“We Are Good at Surviving”: Street Hustling in Addis Ababa's Inner City

Recent studies of the informal economy have tried to understand how the politics of informal actors and their attempts at organizing themselves have created new collective platforms for social practice and social action in the African city (Lindell Africa's informal workers. Collective agency, alliances and transnational organizing in urban Africa (pp. 1–33) 2010; Meagher African Studies Review 54(2):47–72, 2011). These studies have suggested that the informal is not only the domain of the poor and their form of solidarity but also a terrain where new powerful actors in and outside the city might emerge and where power dynamics and forms of differentiation are at work. With a similar theoretical concern, this paper focuses on how engagement with the “street economy” among men between their mid-20s and mid-30s in Addis Ababa's inner city reveals broader experiences of exclusion and marginalization.