Therefore, this scholarship from below illuminates the political possibilities of informality even in the context of chronic structural disadvantage (Finn, 2025a, 2025b). This opens up space to explore new conceptual tools that move beyond existing frameworks to better capture the often-overlooked mundane practices of informal actors. Building on this perspective, I want to emphasize that in this study, there is a clear distinction between sousveillance and my proposed concept of subaltern surveillance. Although these two concepts involve the practice of ‘watching from below’, they have distinct characteristics that set them apart. In this study, I characterize subaltern surveillance as a strategy of ‘watching, predicting and adapting from below’ but without the explicit technological mediation that characterizes sousveillance. As a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott, 1985), subaltern surveillance is the everyday, embodied, and strategic ways marginalized groups (e.g., street traders) monitor state actors (e.g., municipal enforcement agents) to anticipate threats, evade enforcement, and sustain their livelihoods (Bayat, 2013). Unlike sousveillance, which often involves documentation and potential public exposure, subaltern surveillance is tactical, adaptive, and rooted in lived experience – it is about understanding rhythms, routines, and weaknesses of urban governance structures to navigate precarious and contested urban spaces. Therefore, informal economic actors, that is, street traders, subvert the dominant reading of ‘eyes on the street’ through subaltern surveillance, using their social intelligence and embedded presence to monitor the very forces that seek to control or displace them.

By examining subaltern surveillance as a dynamic practice embedded in the everyday survival strategies of street traders, this paper contributes to broader debates on urban governance. It challenges dominant narratives that portray surveillance as a top-down mechanism of control and instead foregrounds how marginalized groups appropriate and redeploy surveillance techniques to sustain their livelihoods. By acknowledging the surveillance capacities of the urban poor – such as street traders – we are pushed to rethink urban informality not merely as a condition of exclusion or absence of regulation, but as a strategic terrain of negotiation and agency (Bandauko and Arku, 2025c; Banks et al., 2020; Roy, 2005). Informality becomes a space where marginalized actors craft alternative logics of order, control, and survival, often in response to the failures or violences of formal urban governance (Bandauko, 2025). This perspective disrupts traditional class-based assumptions that surveillance is only a top-down tool wielded by the powerful. Instead, it reveals that working-class and poor urban residents are not passive subjects of surveillance but can deploy their own forms of watching, predicting and adapting based on their strategic embeddedness within municipal enforcement structures, communicative networks and spatio-temporal ‘counterintelligence’. This form of subaltern surveillance does not rely on advanced technologies or formal monitoring devices. Rather, it is an everyday, embodied urban intelligence – gathered and refined over time through lived experience, careful observation, and strategic infiltration of state structures.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The next section situates the study within broader theoretical discussions on urban informality, surveillance, and everyday resistance. These distinct yet interconnected bodies of scholarship offer a critical foundation for understanding how informal actors, such as street traders, navigate and contest systems of urban governance. Urban informality literature sheds light on the spatial politics of marginalization and improvisation; surveillance studies expose the mechanisms through which power is exercised and resisted in everyday life; and scholarship on everyday resistance focuses on how mundane and ordinary acts can constitute significant political interventions. Together, these theoretical perspectives provide the analytical scaffolding for this paper, allowing for a nuanced exploration of subaltern surveillance as both a spatial and political practice embedded in the rhythms of urban life. Next, I examine how subaltern surveillance works in practice by highlighting how street traders use this strategy to negotiate access to contested urban spaces. Although this section is grounded in my research on Harare, Zimbabwe, I extend the discussion to engage with broader theoretical and conceptual frameworks that underpin the notion of subaltern surveillance. By situating my analysis within a wider scholarly discourse, I critically examine how marginalized urban populations deploy surveillance as a strategy of resistance, adaptation, and negotiation in response to state control and spatial governance. Next, I discuss subaltern surveillance as an act of political agency, focusing specifically on the how street traders mobilize it to lay claims to space and assert their right the city. I then explore how subaltern surveillance challenges conventional thinking on everyday resistance in cities. The paper ends with a roadmap for future research and some concluding remarks.

Theoretical dialogues: Urban informality, surveillance and everyday resistance

In this paper, I distance myself from debates on the origins of informality and its complex conceptual vocabulary. Instead, I would like to agree with critical urban scholars who highlight that informality is not simply a byproduct of regulatory failure or economic necessity but a deeply contested socio-spatial phenomenon that reflects the power dynamics embedded in urban governance (Banks et al., 2020; Roy, 2005). In this sense, informality is an alternative form of urban organization that is constantly negotiated through everyday interactions between the state and informal actors (Roy, 2005). This dynamic relationship produces contested spatial imaginaries, where informal practices are simultaneously essential to urban life and yet subjected to state efforts to regulate, contain, or eliminate them (Bandauko and Arku, 2025d).

