Roadside Commercial Activities and Environmental Perception Affecting Behaviour: Study from Global South

Abstract

In global south countries such as India, transport nodes wiring neighbourhoods to rest of the city, is found to be flooded with roadside unorganized commercial developments. Transport nodes experience both organized and unorganized commercial developments around them as the commuters want to buy commodities for their daily households, feeding the commercial developments as buyers. This necessity promotes the development of unorganised sellers, especially street vendors, offering low-cost goods to commuters but forming encroachments around the transport nodes. Several failed attempts have been made by civic authorities to remove these encroachments. The presence of street vendors in a place is desired by the organized seller and buyer of the place as all of them get benefitted by each other. They form a self-sufficient, holistic and stable system of commercial development. Eventually the place emerges as an important transport node with commercial development, leading to Transit Oriented Developments. In countries of global south, this tendency has become very common and this unorganized commerce forms a major part of these countries’ economy. This particular research aims at a holistic and methodological approach to analyse such complex functions of urban area which is rooted to socio-economic, and often cultural conditions of the developing countries.