Laws governing street vending in New York City are confusing, convoluted, at times contradictory and difficult to enforce with any sort of consistency. In this context of uncertainty and illegibility, the practice of street vending in New York and particularly in central areas of Manhattan, is managed in decentralized, privatized and informal ways. The result is a variegated landscape of street vending that is less a function of the rights that the city grants to vendors or the restrictions the city puts on them and more a reflection of the power, influence, resources and resolve of property owners and business improvement districts to exert control over vending and manage public space using techniques of surveillance, intimidation and physical interventions in the streetscape. This article describes how this landscape is produced and lived, while demonstrating the ways in which uncertainty, legal ambiguity and informal practice are intrinsic to the current regime of spatial management in New York.

Long a subject of study in the global South, the topic of citizen-driven, bottom-up, non-professionally produced urbanism has received increasing attention in professional and academic planning circles of the global North. This newfound focus on informal urbanism in the North is a welcome development, but, taken as a whole, Northern literature concerning informality is characterized by conceptual imprecision and an indeterminate analysis of the politics of informal actions and actors. As such, it fails to provide meaningful guidance to planners concerned with urban poverty, social justice, equity, and inclusion. This article attempts to resolve some of these problems by focusing on one key area of conceptual slippage in the literature: the failure to differentiate between informality born of desire and that born of need. This results in a flattened analysis of the political ramifications of informal actions and the political subjectivity of informal actors. In this article, I review the existing literature in order to point out some of these shortcomings. I then suggest that planners in the North have much to learn about informal urbanism from their counterparts working in and on Southern cities. I attempt to reconcile these two bodies of literature, arguing that Southern theory can help Northern planners develop a more nuanced, politically sophisticated approach to informal urbanism.

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