Urban informality, especially street trading always been discursively constructed as a spatial nuisance, an anomaly, and a pathological practice that should be ‘normalized’ through disciplinary spatial control (Bandauko and Arku, 2024; Huang et al., 2014; Kamete, 2013). One of the key strategies through which this discursive framing is operationalized is surveillance, particularly as a tool of state regulation and control. The term ‘surveillance’ appears in the urban informality literature in relation to state regulation (AlSayyad, 2004). Within the context of urban informality, ‘routine of surveillance makes the exercise of power almost instinctive: people are controlled, categorized, disciplined and normalized…’ (Koskela, 2000: 251). From a Foucauldian perspective, disciplinary power is deployed through surveillance of individual bodies and the normalization of their behavior with the aim of making them conform to the dominant norms of society (Foucault, 1982, 2007). Mitchell and Heynen (2009) argue that the surveillance of urban space is shaped by several forces, and this has significant social and political effects. Therefore, urban space can be conceptualized as ‘power-space’: where urban authorities deploy surveillance to monitor, regulate and often criminalize what is considered ‘undesirable’ behavior and remove ‘social pollutants’ from public space (Abbas, 2024; Raco, 2003). Most cities in the Global South are preoccupied with the discourse of modernity, and informality is considered an anathema to this ideal. Thus, ‘surveillance becomes a mechanism for policing and controlling bodies deemed unworthy of social visibility’ (Malhotra, 2022: 172). Informality is often articulated as a vital means through which marginalized populations exercise economic agency amidst conditions of uncertainty and precarity (Finn and Oldfield, 2015; Thieme, 2018). While much of the literature emphasizes informality's role in enabling survival and entrepreneurial initiative, this paper extends that conversation by illuminating its political dimensions, particularly through the lens of subaltern surveillance. By developing and expanding the concept of subaltern surveillance, I demonstrate that informality is inherently political, even though it is not always understood as political but rather as exclusively an urban form or economic practice. This aligns with Banks et al. (2020), who call for the different rendering of informality using a political economy perspective where informal actors engage with and reshape power structures through everyday negotiations, solidarities, and contestations. Therefore, subaltern surveillance offers a critical entry point into this rendering by illuminating how informal actors engage in practices of watching, predicting, and adapting to systems of urban governance – demonstrating that informality is a dynamic space where control is continuously negotiated and reshaped through everyday acts of resistance.

These dynamics can also be situated within the broader debate on the politics of the governed (Chatterjee, 2004), which foregrounds how marginalized urban populations engage with the state not through formal channels of participatory democracy, but through everyday practices of negotiation and contestation (Finn, 2021). In cities where access to urban space is tightly regulated and politicized, street traders and other informal actors do not operate entirely outside the state's gaze; rather, they navigate within and around it. Subaltern surveillance – manifested through practices of watching, predicting, and adapting – represents a political repertoire through which the governed monitor the actions of governing authorities, interpret shifting regulatory rhythms and respond in ways that preserve their fragile claims to space and livelihood. This form of counter-surveillance mirrors Chatterjee's argument that the poor are not entirely excluded from state power but participate in it through what he calls political society – a domain marked by informal arrangements, contingent recognition, and episodic inclusion. Subaltern surveillance, then, is a form of political agency that does not confront power directly but rather reworks and redirects it through relational, situated, and often covert means. It illustrates how street traders, despite their structural marginality, exercise a form of urban intelligence that enables them to shape governance from below – asserting not just their right to survive, but also their right to claim space in the city. Subaltern surveillance challenges and pushes forward the debate on the politics of the governed by deepening our understanding of how power is monitored, contested, and subtly redirected from below. While Partha Chatterjee's concept of the politics of the governed focuses on how marginalized groups engage the state through informal negotiations, claims-making, and moral economies of need, subaltern surveillance reveals that these engagements are not only reactive or based on petitions for inclusion. Rather, they involve active and intentional monitoring of the state itself – especially its coercive arms such as municipal enforcement agents, police, or regulatory officials.

Within the context of urban informality, state-centric surveillance extends beyond the policing of bodies to include the regulation and maintenance of spatial orders (Bandauko and Arku, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c, 2025d; Lindell, 2019; Müller, 2017). Moreover, surveillance operates as a mechanism of biopower, regulating and disciplining populations through techniques of control, visibility, and exclusion. Drawing from Foucault's notion of biopower (Taylor, 2011), which emphasizes the governance of life itself, the regulation of informal spaces – such as street markets and slums – reflects an attempt by the state to manage populations through both direct and indirect surveillance (Ceyhan, 2012). This surveillance is practised using different strategies such as direct policing and raids and other bureaucratic control mechanisms (e.g., licensing regimes, enforcement and compliance patrols). Using the case of post-colonial Dakar (Senegal), Keller (2012) highlights that in their surveillance of public space, French colonial authorities used the strategy of ‘shadowing’, which involved ‘clandestinely trailing suspects to eavesdrop on their conversations, observe businesses they frequented, note their acquaintances, and monitor their behavior’ (Keller, 2012: 743). The ‘shadowing’ associated with subaltern surveillance presents a stark contrast to the colonial strategy of surveillance discussed by Keller (2012). The form of ‘shadowing’ I discuss in this paper is not about control, but about survival and tactical maneuvering (Bayat, 2013) in a volatile and contested urban environment.

In this respect, scholars have argued that surveillance cannot be understood as a unidirectional practice (Purdeková, 2016). If we view surveillance as a unidirectional process, we may overestimate the ability of the state to function as it wants to/project itself as doing. Indeed, Keller (2012: 749) argues that top-down hegemonic ‘surveillance can be weak and fragmented, ultimately failing to impose order in its intended way’. Vinthagen and Johansson (2013: 4) argue that some groups engage in everyday resistance that is sometimes ‘quiet, dispersed, disguised, or otherwise seemingly invisible’. These subaltern acts of resistance have also been described as ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat, 1997). According to Bayat (1997), the urban poor practice ‘quiet encroachment’ – a subtle but pervasive advancement on the propertied and powerful as a form of defiance to repression and survival under difficult circumstances. This strategy is more viable in authoritarian political systems, where informal economic actors (e.g., street traders) aim to avoid surveillance from institutions that do not support their livelihoods. As a result, subjects of surveillance and control can devise their own strategies to counter the power of dominant authorities (Fernandez and Huey, 2009; Johansson and Vinthagen, 2016; Lyon, 2007; Monahan, 2006). In other words, this dynamic between regulator and surveillance subject is ‘inverted through counter-surveillance tactics and strategies’ (Lyon, 2007: 66). This form of ‘counter-surveillance indicates intentional, tactical uses, or disruptions of surveillance technologies to challenge institutional power asymmetries’ (Lysova, 2025; Monahan, 2006: 561). However, much of the existing literature on counter-surveillance primarily focuses on contexts where subjects resist digital and technological surveillance imposed by state institutions (Purdeková, 2011), corporations, or law enforcement (Browne, 2015; Koskela, 2000; Lysova, 2025). This body of work often emphasizes technologically mediated forms of resistance, such as hacking, encryption, or the subversion of biometric monitoring. Yet, in the context of urban informality – particularly street trading – counter-surveillance is not necessarily digital or technologically advanced. Instead, it manifests through embodied, everyday practices of watching, predicting, and adapting based on bottom-up spatial knowledge and social networks. The informal economy, especially street trading, operates within a terrain of constant regulatory scrutiny, where municipal authorities and law enforcement agencies deploy various surveillance mechanisms to control, police, and sometimes criminalize informal economic activities.

