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For decades, excessive and costly regulations have provided strong incentives for people to work outside Peru’s formal economy. In the case of street vending, repeated efforts to govern street traders’ use of public space have produced a body of policy that is incoherent and ultimately unenforceable. This paper identifies two sources of such policy incoherence: (1) a lack of definitional clarity in national and metropolitan level policy; and (2) contradictory legal provisions concerning municipalities’ right to charge fees for street traders’ use of public space. It is shown how municipal policy oscillates dramatically over time as local governments experiment with different ways to implement the contradictory policies created by national and metropolitan laws. The constant improvisation at the municipal level precludes stable and effective governance of street trade.

This chapter examines the contrast between street vending and city regulatory responses in Vancouver, Canada during two time periods—the 1970s and the 2010s. The comparison of “hippy” vending in the 1970s and “hip” food carts and trucks four decades later illustrates the contradictory impulses that shape regulation of commercial activity on city streets. First, there is a process of “formalization” that seeks to tame the informality and messiness of street vending through new rules, standards and regulations. But by the 2010s, a second, contradictory, impulse appears: an embrace of informality reflecting new ideas about “vital” city streets and identifying street vending, in the form of food trucks and carts, as “hip.” But the apparent embrace of the informal has unfolded through highly formalized procedures, and the vitality associated with vending in Vancouver is acceptable precisely because it has been (re)introduced in a highly formalized, regulated form.

During 2010s, in response to new food truck operators, the city of New Orleans loosened regulations for food truck vending. At the same time the city turned its regulatory eye towards other forms of street vending and introduced a new second line vending ordinance. Using the New Orleans case, we argue that relaxing rather than revising regulations—and subsequently planning for ways to make street vending compatible with other activities—would be more effective and just. The authors participated in and observed 32 second line parades (parades organized and sponsored by African-American historic benevolent societies) during one season to understand how second line vending played out and the potential impacts of the new ordinance. This analysis demonstrates that compliance with the second line ordinance would have restricted vending without resolving identified concerns. New Orleans is an instructive case because the intent was to allow rather than eliminate vending. We argue that increasing compatibility between vending and other street activities makes food and goods available in the spaces were urban residents can most easily access them, and thereby establishes a more effective and just public space.

This chapter focuses on the most controversial issue about sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and in many cities around the globe: street vending. Legal scholars agree that property rights theory should provide insight but that its application to public spaces is under-developed. The chapter posits that the role and rules of public space are currently being actively contested and re-written given rapid immigration and the developmental objectives to become a “world class city.” This chapter reviews the policies and campaigns by the Vietnamese government to regulate the sidewalk. It also analyses public opinion and debates circulating in current media and social narratives as well as interviews with local police and 270 street vendors. It outlines and critically reviews the battling narratives and counter-narratives about sidewalk clearance and the legitimacy of street vendors to use public space. The chapter emphasizes the importance of street-level state actors who are embedded in local society and their negotiation with neighborhood members in constructing the actual practice of rights to public space. This chapter raises the need to ground general and a-physical scholarly conceptions of “rights to the city” in order to realize real property rights to public property.

Chapter 2 situates the study historically in the context of U.S. and Mexican migration and traces the formation of the street vending economy in urban centers in México and in U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and New York. The chapter demonstrates that street vending across the border is linked to macro structural forces and is not solely derivative of Latinx cultural practices. The chapter also highlights the historical precedent of street vending in the United States, as opposed to portraying the work as a direct cultural transplant from Latin America. The Latinx street vendors in Los Angeles immigrated to a society where street vending had been an economic strategy since the early nineteenth century. The chapter notes that as a result of both political turmoil and the rise of a foodie culture based on “authenticity,” attitudes toward street vendors are becoming more sympathetic and respectful, leading to the decriminalization of street vending across the state of California.

This chapter first discusses the confusion about what disorder is and the paucity of careful thinking about how manifestations of disorder interact with one another. It highlights how this confusion hinders systematic analysis of the myriad policies seeking to address the many different manifestations of disorder in our cities. It explores the connections between commercial activity, crime, and disorder in two contexts. The first is the long-standing debate over the regulation of street vending in New York City. The second is the asserted connection between mixed-use urban neighborhoods and crime and disorder. Analyzing the possibility of a commerce-disorder nexus in these specific contexts helps overcome some of the definitional confusion that plagues the order-maintenance literature.

