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Informal vendors have occupied the streets of Metro Manila's Baclaran district since the 1950s. Their presence has generated policies seeking to manage or banish street hawking. Years of street occupancy, however, have enabled the vendors to enforce grassroots mechanisms to appropriate streetscapes. In this paper, I analyse three routinised practices - the haging occupancy, the Bermonths routine and the various finance-generating schemes - that have enabled vendors to persist amidst the changing socio-political conditions. These practices capture the Baclaran hawkers' insecure access to contested spaces, how they capitalise on a socio-temporal dimension of informality, how they cope with economic distress, and how they enforce a set of property rights arrangements. Understanding these grassroots practices, which are embedded in the precarity of street life, can inform responsive policies on urban informal trading.

Jeepneys are paratransit vehicles which constitute the bulk of urban transport in many cities in the Philippines. There are around 179,000 jeepneys of which 90% are fifteen years or older. However, this is not without so many other issues on the road. To address this, the government issued a landmark policy enabling the Public Utility Vehicle Modernisation Program (PUVMP), a transformational large-scale initiative focused on land-based public transport in which the majority are jeepneys. The program brings about a comprehensive reform covering new policies in the franchising process, vehicle modernization, operator consolidation and changes in the current business model, financing and a more structured route planning process, among others. This is, however, an ambitious undertaking, not merely because of its scale, but the likely disruption to the current, relatively informal model by which jeepneys are regulated. This paper uses deductive thematic analysis, based upon a review of the literature on informal/formal hybridised urban transport regulatory models, to investigate the reform's likely impact on the dynamics of the sector. As such it tentatively confirms the likely issues arising when transitioning from an informal model to a more formalised one. The paper raises imperatives for the global informal transport sector as a whole.