However, the agency of informal actors in navigating and resisting these surveillance regimes remains undertheorized. I draw on my research on urban governance and the spatial politics of street traders in Harare to theorize and critically examine subaltern surveillance as an act of political agency that is used to disrupt and undermine hegemonic municipal surveillance regimes and claim access to urban space. This study moves beyond the technologically oriented debates on surveillance to examine the ‘non-special, the mundane and the everyday’ (Purdeková, 2016: 63). The concept of subaltern surveillance introduces a dialectical perspective – one that foregrounds the constant push and pull between domination and resistance, visibility and invisibility, and control and evasion. By centering the practices of watching, predicting, and adapting, subaltern surveillance reveals how the urban poor are not passive subjects of top-down surveillance but are actively engaged in reshaping urban power relations from below. This dialectic helps uncover the co-constitutive relationship between state surveillance and informal counter-strategies, thereby broadening how we understand governance, agency, and resistance in contested urban spaces.

My theoretical contribution on subaltern surveillance illuminates how street traders in highly regulated urban environments actively watch, predict, and adapt their spatial practices based on the enforcement rhythms to mitigate risk and protect their livelihoods. Unlike conventional notions of counter-surveillance, which often assume access to digital tools, subaltern surveillance emphasizes the micro-politics of observation, spatial intelligence, and adaptive maneuvers deployed by marginalized groups. By zooming in on the micro scale, I also project out broader questions of power and resistance and open new pathways for scholarship on informality and agency. Street traders engage in subtle yet effective forms of resistance – mapping enforcement patterns, communicating through informal networks, and leveraging collective vigilance – to pre-empt crackdowns and evade punitive actions. These strategies do not merely invert power asymmetries but actively reshape the urban surveillance landscape, demonstrating how informal actors exercise control over their own visibility and mobility. By deploying subaltern surveillance, street traders become ‘inventive appropriators and trespassers who often occupy the interstices of the urban archipelago's spatiotemporal order’ (Stavrides, 2013: 43). In this context, street traders use their spatial ingenuity and everyday wisdom (Bandauko, 2024; Stavrides, 2013) to insert ‘temporary rhythms into those spaces left open by dominant rhythms’ (Lefebvre, 2004; Stavrides, 2013: 43). This strategic engagement with urban temporality is a key feature of subaltern surveillance, where traders not only observe and respond to the movements of state actors but actively shape urban rhythms (Gibert-Flutre, 2022) to their advantage and in the process establish counter-rhythms that allow them to navigate and resist exclusionary spatial governance. As street traders engage in subaltern surveillance, they disrupt the rhythms imposed by urban authorities, exposing the inconsistencies of enforcement practices while reasserting their right to the city (Tran and Yip, 2020).

Therefore, by centering subaltern surveillance within discussions of urban informality, this study challenges dominant surveillance paradigms that overlook the agency of marginalized populations. The concept of subaltern surveillance is rooted in the post-colonial and critical urban theory (Bayat, 2000; Roy, 2011, 2016). Debates on subaltern urbanism advocate for the political agency of the urban poor as a form of quiet encroachment of the ordinary (Bayat, 2000, 2012). Subaltern surveillance ‘denotes day-to-day mundane agentic practices of urban dwellers … whose urbanity is crafted by the urban social actors positioned at the bottom of the social ladder’ (Moyo, 2023: 431). This paper addresses the gaps in the literature by shifting the focus from technological counter-surveillance to embodied, spatial, and relational practices of resistance that emerge from contested urban spaces. The paper reinforces the argument that subaltern urban residents are not passive recipients of state violence or urban exclusion – they are active participants in a complex game of urban negotiation, using their embedded knowledge to exploit gaps in municipal surveillance regimes and gain tactical advantage to navigate contested space. Subaltern surveillance, therefore, enriches the quiet encroachment debate (Bayat, 2000) by revealing the micropolitics of watching, predicting and adapting to spatial control and how marginality is turned into a site of resistance and political agency. It offers a critical lens through which to understand how power through surveillance circulates and is contested in the contemporary city – not solely from above, but also from below.

