The Peddlers and the World Cup: Mega events’ unequal impacts on informal markets

• In Event: Informal Markets in Latin America: Hierarchies, Legalities, and State-Society Relations

Abstract

Mega events disrupt and reorganize the lives of millions of people every year. While planning committees assert that these events bring large tangible and intangible benefits to host cities, few studies assess those claims. Even fewer assess how the event distributes benefits or losses among local actors. Under what conditions do informal market actors benefit from mega events? This paper analyzes original survey, interview and ethnographic data on street vendors in São Paulo, Brazil during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. We find that most vendors lost money and many went into debt, while a minority of vendors made record profits, worked less, and generally benefited from the event. We use field theory to explain these findings, and argue that winners were high up in preexisting hierarchies within informal markets. We demonstrate that, contrary to assumptions in policy and academia, informal actors are very heterogeneous. Extrapolating from this case, we conclude that mega event and informal market policies must actively counter these hierarchies in order to benefit most citizens.

Authors

• Jacinto Cuvi, University of Texas at Austin

• Calla Hummel, University of Texas at Austin