Designing informal mobility: Chandigarh’s rehriwallas in motion

Source abstract

This paper examines how street vendors in Chandigarh deploy everyday design as a political strategy of spatial negotiation. Focusing on the rehri—a mobile handcart, it traces how restrictive bylaws produced non-compliance by design. In response, rehriwallas collaborated with local technicians to retrofit existing carts, developing an electrified rehri that was affordable, locally sourced, and legally legible. These interventions exemplify everyday design—iterative material adaptations produced within the constraints of informal work, where technical decisions are inseparable from questions of formal compliance and affordability. Read against Chandigarh’s modernist legacy, where mobility functioned as a technique of discipline and displacement, the redesigned rehri reclaims mobility as a tactic of presence. Electrification also enabled the cart to be reframed as municipal innovation and adopted as a formal program, culminating in a mayoral launch of an electric rehri fleet. The paper argues that everyday design operates as a material politics of legibility—an ongoing negotiation through which informal workers reconfigure the terms of recognition. By centering retrofit and affordability as forms of technical expertise, the case expands what counts as design beyond professionalized planning and demonstrates how informality is not residual to the city, but a generative mode of city-making.