‘Shadowing the state’ and ‘hacking the system’: Street traders and practices of subaltern surveillance in Harare, Zimbabwe

Subaltern surveillance is a bottom-up strategy employed by both male and female street traders in Harare to carefully study the routines and rhythms of municipal enforcement agents. Far from being passive subjects of state control, these street traders engage in a dynamic practice of shadowing the state – closely tracking the daily spatial and temporal patterns of enforcement to anticipate crackdowns, evade displacement, and strategically reinsert themselves into public space. This form of surveillance enables them to hack the system from below, exploiting gaps in municipal enforcement structures, forming informal information-sharing networks, and sometimes co-opting state actors to gain privileged insights. These practices allow them to implement counter-conducts that subvert state repression while maintaining access to urban space. Conventional notions of surveillance often emphasize top-down monitoring by authorities (Browne, 2015), but subaltern surveillance inverts this dynamic, demonstrating how marginalized populations engage in grassroots counter-surveillance to navigate hostile urban environments (Monahan, 2006). This form of surveillance aligns with counter-hegemonic practices and ‘infrapolitics’ (Scott, 1990), where street traders reconfigure urban spaces of oppression into sites of resistance. Through subaltern surveillance, street traders in Harare engage in ‘covert’ resistance, interpreting the spatial surveillance gaps of municipal enforcement officials and deploying tactics of temporal and spatial avoidance based on the policing rhythms of urban authorities (Bandauko and Arku, 2025b; Turner and Schoenberger, 2012; Turner et al., 2021). As multiple participants emphasized, they remain constantly vigilant, as municipal raids can occur abruptly, making it necessary to operate ‘under the radar’ (Eidse and Turner, 2014; Turner and Schoenberger, 2012). This echoes Canedo and Andrade's (2024: 124) argument that ‘everyday forms of resistance performed by marginalized communities produce other forms of spatialities and social-spatial dynamics that have the potential to contest and confront hegemonic power relations’. By engaging in subaltern surveillance, street traders blur the boundaries between resistance and compliance, visibility and invisibility, thereby sustaining their livelihoods in contested urban spaces. In the next section, I discuss the three critical dimensions of subaltern surveillance: (i) spatio-temporal counterintelligence, (ii) communicative networks and collective vigilance, and (iii) strategic embedding. These three dimensions are nested within the broader theoretical discussion of subaltern surveillance and demonstrate that subaltern surveillance involves sophisticated, well-calculated, and modulated forms of everyday resistance that unsettle conventional narratives and practices.

Spatio-temporal counterintelligence (STC)

Spatio-temporal counterintelligence is a critical dimension of subaltern surveillance. This dimension of subaltern surveillance involves both fixed and mobile street traders undertaking bottom-up surveillance of police, cataloging patterns of law enforcement officials’ routines and behaviors to adapt and modify their own spatial practices. Indeed, the spatio-temporal counterintelligence enables street traders to understand ‘rhythms of the police and municipal enforcement officials and devise avoidance and resistance strategies to maintain their access to the contested spaces’ (Dang et al., 2025: 11, my emphasis). One street trader highlighted that:

We stay late because we know officials have gone home. We can read their schedules and decide how to act. We have learned their patterns – the times they patrol, when they take breaks, and even which routes they usually use. So, once we notice that it is quiet or the familiar officers have left for the day, that's when we spread our goods freely. It is risky during the day, but by evening, the city belongs to us. This is how we survive – by observing, calculating, and adapting. It is not just about selling; it's about studying the system so we can find ways to exist within it without getting caught or harassed. That knowledge, built over time, is what keeps many of us in business. (Margaret, FGD, Harare CBD, 26 May 2022)

These sentiments reflect the subtle intelligence and tactical adaptation involved in the practice of subaltern surveillance and survival under precarious urban conditions. Thus, subaltern surveillance enables street traders in Harare to adjust their daily routines based on the rhythms of the city (Tran and Yip, 2020). Like in other cities like Hanoi, Vietman, street traders have become, ‘savvy to the daily and weekly rhythms of ward officials and police and have created micromobility patterns to avoid fines and retributions’ (Eidse et al., 2016: 346). This temporal literacy enables street traders to make calculated decisions about when to display goods, when to blend into the crowd, and when to relocate. By tracking enforcement rhythms (Eidse and Turner, 2014; Turner and Schoenberger, 2012) and adjusting accordingly, traders engage in a continual negotiation of urban space. Subaltern surveillance, therefore, must be understood as a grounded and dynamic form of resistance – one that challenges dominant surveillance logics not through overt confrontation, but through everyday acts of spatial intelligence. In this sense, the political agency of informality lies in its capacity to unsettle the state's temporal and spatial claims, offering a counter-logic to exclusionary urban governance and making visible the nuanced ways in which street traders assert rights to the city from below (Bandauko and Arku, 2025b; Bork-Hüffer et al., 2016; Eidse and Turner, 2014; Fattah and Walters, 2023).

Street traders also engage in a constant state of alertness, cultivating an acute awareness of their surroundings to anticipate and respond to municipal enforcement. As one street trader explained, ‘Remaining in one place for too long is not an option; we are always on the move, constantly aware of our surroundings. The council vehicle can appear at any moment, and we must be ready to act’ (Florence, interview, Harare CBD, 10 June 2022). This perpetual state of vigilance reflects the tactical mobility central to subaltern survival strategies. Another vendor described how collective intelligence plays a crucial role: ‘You must always watch your back. If I see others running, I know the police have come – I do not wait to confirm, I run too’ (Morgan, interview, Harare CBD, 10 June 2022). This practice echoes what Simone (2008) refers to as ‘people as infrastructure’, where informal actors mobilize knowledge and networks to navigate precarious urban environments (Simone, 2008). Such shared awareness creates an informal warning system, akin to the guerrilla intelligence networks observed in resistance movements, where actors rely on real-time information to anticipate and counteract state surveillance (Scott, 1998). Once municipal patrols withdraw, traders swiftly reclaim their spaces, demonstrating how subaltern surveillance produces fluid zones of political and economic forms of resistance (Bandauko and Arku, 2025c).

