Uncertainty and the Governance of Street Vending: A Critical Comparison Across the North/South Divide

Abstract

Through a critical comparison of the spatial management of street vending in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay and New York City, USA, we show how uncertainty enables the management of vending and urban space. By uncertainty, we mean a condition characterized by legal complexity and negotiable enforcement of laws and regulations. Putting New York and Ciudad del Este in dialogue, we demonstrate that these negotiated legalities are not limited to Southern urbanisms, nor are they remnants of unmodern social forms. We find similarities in how vendors experience and negotiate uncertainty, even as divergent mechanisms link uncertainty and inequality. By claiming streets as sites of work, vendors challenge dominant notions of global urbanism which conceive of sidewalks as sites of circulation, rather than livelihood. Especially in Ciudad del Este, vendors know the biases of law, and ground their claims to livelihood in ethics rather than legal compliance. Yet vendors’ claims can also reinscribe hierarchical relationships with frontline enforcers and reinforce exclusionary notions of rights based in productive citizenship. Understanding how uncertainty works as a logic of governing helps expose these unavoidable tensions and therefore to imagine and construct pathways toward more just urban economies.

Towards a cultural political economy of the illicit

“…At the same time, some activities that are sanctioned by law are de facto permitted in particular places (Tellman et al, 2020). The latter is the case of the informal economy (Behzadi, 2019; Tucker and Devlin, 2019). Illegal activities, such as the trade of counterfeit goods, may be tolerated by governments as a necessary means of survival for poorer social groups.…”

THE INFORMAL CONSTITUTION OF STATE CENTRALITY: Governing Street Businesses in (Post‐)Pandemic Chengdu, China

“…It is tempting to see informality as the ‘other’ of formality, regulation or state apparatus (Acuto et al ., 2019), and to highlight or focus on ‘what people are not doing’ (Hart, 2006) or on various negative deviations from being ‘modern’ (Varley, 2013). Instead of engaging with this one‐dimensional stretching of concepts (see Schmid et al ., 2018), we consider the gradually evolving body of literature that explores informality alternatively and focuses particularly on the relationship between informality and the state (Roy, 2005; 2009; Yiftachel, 2009; Devlin, 2011; Hilbrandt et al ., 2017; Bénit‐Gbaffou, 2018a; 2018b; Boudreau, 2019; Haid and Hilbrandt, 2019; Tucker and Devlin, 2019; Beier, 2021; Jin, 2021). In our line of inquiry, we concur with Roy (2005; 2009) that informality is best seen as an idiom or mode of urbanization where a state of deregulation is constructed that is associated with techniques such as unmapping, unplanning and ungoverning so as to attain certain political‐economic ends.…”

Research on the Evolutionary Game Model and Stable Strategy of Urban Management Law Enforcement

“…Street vending around the world continues to serve as market places with, and more often without, the consent of authorities [24,25]. One mainstream explanation is that the local government tends to view street vendors as inefficient, disorderly, and unsanitary, which are opposed to the desired national image [26].…”