Street Vendors and Public Markets Can Drive the Future of Thriving and Inclusive Cities

Public Spaces Need a Full Spectrum of Informal to Formal Retail

A version of this article was originally written in 2013 and published for the Rockefeller Foundation's Informal City Dialogs with Next City, as part of a debate on Street Vending to which we invited our friend Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá.

Informal vending, formal markets and conventional storefronts are all needed to support an inclusive, innovative, and vibrant public realm and local economy. The negative perception of informal vending is an issue that plagues cities everywhere, but the successful integration of such vendors into urban life can add much to the lifeblood of a thriving city.

Strategies to support street vending and local markets can make them an integral part of vibrant public spaces and create a "Market City" where many forms of economic enterprises integrated with public spaces can thrive.

Around the world, markets and the social life they foster as well as the livelihoods they support reflect cities at their best.

Cities first formed around informal street markets, and perhaps the core of where they often go wrong is in the cases when they have worked to eliminate that primary function. In good market environments, each vendor competes to contribute to the shared experience and customer needs - through their quality products, their displays, and through human connection.

Often, good management and organizing is helpful to facilitate the role of vendors in best supporting their public spaces and communities. With this placemaking support, streets, public spaces, and markets can start to become more self-managing and self-organizing.

Unfortunately, most cities don’t have a vision for a positive role of vending. Around the world, governments are removing street vendors and razing market districts. We are often replacing vending that activates public space and supports social life with internalized retail that merely sucks value from its location near pedestrian flows – moving the function of retail from placemaking to "place taking." We create cities that preclude this most fundamental entry-level scale of economic activity, often under the auspices of narrowly planning for mobility, economic development, or “world-class design.”

The celebrated "world class" buildings below give little back to the street, dampening the local energy, culture and economy that retail, markets, and street vending can provide. Street vendors could help bring public life back to some of these places.

As we plan for the largely Western ideals of accommodating maximum throughput of various transportation modes, maximizing retail rents, and leading with design and branding concepts, we forget the more central purpose of transportation systems and streets: They create places where people want to be. Great streets blur the public and private, transitory and stationary activities, while being anchored in usually informally communicated public goals.

As we have disinvested in, and often disparaged, these "chaotic," self-managed spaces, the businesses have been forced into a mode of marginalization or survival.

When supported and showcased, street vendors and the energy they bring can help create iconic places that are cultural drivers and define cities. Think of the book vendors on the banks of the Seine in Paris, the flower market of Mumbai, the buskers and kiosks of Barcelona’s Ramblas, the floating market of Bangkok and the weekend market of La Paz Bolivia, where indigenous women bring purpose and life to a square mile of streets.

Many cities are particularly good at one kind of public market, and other cities can learn from them. We've written about a full range of markets, whether farmers markets in underserved neighborhoods like East New York Farms! in Brooklyn, NY, holiday markets like in Budapest, market sheds like Ithaca, New York's, indoor/outdoor markets like the Flint Public Market, market halls like in Barcelona's, market squares like Munich's Victuals Market, or market districts like London's Borough Market.

To help cities support a broader spectrum of markets, local economic activity, and place-supporting retail, they need to start by supporting sidewalks and sidewalk vending. Having a more seamless spectrum of increasingly organized markets, starting with street vendors that may be new entrepreneurs, can also offer more opportunities for upward mobility, and more porous and open cities for all.

Key to making all kinds of markets and vending succeed is helping them support, and benefit from, the public space with which they are inextricably interconnected. Certainly, the efforts to put order to informal vending through removal or regulation are often practiced in ways that prevent its inherent placemaking potential. Promoting vending as part of a placemaking effort can create destinations, incubate businesses and provide crucial low-barrier-to-entry income and affordable shopping that most cities are not sufficiently providing.

Placemaking as a process, whether led informally or formally, starts with maximizing public use and management of public space, rather than starting with design solutions or more narrowly defined outcomes. Where the self-managing capacity of informal retail does not exist, a placemaking process can deliver participation, self-regulation, or formalization through investment in elevating the role of the vendor.

Vending needs to be supported and challenged to contribute to the public realm. Where informal regulation does not exist, regulations and infrastructure need to be added. Formal retail needs to be turned inside-out to add to and benefit from informal retail and vendors, as well as to revive social connection and local economies. The healthy, innovative, and equitable city of the future will be a “Market City” with a full spectrum of informal-to-formal markets and retail, all competing to contribute to the public realm.