Street traders’ spatiotemporal counterintelligence reveals a critical dialectical relationship between formal urban governance apparatus and informality. Although the state's top-down surveillance represents the dominant thesis of urban control, street traders activate their bottom-up and adaptive form of surveillance. This is not a simple game of cat and mouse; it is a dynamic, co-constitutive process where each side's actions inform and shape the other's. The state's efforts to enforce order inadvertently provide the very patterns that inform subaltern surveillance, just as the street traders’ capacity for evasion forces the state to continually refine its methods of control. Therefore, the seemingly chaotic and improvised nature of urban informality is, in fact, a deeply strategic and systematic counter-logic to formal urban governance. This dialectic reveals that urban space is never fully controlled or fully free but is perpetually negotiated and contested. In this sense, urban informality becomes a powerful, agentic force that actively co-produces the city's spatiotemporal rhythms and demonstrates the limits of state power (Dovey and Recio, 2024).

Communicative networks and collective vigilance

Subaltern surveillance operates through collective vigilance and informal communication networks, enabling traders to share real-time intelligence and respond swiftly to enforcement crackdowns. Drawing on strategic positioning, coded signals, and rapid mobilization, traders create an adaptive system that is based on temporary avoidance. This temporary avoidance is a tactic of circumvention, where street traders ‘will pack up and move as soon as they hear or see policemen approaching from afar’ (Tran and Yip, 2020: 264). Such anticipatory movements rely on a deep shared intelligence within informal networks. In this way, subaltern surveillance transforms ordinary sensory cues – such as the sighting of a municipal patrol vehicle – into tactical retreats. As Simone (2008) highlights, urban residents in precarious conditions often rely on intricate social networks to navigate uncertainty, using ‘people as infrastructure’ to sustain their livelihoods. As a result, street traders in Harare establish lookout positions and use non-verbal signals to warn each other of impending danger. Urban governance practitioners acknowledge the sophistication of these tactics. A city official explained how traders ‘station lookouts who whistle when municipal vehicles approach, allowing vendors to pack up and flee before authorities arrive’. This practice of watching the watchers is a core element of subaltern surveillance. An urban development practitioner similarly noted that traders ‘position themselves strategically to identify enforcement officers, using subtle codes to alert others’. While conducting ethnographic observations on how street traders in Harare negotiate access to contested spaces, I realized that their use of coded language and signals is not merely a spontaneous act but a deliberate and strategic practice. These communicative forms function as a covert system of subaltern knowledge – what James C. Scott calls ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott, 1990) – allowing traders to share intelligence about the movements of municipal police, coordinate evasive actions, and sustain their livelihoods under conditions of constant threat and precarity. Moreover, these practices echo, but also significantly extend, Jane Jacobs’ (1961) idea of ‘eyes on the street’, which emphasized the importance of constant, everyday surveillance by ordinary citizens in maintaining neighborhood safety and cohesion (Bartonek, 2023). While Jacobs’ concept was rooted in a normative vision of public order and community self-regulation in relatively stable urban environments, the practices of street traders in Harare reflect a more insurgent and tactical use of mutual visibility and vigilance under conditions of repressive spatial governance. Here, ‘eyes on the street’ are not just about maintaining social harmony but about collective protection, subversion, and survival. In this sense, street traders mobilize visibility not to uphold normative urban order but to navigate and contest it – transforming Jacobs’ passive notion of watchfulness into an active, political form of subaltern surveillance. This practice of ‘Collective Vigilance’ directly challenges state-centric perspectives on surveillance, not through overt confrontation, but through a networked, horizontal form of watching that empowers the marginalized informal actors. In this way, it constitutes subaltern surveillance by turning the gaze back on the state, using the state's own predictable patterns of control against it. This echoes James Scott's concept of ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985) where seemingly mundane or hidden practices become forms of resistance, but here, the resistance is specifically enacted through an affective, shared spatial intelligence.

These forms of communication have become ingrained in their daily routines, serving as essential survival tactics in a tightly regulated urban environment (Crossa, 2009; Steel, 2012). In this sense, street traders invert the gaze of the state; they transform themselves from mere subjects of surveillance into active observers and interpreters of power. This counter-gaze is a form of tactical resistance – rooted in experience and necessity – that enables continued appropriation of contested urban spaces while subverting the intention of enforcement to discipline or displace. These practices are not unique to Harare; they have also been reported in other Global South cities, where strict surveillance mechanisms have been instituted to regulate public space. For instance, despite the use of electronic monitoring systems and patrol techniques by the Urban Management Composite Law Enforcement Bureau (UM or chengguan), street vendors Guangzhou (China), ‘watch the streets and inform others about the UM activities by using walkie-talkies or cell phones…’ (Huang et al., 2014: 179). Similarly, in Mexico City, a street traders’ association pays some of its members to ‘watch for the police, and to warn other vendors of police activities through the use of walkie-talkies’ (Crossa, 2009: 56). These observations underscore how traders embed surveillance into their daily routines, transforming urban space into a contested terrain of visibility and evasion. In this context, street traders engage in watching the watchers, where the observers themselves come under the gaze of observation (Welch, 2011). By continuously monitoring and responding to shifts in enforcement, traders engage in a form of insurgent urbanism (Holston, 2009), subverting state control through everyday acts of resistance.

