Street Vending and the Right to the City

Amy Schoenecker is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Hartford.

"Street Vending and the Right to the City is a beautifully crafted comparative ethnography of vendors in Chicago and Mumbai that demonstrates that informality is not a developmental gap but a governing logic of cities across the global South and North. Attending to vendors’ everyday negotiations with fragmented, often violent state institutions, Schoenecker reveals how licensing regimes, bureaucratic gray zones, and spatial bans create the conditions for and simultaneously marginalize informal commerce and the people engaged in this work. The book’s compelling portraits of vendors’ 'politics of presence' demonstrate that street vending is not peripheral to city life, but central to struggles over belonging, citizenship, and the right to shape urban futures."Liza Weinstein, Associate Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University"Schoenecker's work offers readers a glimpse into the imaginarily incomparable, yet uncomfortably similar xenophobic, classist, and in multiple ways, informal urban regimes of Chicago and Mumbai, as viewed through the lens of street vending and vendors. Her accounts of regulatory trajectories and vendors' frustrating interactions with legal and enforcement systems illuminate how informality is operationalized in the governance of these self-branded 'global' cities. She provocatively shifts the conceptual focus from the uses to the users of public space, effectively demonstrating the exclusionary intent of bureaucracies of control and marginalization. The book centers vendors' common agency across global divides, revealing how the right to the city is a perpetual negotiation for otherized (im)migrant entrepreneurs."David Schlifka, AICP, PhD Candidate, Georgia State University

• List of Figures and TablesSeries Editor’s IntroductionAcknowledgmentsList of Acronyms and AbbreviationsIntroduction: The Politics of Street Vending1 Street Vending in Global Context 2 Placing the Cities3 Governing the Informal: The View from City Hall4 On Formalization: Bureaucratic Exclusion and Identity Politics5 Claiming the Right to the City6 On Precarity Conclusion: Street Vending, and the Right to the City––Where Next?Index