This chapter examines grassroots organizing around street vending in New York City since 2003, with particular emphasis on the debates surrounding vending in the city and the ways in which the issue has been framed by both activists and government officials. It begins with a discussion of the claims of street vendors within the context of neoliberal forms of urban governance and their contestation, asking how they work within and contest neoliberal forms of governance. It then considers two main issues faced by street vendors in New York City, one related to enforcement of street-vending rules and regulations, the other related to licensing and permits. It takes a look at one organization, Esperanza del Barrio, to find out how it uses ideas of respect, dignity, and rights to frame its advocacy of street vendors. The chapter shows that grassroots activists and their supporters have framed the demands of street vendors by appealing to ideas of free enterprise and individualism.

This chapter investigates street vending in Garment Town, a Latino immigrant–receiving neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. More specifically, it examines how street-vending spaces are organized, supported, and created through the daily practices of Mexican and Central American immigrant women vendors. The chapter first provides an overview of the economic context of immigrant vending practices in Los Angeles before discussing how the informal economy is organized at the street level in developed economies and how street-vending landscapes as not only racialized but also gendered. It shows that Latina immigrants as vendors exercise choice and agency among patriarchal structures that reify gendered roles/responsibilities in the streets. Latina street vendors perform, transform, and reorganize public space in ways that facilitate their business strategies and assist them in negotiating the demands of everyday life. Such actions include transforming street corners into drive-throughs, adapting car trunks to serve as markets, and providing child care on the streets.

This chapter discusses the rights of low-income persons, including those who “look poor” or homeless, to travel, to become members of a community, and to use public spaces, such as streets, parks, libraries, and post offices. Many localities have adopted “quality of life” regulations that restrict and even criminalize acts that are innocent when done in the privacy of one’s home, such as sleeping or eating, but become illegal when done in public. The chapter sets out the constitutional right to travel from state to state and within a state, and describes the practical and legal barriers that exist to the actualization of that right, such as the absence of public transportation or not having money to buy a car. Attention is given to the constitutional status of residency requirements and how they impact efforts to obtain better housing and schooling. It explores permissible limits on rights to use public spaces, and protections that may be invoked in many typical encounters with the police, such as demands for identification cards or the seizure of possessions temporarily left in a park. Practical advice is given about library services and mail delivery, as well as how to get licenses for commercial activities that make use of public spaces, including street vending.

This chapter examines gendered expectations resulting not only from the intersecting relations of race and class but also from the age as well as the inequality of nations that gives rise to particular patterns of international labor migration. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic observations and twenty in-depth interviews with Latina/o adolescent street vendors (sixteen girls and four boys) in Los Angeles, the chapter investigates how Latina girls negotiate a triple shift: street vending, household work, and schoolwork. It also explores the continuities between gendered household divisions of labor and street vending, whether the girls see “third-shift” work obligations as a burden or as a source of empowerment, and how the work that girls do as street vendors both perpetuates and challenges gendered expectations.

This chapter presents the core quest of the book: creating a new kind of map that will unveil rather than obscure sidewalk life. The motivation for mapping was to create an alternative set of facts that could help inform the controversies over street vending and the ideal sidewalk. It explains the spatial ethnography fieldwork methods developed that integrate detailed field surveys of space use, hundreds of interviews, the coding of data into GIS, and different sources of visual representation such as photography and difficult to obtain historical, state planning, and private developer maps. The chapter then presents a critical cartography primer that visually discusses through a progression of original maps how cartographic choices and logics veil and unveil phenomenon and knowledge. Seeking alternatives to Euclidean conventions, the maps show phenomena such as sidewalks as social constructs, as space that evolves over the hours of the day and years, the enforcement of micro-properties, and the experiential qualities of HCMC’s sidewalk life. The chapter concludes with the proposition of a mixed-use sidewalk: sidewalk space can be transacted between multiple types of users over the course of the day, expanding the possibilities of public space.