Strategic embedding within municipal enforcement structures

Another critical dimension of subaltern surveillance involves street traders strategically embedding themselves into municipal surveillance and enforcement structures. Street traders do not merely react to enforcement; they actively seek insider knowledge by cultivating relationships with municipal enforcement agents, informants within or even low-ranking police officers who provide early warnings about impending crackdowns (Kamete, 2010, 2012). This strategic embedding within state structures mirrors what Bayat (2013) describes as ‘quiet encroachment’, where marginalized groups subtly penetrate formal systems to carve out space for their survival (Bayat, 2013). In this case, street traders, considered, ‘illegitimate individuals use legitimate individuals (municipal officials) to infiltrate spaces or systems’ (Marks, 2013: 227). When street traders infiltrate what Kamete (2012) metaphorically calls the ‘enemy's camp’, they are, in effect, shadowing the state – closely observing its modus operandi to develop adaptive counterstrategies for navigating top-down surveillance. Such infiltration blurs the boundaries between formal authority and informal practices, enabling street traders to both anticipate and influence state actions. It also challenges binary notions of domination and resistance by showing how marginalized actors can exercise agency from within systems designed to regulate or exclude them. One street trader in Harare explained:

When enforcement intensifies, we build informal networks with trusted municipal officers by giving them something, like $5, for reliable information on upcoming operations. You cannot survive out here without good intelligence. We do not just wait to be caught off guard – those small tokens are more like investments in our security. With that information, we know which days or times to stay away, or when to hide our goods quickly. Sometimes, they tell us which streets to avoid, or if there is a new officer on duty who is stricter. It is not always guaranteed, but it gives us an edge. We are constantly navigating uncertainty, so we must build relationships, read the mood, and act fast. It's a kind of system, informal but effective, and it's what helps us stay one step ahead. This keeps us prepared and alert…. (Interview with Simeon, 6 June 2022)

The sentiments from Simeon demonstrate that street traders’ strategic embeddedness is both a survival strategy and a political act, enabling them to watch the internal workings of the state from within and to predict the timing and spatial logics of enforcement operations. These traders become attuned to the institutional rhythms of the city – gathering intelligence on when raids are likely to happen, which areas are being targeted, and which officers are on duty. They then adapt their practices accordingly: moving their goods, altering their operating hours, or temporarily vacating enforcement hotspots. In some cases, street traders also use this privileged information to alert others in their networks, extending the protective reach of their surveillance beyond individual benefit. This form of embedded and anticipatory practice reflects a sophisticated understanding of urban governance and enforcement as uneven, negotiable, and relational – where power is not only resisted from below, but also studied, internalized, and tactically leveraged by those who are meant to be governed. Street traders often describe this practice as a form of ‘hacking the system’ – an adaptive tactic that enables them to gain advanced intelligence on planned municipal crackdowns, enforcement routines, and policy shifts that could disrupt their livelihoods (Huang et al., 2014). This ‘embedded surveillance’ demonstrates how subaltern actors do not simply evade surveillance but actively manipulate it, turning the tools of enforcement into mechanisms of resistance. As Scott (1990) argues, everyday forms of resistance often operate beneath the surface of visible confrontation, where the subaltern repurposes dominant systems to serve their own ends. Through this strategic infiltration, traders disrupt the hierarchy of surveillance, transforming the urban space into a site of contested governance where power is fluid rather than absolute. These strategic maneuvers make subaltern surveillance an act of political agency, where street traders lay claims to urban space even when they are fiercely targeted by spatialized repression (Kamete, 2012).

Subaltern surveillance as political agency

Cities are often sites of tension between state control and the informal, where marginalized actors navigate complex systems of power (Smith, 2020; Tran and Yip, 2020). Given the contested nature of urban space, surveillance is part of everyday life in cities. Some experience it as ‘violent’, a form of social exclusion, while others have found ways of navigating surveillance practices and processes. One of the strategies employed by informal actors, such as street traders, in these settings is subaltern surveillance. This form of surveillance goes beyond mere evasion; it constitutes a form of political agency through which marginalized groups assert their rights to the city. By engaging in surveillance from below, street traders challenge repressive domination, (re)claim space, and unsettle the very logics of urban governance and spatial control that are designed to punish them. In this section, I will explore these dynamics in detail, addressing subaltern surveillance as an assertion of the right to the city, its role in challenging state authority, and the dialectical relationship between control and resistance in urban governance. In doing so, I open avenues for theoretical and conceptual discussions on how the urban poor mobilize their political agency through subaltern surveillance to subvert the very structures of domination that are meant to undermine their livelihoods. As street traders deploy subaltern surveillance, they can be characterized as subversive rather than passive, disenfranchised yet far from powerless. Through their everyday acts of watching, predicting and adapting, street traders become active agents in subverting exclusionary logics of urban governance and defending their right to the city.

Beyond evasion: Subaltern surveillance as an assertion of the right to the city

From the foregoing, subaltern surveillance is not merely a technique of evading detection or punishment; it is a form of political resistance and an assertion of belonging in urban spaces. Street traders operate in public spaces that are typically under the surveillance of the state and municipal enforcement agents. However, these actors do not passively accept the constraints of this surveillance. Instead, they engage in surveillance of their own, observing and interpreting the movements and actions of enforcement agents. In doing so, they reclaim a sense of control over their space and, more crucially, assert their right to the city (Arefin and Rashid, 2021; Blokland et al., 2015; Harvey, 2008; Mitchell and Heynen, 2009; Purcell, 2002). The concept of subaltern surveillance offers a powerful conceptual entry point for linking the insights of Asef Bayat, Jane Jacobs, and Henri Lefebvre on urban informality, everyday resistance and mundane politics, and the production of space. Bayat (1997) foregrounds the notion of the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’, where marginalized urban populations engage in incremental, often non-confrontational acts to claim appropriate urban space and support their livelihoods. Subaltern surveillance aligns with this by highlighting how street traders observe, learn, and tactically respond to shifting urban power dynamics – an act of watching that enables quiet encroachment to be both possible and strategic. Similarly, Jacobs’ (1961) emphasis on the ‘eyes on the street’ as a form of grassroots social order is inverted in contexts of marginality: rather than community surveillance serving to uphold middle-class civility, subaltern surveillance becomes a survival mechanism through which informal traders monitor state agents and everyday rhythms of control. Finally, the notion of the right to the city – a call to reclaim urban space through lived experience and spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991) – resonates with subaltern surveillance as it reflects a tactical assertion of spatial belonging. In this light, subaltern surveillance is not merely reactive but generative: it is a mode of appropriating and contesting the city that is deeply political, rooted in embodied knowledge, and central to how marginalized groups negotiate precarity and assert their right to urban space. In this way, subaltern surveillance becomes a direct counter to the exclusionary logics of urban governance and politics of the city. Moreover, this form of surveillance serves as a tool for survival in hostile environments. The ability to ‘read’ the rhythms of authority – such as when police patrol or what areas are more likely to experience raids – gives these actors a tactical advantage.

