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This chapter establishes the chronology of the street markets’ development, focusing on their growth and spread, and their legal position. The street markets were not entirely outside the law but not nor were they clearly within it, unlike London’s authorised markets (the wholesale markets such as Smithfield and Billingsgate). The chapter covers three phases: the period to 1867, when the markets expanded in the absence of clear legal frameworks; the 1860s when two initiatives (a law that threatened to eliminate street selling, and an attempt to rehouse it off the streets in the monumental Columbia Market) confirmed by their failure the status quo of the street markets’ informality; and the period to 1939 during which informality persisted under the supervision of the Metropolitan Police, and despite the introduction of licensing in 1927.

Chapter 4 tells the history and structure of street vending in two municipalities in the La Paz department of Bolivia and two districts in the São Paulo state in of Brazil. This chapter demonstrates how officials actively intervene in informal markets and workers’ organizations, and suggests how those interventions vary over time, creating highly structured organizations around La Paz and fleeting organizations around São Paulo. The chapter then develops the specific incentive structures that officials and workers face. Chapter 4 grounds the game theoretic model’s assumptions in observations from street markets in La Paz: It shows that unorganized street vendors create negative externalities, that street vendors approach collective action decisions with a cost–benefit analysis, that officials offer private benefits to organized street vendors, especially leaders, and that once organized, street vendors self-regulate and bargain with officials.

Times Square and Picadilly Circus recall the metropolitan grandeur of New York and London. Although San Francisco has no single spectacular landmark by which the world may identify it, the greatest cities have long since welcomed it into their company. Portsmouth Square, the Palace Hotel, and the Ferry Building, which served successively as symbols of civic vanity, no longer resound with much more public clamor than many another plaza, hostelry, or terminal. Only Market Street accents for the casual observer San Francisco's character of a metropolis. Southwestward from the Ferry Building to the Twin Peaks Tunnel, Market Street's wide, unswerving diagonal bisects the city. Jasper O'Farrell's survey, a century ago, laid the foundation for Market Street's development. Long before the forty-niners paved it with planks, the tallow and hides of Peninsula ranchos rolled down its rutted trail in Mexican oxcarts to Yerba Buena Cove.

This chapter analyzes the Spinoza image in the work of Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) in three stages. First, relying primarily on Singer's autobiographical writings, this chapter charts Singer's path from worship to wariness of Spinoza in Warsaw between the wars, the very period that witnessed a broad and ecumenical revival of the Amsterdam philosopher and a veritable explosion of his popularity within Yiddish literature. It then turns to an analysis of the two works in Singer's canon most pivotal to his use of Spinoza, “Der Shpinozist” (“The Spinoza of Market Street”) and Di familye mushkat (The Family Moskat). These two works reflect the range of the Spinoza theme in Singer, from the miniature scale of the short story to the multigenerational novel, and from gentle comedy to harsh post-Holocaust tragedy.

This chapter considers how the exposure of adolescents to street market contexts (e.g., gangs, drug markets) shapes the connection between violence and identity development—thus increasing the likelihood of violent behavior by youth. Prior research has explored the normative aspects of these contexts, particularly a violent “code of the street.” This chapter, however, focuses on the interaction of the street market context as embedded in structural inequality and the adolescent developmental phase of identity formation, concluding that violence comes to represent socially valued personal qualities, which strengthens its connection to positive identity models. Moreover, interventions focusing on the risk factors that contribute to youth involvement in street markets do not sufficiently address the generative dynamic that exists once they are involved—as exemplified by the identity development process. Interventions utilizing a substitution principle are offered as one alternative.

Like the backyard of some imposing but superannuated mansion, the Western Addition is cluttered with the discarded furniture of the city's Gilded Age. It is a curious district whose claim to distinction is its disdain of all pretense. It is not beautiful, and yet San Franciscans refer to it almost affectionately as “The Fillmore,” the name of its busiest thoroughfare, and love it, as Charles Caldwell Dobie says, “for its supreme grotesqueness.” Once it was what its name implies—the “western addition” to the old town. Its eastern boundary is the broad traffic-thronged artery of Van Ness Avenue, “automobile row.” Westward it spreads as far as Lone Mountain's vanishing old graveyards, once far out of town in a sandy brush-grown wilderness. Northward it extends to the heights above The Marina, and southward almost to Market Street.

This chapter describes the street drug market known as ‘The River’ area, where the neighbourhood is an ethnically and socially mixed urban area. It notes that the river Akerselva divides Oslo – the capital of Norway – into its eastern, working-class parts and the more prosperous west. The chapter presents the basic argument that the young men at The River develop a competence that the authors coin ‘street capital’ which is similar to Bourdieu's (1984) ‘cultural capital’; but that this competence, and its associated skills and dispositions, are limited to a violent street culture. It discusses street culture in a Scandinavian welfare state. The chapter also briefly discusses the cannabis trade and economy, which is structured in a different way from the ‘hard’ drug economies. It emphasises that this study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at The River, the most important part of which was qualitative interviews with the drug dealers.

The brighter aspects of hinmin life are examined here, with poor people seen as agents who embraced challenges and sought to enjoy life. At work, many found meaning in what they did, even as they strove to advance and engaged in individual acts of protest. In the political sphere, it is clear that hinmin were heavily involved in the public protests and riots that marked the late-Meiji years—and that they had a significant impact. At home, they read newspapers in surprising numbers, created communities that, over time, began to resemble the village communities from which they had come, and they worked to improve their finances and their lives. Beyond that, the hinmin were celebrators. Their participation in street markets, in holidays, in seasonal celebrations such as blossom-viewing, and in temple festivals is detailed, with an emphasis on the the Asakusa temples and entertainment centers.

History has played fast and loose with that great segment of the city which sprawls southward from Market Street to the San Francisco-San Mateo County line. Athwart historic Rincon Hill, fashionable residential quarter of Gold Rush days, the streamlined approach to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge rises from an area of factories, machine shops, railroad terminals, “skid-road” hotels, and Greek restaurants. Westward from the water front-lined to Hunter's Point with warehouses, stockyards, and shipbuilding plants—the district spreads across Potrero Hill to the heights of Twin Peaks, Buena Vista Park, Mount Olympus, and Mount Davidson. A broad residential district whose most venerable landmark is Mission Dolores, occupying a sheltered coastal plain and adjacent hillsides, “The Mission” is San Francisco's workshop, where most of the city's working-class population live.

This chapter situates transit workers' experience and the great strikes of 1909 and 1910 in broader social currents. The construction of the Market Street Subway nearly bankrupted the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company (PRT), leading the company and city to sign the 1907 contract that gave the city increased power over its transit system. This contract serves as a lens for the chapter's exploration of the debates over the provision of public services by private enterprise. In organizing Philadelphia's transit workers, the Amalgamated countered the transit company's staunch antiunionism with language focused on workers' rights, equality, and fairness. Conflicts in Philadelphia's transit industry showed the violence brewing in Progressive Era labor relations and convinced city leaders that they could not let that conflict loose on the city again.

Zhou Enlai tried but failed to protect Jack, and so in 1969, Jack and Yuan-tsung were evicted from their apartment and forced to live in a corner room at a slum house on Sheep Market Street. Most of their neighbors came from the urban underclass; among them were a retired prostitute, a semireformed thief, a laundress who doubled as a bed playmate to her employer, and an old witch who practiced black magic. They were purveyors of gossip and became new sources of information for Yuan-tsung. A Japanese woman named Noriko, punching bag to her Chinese husband, became Yuan-tsung’s best friend and played a key role in her fight against the Red Guards.