Regulating food trucks and street vendors is a policy issue facing many cities across the U.S. This paper compares the street vending regulations in Chicago, IL and Durham, NC, cities which have pursued opposing approaches. Chicago, IL maintains a strict policy, while Durham has a liberal policy towards the sale of street foods. Despite the regulatory variation, similar inequities among groups of street vendors exist. Namely, both cities have a set of gourmet food trucks that operate in the central business district and gentrifying neighbourhoods, and a set of immigrant vendors that are excluded from these spaces. Regulation, therefore, cannot be credited with reducing inequities in the bifurcated labour practices of the street vending industry. Rather, variation in regulation is found to have minimal influence on the practices of street vendors across the two cities. Therefore, changing regulations from restrictive to liberal is an imperfect solution, contrary to the findings of much of the literature. Instead, structural inequities between vendors should be addressed.

This chapter provides the readers with a clear sense of what is physically involved in this line of work for children and parents. The chapter describes what children do on a typical day, what kinds of jobs children do, how old they are when they start working, and how these different tasks are initiated. The chapter identifies three different work patterns for working children: (1) vacation work, (2) weekends only, and (3) school nights and weekends. Some children of street vendors also opt out of street vending altogether. In this chapter, we see the fluidity of their intersectional childhood, as they are nurtured by their parents and also nurture their parents. Children's voices and desires for material goods, combined with the structural circumstances that push the families to street vend, inform the ongoing sociological debate about structure and agency through the children's perspective.

Our applied research/practice team of two attorneys and a social scientist produced this case study of an immigrant woman, who learned to be an entrepreneur. Our central narrative describes how New York City government’s response to mobile food vending prioritized powerful special interests at the expense of expanding economic opportunities in the service of the greater public good. This central narrative develops through our detailed description of an immigrant woman’s circuitous path to business and back to wage labor.

This chapter challenges segmented assimilation theory by looking at parent–child work relations. Unlike the parents in this study, all of the children I interviewed speak English and are familiar with American culture and technology, and the majority of the children are also U.S. citizens. These are resources unique to the children and I call these American generational resources (AGRs). I argue that children in street vending families share power in the household because they contribute to their family's income, and they are involved in business negotiations and decision-making processes. These children and youth speak English and enjoy legal status while most of their parents remain undocumented and are Spanish monolinguals. Segmented assimilation theory contends that this power imbalance in favor of the children could result in dissonant acculturation. Contrary to what segmented assimilation theory would predict, parents’ authority over their children is not diminished as a result of children's faster acculturation. Rather, parents who work with their children have more control over their children because they spend more time with them. In addition, children's AGRs are valued resources by their parents and are frequently useful for the family street vending business.

This chapter explores the everyday negotiations required for ethnic minority street vendors working in Sapa, a tourist town in upland northern Vietnam, to eke out a livelihood in an especially prescribed environment. These individuals, mostly women, face a local political environment where access and institutional requirements shift on a near-daily basis due to the impulses of state officials, and where ethnicity is key to determining who gets to vend, where, and how. A focus on the micro-geographies and everyday politics of itinerant trade in this rapidly growing tourist site reveals specific relationships and negotiations regarding resource access, ethnicity, state authority, and livelihood strategies.

Chapter 6 turns a familiar story of gendered labor on its head. The chapter adds greater complexity to our notions of male-centered spaces. In this context, women challenge gendered expectations and find the street to be a space of empowerment. The freedom of male privilege leaves men/boys more vulnerable to street violence while vending on the streets of Los Angeles. The presence of women of all ages serves to protect men from violence from other men. As a consequence, families develop gendered strategies to protect sons, which differ from the strategies to protect daughters. The findings challenge the belief that the street is more dangerous for females and more appropriate for males.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s history shows us how sidewalk practices have regularly not followed the plan and are not dictated by the built environment. Present-day HCMC started as two distinctly separate towns 300 years ago: Saigon, the headquarters of the French colony Indochine, and Cholon, the larger and thriving Chinese diaspora trading port town. The city has gone through a remarkable succession of political and economic regime changes, particularly in the last 70 years: colonial, post-colonial nationalist, communist, and market transition. Historic photographs and accounts reveal that sidewalk space has always been a recreational and street vending space and not solely a transportation corridor despite the urban planning regulations of various regimes. Its urban history also shows that HCMC has been a city of immigrants from its inception, an unspoken narrative. Furthermore, the fact that both the Haussman-esque boulevards in Saigon and the narrow feng-shui sidewalk designs of Cholon host a vibrant sidewalk life counters behavioural determinism and colonial theory which presume physical space has strong power to control populations.