The practice of subaltern surveillance resembles the dynamics of guerrilla warfare in several ways. Just as guerrilla fighters rely on intelligence gathering, stealth, and an intimate knowledge of terrain to outmaneuver more powerful state forces, street traders strategically monitor the movements, routines, and behaviors of enforcement agents to anticipate crackdowns and evade punitive measures. Guerrilla tactics often involve blending into the local environment, using decentralized and adaptive strategies to resist domination, and leveraging informal networks to gather critical information. Similarly, street traders operate within an intricate web of social connections and observational strategies that allow them to detect impending threats, warn fellow traders, and respond swiftly to shifting enforcement patterns. Furthermore, both guerrilla warfare and subaltern surveillance disrupt the rigid hierarchies of power through tactical improvisation and real-time adaptation. Whereas state authorities attempt to impose order through formal mechanisms of surveillance and control, informal actors such as street traders engage in counter-surveillance, turning the gaze back on those who police them. This subversive use of surveillance functions as a survival strategy that enables traders to carve out spaces of autonomy in an otherwise hostile urban environment. Through their ability to read and manipulate the rhythms of the city, traders engage in a form of insurgent urbanism (Canedo and Andrade, 2024; Hou, 2010), resisting exclusionary policies not through direct confrontation but through everyday acts of evasion, adaptation, and resilience. Therefore, subaltern surveillance demonstrates that street traders are not passive victims of repressive spatial governance but active agents that can push back against exclusionary practices.

The dialectic of control and resistance: How surveillance from below unsettles urban governance logics

The relationship between subaltern surveillance and state authority is inherently dialectical, characterized by a continuous process of control and resistance. This dialectical relationship shows that power is not merely a possession of the dominant group (through their top-down, hegemonic surveillance and control) but a complex force that is both exerted by those in power and contested by those in subordinate positions (Davies, 2014; Tran and Yip, 2020). State surveillance and urban governance systems are designed to impose order, regulate behavior, and maintain control over space (Browne, 2015; Ceyhan, 2012; Kamete, 2013; Keller, 2012; Malhotra, 2022). However, subaltern surveillance complicates these efforts by introducing new forms of resistance that disrupt the logics of urban governance. By developing a sophisticated spatial and temporal literacy of the city, street traders engage in a continuous process of spatial recalibration that actively reconfigures the power dynamic. This dialectic is not a simple binary; rather, it is a fluid, co-constitutive process where the state's control mechanisms inadvertently create the conditions for subaltern resistance, and the resistance, in turn, forces the state to adapt its methods.

Within the context of urban informality, this dialectic becomes especially pronounced: urban governance in cities with large informal economies is frequently organized around exclusionary logics that seek to sanitize and order public space (Bandauko and Arku, 2024; Finn, 2018). However, through their practices of watching, predicting, and adapting, street traders resist these spatial prescriptions and insert themselves into urban life on their own terms. Thus, street traders, through their surveillance practices, unsettle these logics by demonstrating that formal rules and regulations do not solely govern urban spaces. Instead, the production and appropriation of urban space is shaped by entanglements and negotiations between state and informal actors, each contesting the other's claims to control. As Foucault (1982) argues, where there is power – such as in the form of state-centric surveillance – there is also resistance. While acknowledging the dialectics of domination and resistance in contested public space, Kemple and Huey (2005) demonstrate that surveillance is not a one-way exercise of power; rather, the ‘observers themselves come under the gaze of observation’ (Welch, 2011: 304). Street traders deploy subaltern surveillance to empower themselves against institutionalized forms of spatial control, and in the process, blurring the binary between the observer and the observed. In this way, surveillance can be interpreted as an interactive dance (Di Domenico and Ball, 2011) – a dynamic and iterative relationship between dominant and subordinate actors. However, this dance does not imply equality between its participants; rather, it underscores the constant negotiation of power in contested urban spaces.

Subaltern surveillance (watching from below), therefore, challenges the idea that urban governance can be easily reduced to hegemonic surveillance (watching from above) (Ross, 2020). When street traders engage in subaltern surveillance, they introduce an element of unpredictability and resistance that disrupts the state's attempts to monitor and control urban space. The very act of surveillance from below unsettles the assumptions of governance by revealing the limits of state authority and the resilience of informal actors (Hughes, 2020; Johansson and Vinthagen, 2016; Kamete, 2010). This dynamic is particularly evident in the ways that street traders use subaltern surveillance to disrupt the operations of urban authorities. For example, when street traders monitor the activities of police or enforcement agents through ‘embedded surveillance’, strategic infiltration, they can anticipate actions such as raids or attempts to remove them from certain areas. By staying one step ahead, they challenge the notion of urban governance as a smooth, uncontested process. In this way, subaltern surveillance acts as a form of counter-conduct (Foucault, 1982; Jongh, 2022), a tactic that resists and subverts the formal systems of control.

