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Context and background: This study argues that government schemes to serve petty traders in Tanzania remain unsustainable mostly due to poor consideration of the impact the socio-economic linkage has on location determinants. Goal and Objectives: This research aimed to understand how the articulation of petty trading operations with larger traders, directly or indirectly, influences location decisions.Methodology: The core of this research was based on a case study approach that involved surveys of petty traders and interviews with large-scale traders at the Mwenge trading center, along with documents review.Results: Petty traders select locations that maximize functioning as an economic enterprise and moderate survival risks. That is, the location of the trade is selected based on social ties, but the petty traders’ success depends on economic links established with larger traders, from whom they get their merchandise, and over which they have very little control. The implications of these findings are: the level of articulation that governs location decisions, drags down the sustainability of government schemes, and gives rise to serious damage to the urban fabric; and two, the analysis of backward linkages combined with other location determinants provides the background against which the petty trading spaces identification, planning and designing could be analyzed.
