UC Berkeley

The dynamics of street vending have not garnered enough attention within the realm of urban planning despite their implications for public space utilization, economic activity, and city governance. With cities experiencing population growth and changes in forms of employment, the competition and significance of public spaces have and will become increasingly pronounced. This dissertation places street vending at the forefront of public space research. I use street vending as a lens through which to understand the complexities of the use of public space and city management, offering insights into the governance structures that shape urban landscapes.

In this dissertation, I scrutinize how the social, political, legal, and spatial relationships among multiple actors (different levels of government, bureaucrats, leaders of street vending associations, and vendors) impact governments’ incentives and capacity to control public space. I pay particular attention to competition between and among different forms of political intermediation (brokerage) including street vending associations and state employees who function as brokers. I also emphasize that politicians use brokers not only for electoral gains, but also to exercise power, which is crucial for urban planning research. By examining street vending patterns in both global south and global north urban contexts, this research contributes to the ongoing discourse at the intersection of urban politics, public space management, and workers’ livelihoods.

In the introduction, I briefly review bodies of literature in urban planning and political science relevant to the study of street vending in Mexico City and San Francisco. I then present the main goals of the dissertation, addressing the overlooked role of street vending in the political economy – and more specifically – the competition over public space from the perspectives of vendors, street vending associations, bureaucrats, and politicians. Next, I present the research questions and the methods I employed to answer those questions.

In chapter 1, I introduce Mexico City’s street vending background. First, I present street vending’s administrative and bureaucratic structure. Then, I describe the diversity of street vendors that exist within the city and explain their main differences, which has relevance for their governance. Next, I provide a statistical snapshot of the number of street vendors from 2005 to 2023. Lastly, I briefly mention two of the main legal instruments used by local officials and leaders of street vending associations to regulate street vending: the Regulation of 1951 and the 11/98 Agreement.

In chapter 2, I illustrate the variation in street vending associations’ political influence through a multi-method approach. By building a geospatial dataset of street market associations in Mexico City, I identify differences in associations according to their size and spatial presence across the city, creating a typology of local, district, and city-wide associations. Then, through in-depth interviews with street vending leaders, politicians, state employees, and street vendors, I illustrate through case studies how vending associations relate to neighborhood residents and politicians. In turn, I show how these relationships affect associations’ ability to form alliances with other associations and their incentives to control public space. Associations’ alliances and their relationship both with neighbors and politicians have relevant consequences for associations’ ability to lobby and secure regulations which are beneficial for street vendors more generally.

In chapter 3, I analyze how political and bureaucratic structures shape street vendors’ use of public space, such as parks, sidewalks, and public squares, in Mexico City. By bridging literature on clientelism, street-level bureaucrats, and public space, I argue that partisan political alignment between intra-city local governments and the city government determines the levels of competition between inspectors and street vending associations, and the local governments’ ability to control public space. Through a comparative case study, I examine these mechanisms in three boroughs (intra-city local governments) in Mexico City which differ in terms of their political alignment with the city government. By direct observation, examining city documents, and in-depth interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, leaders of street vending associations, and street vendors, I analyze street vending associations and inspectors acting as brokers between elected officials and vendors and articulate the administrative, economic, political, and spatial consequences of these relationships across different local governments in Mexico City. I find that politically aligned governments rely more on street vending associations, while unaligned governments rely more on loyal inspectors-brokers for the control of public space and the extraction of economic and political favors. Aligned boroughs benefit from vending associations for two key reasons. First, these associations tend to support the city-wide ruling political party, delegating street vending enforcement to associations in exchange of political support. Second, aligned boroughs have a greater enforcement capacity from the city-wide government, enabling them to remove vendors for whenever they need to use public space for infrastructure projects or reallocating space for other groups of vendors. In contrast, unaligned boroughs rely on loyal bureaucrats to extract votes and money from vendors within the borough's jurisdiction, resulting in less control over public space and heightened tensions with vending associations.

In chapter 4, I trace the implementation of a street vending ordinance in San Francisco to examine the misalignment between legal instruments and everyday activities. Drawing on data from interviews with vendors, community organizations, and local officials (i.e., district supervisors, public works officials, and police officers), I analyze a case study in the Mission District to understand who legitimizes street vending and the mechanisms through which vendors are legitimized. Through this spatiotemporal study, I find that heterogeneity of vendors influences compliance, enforcement, and the legal structure of the ordinance, shedding light on the dynamic challenges to legitimize street vendors’ use of public space. Consequently, I show that city ordinances only govern the governable, creating distinctions between vendors that are willing to be regulated and others actively skirting the law.

Finally, I conclude by providing a summary of the findings and the key contributions of this study. My dissertation makes two key contributions. First, I reveal a new frontier for planning theory and practice, by moving beyond stylized descriptions of the state as a monolithic entity that is either pro or anti-poor. By bringing in literature from political science into planning, I expose the inherent tensions between different levels of government and the complexity of enforcing regulatory frameworks. Thus, beyond electoral strategies, I find that the relationship between politicians and associations impacts governments’ ability to control public space and exercise power. Second, I examine the competition within and among street vending associations to understand how associations mobilize and increase their bargaining power to remain in place. While most research has shown the relationship between vending associations and the state, I show how varying levels of political influence affect associations’ ability to lobby and secure regulations which will ultimately improve street vendors’ livelihoods. Then, I suggest recommendations for future scholarship and practice to improve the regulation of public space for street vendors and other potential populations that use public space such as sex workers, waste-pickers, day laborers, and people living in homeless encampments. Lastly, I present ideas for future research that derive from this dissertation.