Yet, while subaltern surveillance enables street traders to undermine state-led surveillance and assert a degree of agency, it operates within structural constraints that limit its effectiveness and transformative potential. The ability to watch and adapt does not dissolve the deep-rooted asymmetries embedded in the urban governance regimes that continue to marginalize informal actors like street traders. Therefore, it is important not to romanticize these practices. Instead, they should be understood as everyday practices of survival – tactical maneuvers that reflect both creativity and constraint, and resilience and vulnerability. Subaltern surveillance, then, reveals the partial and precarious ways in which marginalized groups navigate urban governance regimes that are often hostile to their presence.

Future research directions

While this research provides critical insights into subaltern surveillance, there is significant scope for comparative work that examines how these practices vary across different cities and regions. Future research could explore the transnational dimensions of subaltern surveillance, investigating how informal actors in diverse urban settings develop, share, and adapt surveillance techniques in response to heterogeneous enforcement regimes. For instance, one promising avenue for comparative analysis is examining how subaltern surveillance operates in cities with different political economies of informality. For example, how do informal actors in highly securitized cities such as Lagos, Johannesburg, or Nairobi deploy surveillance techniques compared to those in cities with more permissive informal economies such as Bangkok or Jakarta? A comparative study could illuminate how variations in urban governance structures, legal frameworks, and socio-political contexts shape the surveillance strategies of street traders.

Another important direction for future research is to investigate the gendered dimensions of subaltern surveillance, as informal economies are often highly gendered (Bandauko et al., 2024; Saxena, 2024). Therefore, understanding how gender intersects with surveillance practices could provide deeper insights into the ways in which women navigate urban governance, resist enforcement, and exercise agency in the informal economy. Are there gender-specific strategies of subaltern surveillance? How do gendered power dynamics influence the visibility and invisibility of informal actors? These questions could enrich both feminist geography and surveillance studies by highlighting the intersectional nature of urban informality. Finally, future research should explore the long-term implications of subaltern surveillance on urban governance and policy. As informal actors continuously adapt and refine their surveillance practices, how do urban authorities respond over time? Does the increased sophistication of subaltern surveillance lead to more militarized enforcement, or does it open avenues for more collaborative governance? Investigating these long-term trajectories would offer critical insights into the evolving relationship between informal actors and urban authorities, with implications for broader debates on urban justice, governance, and the right to the city. Another potential avenue for future research is to analyse emerging strands of subaltern surveillance scholarship across regions and groups. By tracing these practices across multiple contexts, scholars can uncover how surveillance both constrains and enables informal politics, highlighting creative strategies of resilience, solidarity, and claims-making that often remain invisible in urban studies literature. Such an agenda would expand the conceptual toolkit for analyzing urban informality and foreground the agency of those who inhabit surveilled spaces while crafting alternative political futures.

Informality has always been more than a descriptive category of urban life; it is deeply political, both in how it is produced by state practices and in how it is experienced and reworked by subaltern actors such as street traders. Revisiting the political dimensions of informality reminds us that it is not only a matter of economic survival or spatial marginality but also a terrain of power, negotiation, and contestation. As practices such as subaltern surveillance reveal, informality entails the constant reconfiguration of visibility, authority, and legitimacy between governing institutions and those who live at the urban margins. By paying closer attention to these political dynamics, urban scholarship can open new possibilities for theorizing informality, not merely as a regulatory gap or socio-economic condition, but as a generative site for rethinking urban politics and everyday forms of governance.

Conclusion

This study advances the theoretical discourse on surveillance studies, urban informality, and everyday resistance by foregrounding the agency of street traders in shaping urban governance through subaltern surveillance. Traditional surveillance studies have largely focused on state-led surveillance mechanisms, emphasizing top-down control, datafication, and biopolitical regulation. However, in this paper, I challenge and disrupt this dominant narrative by shifting the analytical focus to how marginalized groups, particularly street traders, engage in counter-surveillance practices to negotiate access to contested spaces and claim their right to the city. Subaltern surveillance has three dimensions: communicative networks and collective vigilance, spatio-temporal awareness and tactical avoidance and strategic embedding within municipal structures. Together, these three dimensions reveal how subaltern surveillance is not only a survival mechanism but a subtle form of political engagement – challenging the monopoly of state surveillance and reconfiguring power relations in the city from below. I also demonstrate that rather than being merely surveilled, street traders actively perform watching by observing the movements, behaviors, and routines of municipal enforcement agents. Through this constant vigilance, they generate localized, situated knowledge that enables them to predict enforcement patterns – such as the timing of raids, the routes officials typically take, or the signs of imminent crackdowns.

These predictive capacities are not incidental; they are cultivated over time through lived experience and information-sharing within tight-knit social networks. Traders then adapt by modifying their routines – shifting vending spots, using warning codes or temporarily hiding goods – to evade penalties and maintain livelihoods under conditions of hostility. These three interlinked practices illustrate a dialectic of control and resistance: while the state seeks to discipline and regulate informal activity through surveillance and spatial exclusion, street traders respond with a repertoire of everyday tactics that subvert, negotiate, and reconfigure the reach of urban authority. In doing so, they not only resist domination but also reassert agency in shaping the political life of the city through these ordinary practices. Therefore, this subaltern surveillance is not merely reactive but is a strategic mode of governance and an act of political agency that unsettles urban governance logics. Through subaltern surveillance, street traders reclaim space, navigate between visibility and invisibility, and engage in a dialectical process of control and resistance. By asserting their right to appropriate urban space and surveilling those who surveil them, they push back against exclusionary urban governance practices. As such, subaltern surveillance represents a form of urban politics that is deeply embedded in the everyday struggles of marginalized actors, offering a window into the ways in which informal actors can shape the city and assert their agency in the face of intensified state surveillance and control.