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Latin American scholars have recently discussed the privatization of urban public space. A fundamental aspect of this process is the disintegration of communities because it often targets and affects a peculiarly Latin American kind of public space: the plaza. Plazas have traditionally functioned as cultural centres in Latin American cites. They are central meeting points for political groups, sites of civic expression and public resistance, as well as places to purchase relatively cheap goods and services. Plazas are, therefore, sites in which families, neighbours, and political organizations mingle, interact, and also challenge authority. This paper uses these sorts of insights on public space in Latin America to develop a conceptualization of the plaza as a community centre. However, the multiple practices and interactions that occur in these forms of public space have been disrupted by state-led strategies which seek to privatize and sanitize public space, thereby disrupting—or even destroying—the community centre. I use primary materials on Mexico City's Historic centre and its plaza to explore the ways in which this specific type of urban public space has been affected physically and symbolically by a regeneration scheme known as the Programa de Rescate.

All UNESCO urban World Heritage sites are strictly regulated. In Antigua, Guatemala, this includes building façades and streets, as well as the use of public places. Homeowners and building owners, however, challenge regulations by using unapproved paints, signs, and building materials. Residents modify building façades to accommodate cars and open walls to effectively blend home-based businesses with the street. At the same time, street vendors contest regulated public spaces by behaving inappropriately by selling goods on public streets rather than designated marketplaces. Rather than conceive of property owners and vendors behavior as outside and in contrast to the building and street vending regulations, I reframe their actions within what I am calling urban spatial permissiveness, a concept I derive from Roy’s (2004) theory of the unmapping—flexible regulation—of urban space. Antigua offers an ethnographic setting that shows how regulations are not always rigidly enforced but are negotiated to deal with everyday contingencies that relate to residents’ and vendors’ rights to the city (Harvey 2008). By way of conclusion I consider Foucault’s concept of governmentality as a negotiated process, in order to argue that relationships between building regulations and public space usage reveal the limits of legality and strict enforcement policies.

Informal commerce, characterized by market and street trading activities, thrives in the central areas of many Latin American cities. Focusing on the neglected spatial dimension of informal commerce, the paper traces its considerable expansion in the historic centre of Quito in Ecuador since the early 1970s and examines the issues which have prompted municipal intervention. An early municipal response involves some attempts at redistribution of informal commerce, justified by essentially functional issues such as hygiene and congestion. However, the introduction of conservation policy and the way this policy evolved to embrace a broad concern for the urban environment is associated with the emergence of an aesthetic/cultural discourse in attitudes towards informal commerce. The authorities are increasingly motivated towards ‘selling’ a new image of the historic centre and encouraging new economies oriented towards the tourist and a relatively wealthy clientele. Moves to exclude informal commerce have concentrated on the most visible spaces, particularly those of the principal squares. Although informal trade hidden from view continues to thrive, only time and further research will show whether the re‐presentation of the historic centre and the promotion of new economies will finally effect the exclusion of informal commerce as a culmination of long‐term efforts to control its occupation of space.

The socio-legal technology of licensing is one of the primary tools governments use to manage spaces and practices deemed risky or threatening to public order. Licensing requirements thus play a crucial role in shaping routine experiences in public space as well as the trajectories of emerging forms of public life. Yet licensing laws have largely been ignored in critical urban scholarship: too often concerned with the interpretation and critique of popular practices and public spaces, the mundane operations of urban governance are often left to practitioners and policy researchers. This article demonstrates how paying closer attention to licensure can provide valuable and unexpected insights into matters of social equality, urban amenity and economic opportunity. It does so through a comparative inquiry into practices of street food vending in New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Drawing on ethnographic study and interviews, the article demonstrates how licensing can be involved in the production of quite peculiar and unjust geographies of practice, but also how shifts in popular culture can force a reconsideration of taken-for- granted laws. In conclusion, it is argued that a focus on licensing offers a productive pathway for new forms of critical urban research and provides a potential point of leverage in efforts to configure better and more democratic forms of urban public life.

This article investigates the relationship between political identity and public space in the communities of the Colca Valley, in Peru’s rural Andes, by examining two moments in which the built environment became a medium for formatting and engaging a local indigeneity. The first is the colonial invasion, during which the reducci´on plan condensed and dispersed “unruly” native subjects around a public square and a church. The second is the contemporary moment, in which that same space is used to stage audits, evaluations, and competitions in the context of a development paradigm shifting from service provision to investing in indigeneity by financing the promotion of entrepreneurial and agricultural practices that organizations classify as typically indigenous. This article offers two arguments: (1) in the colonial era, notions of indigenous identity configured efforts to improve and regulate daily life—or, to achieve development; and (2) through changing historical contexts, the built environment is used as a medium for defining Colcan indigeneity, deploying it to generate strategic knowledge and regulatory force, and investing it with the potential for various kinds of salvation. This approach suggests that transnational paradigms do not simply “touch down,” but also, adjust and push existing dynamics through the local media at their disposal.

In Bangladesh, Dhaka is migrants' most important destination and has itself been fundamentally transformed through migration. But there is ‘no place’ for many migrants in Dhaka. Poorer migrants live in slums and many encroach on public space to sustain their lives – the new urbanites are taking their ‘right to the city’. In doing so, they not only draw on local resources. Their production of the urban space often relates directly to their migration trajectory, their translocal networks, and their simultaneous situatedness at multiple places. Migrants connect ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ and constitute translocal spaces, which contribute to re‐making Dhaka from below. This paper integrates current debates on translocality, informal labour, and subaltern urbanism to address two key questions on transient urban spaces: How do migration trajectories and translocality structure the urban poor's lives? How do migrants make use of local networks and translocal social relations to find work and appropriate ‘their place’ in the city? Empirical research on street food vendors in Dhaka, almost all of whom are internal migrants, builds the basis for my argument. I show that ‘translocal social capital’ and home‐bound identities can be important resources to gain access to urban labour markets and to appropriate one's place in the city. The paper argues that the poor use translocality for their livelihoods and thereby continuously re‐shape the face of the megacity of Dhaka.

Since the 1970s, certain types of upscale restaurants, cafés, and stores have emerged as highly visible signs of gentrification in cities all over the world. Taking Harlem and Williamsburg as field sites, we explore the role of these new stores and services (“boutiques”) as agents of change in New York City through data on changing composition of retail and services, interviews with new store owners, and discursive analysis of print media. Since the 1990s, the share of boutiques, including those owned by small local chains, has dramatically increased, while the share of corporate capital (large chain stores) has increased somewhat, and the share of traditional local stores and services has greatly declined. The media, state, and quasi-public organizations all value boutiques, which they see as symbols and agents of revitalization. Meanwhile, new retail investors—many, in Harlem, from the new black middle class—are actively changing the social class and ethnic character of the neighborhoods. Despite owners’ responsiveness to community identity and racial solidarity, “boutiquing” calls attention to displacement of local retail stores and services on which long-term, lower class residents rely and to the state’s failure to take responsibility for their retention, especially in a time of economic crisis.

This paper investigates a moment of shift in urban neoliberal governance strategies under the purview of a new municipal Chief of Government of Buenos Aires at the end of the 2000s: the introduction of a regime of public space that has had implications for the waste management sector (and particularly informal recyclers or cartoneros). I document government attempts to re-represent the city as a modern, hygienic centre that is receptive to investment and tourism, drawing on discursive framings of public space that seek to redefine legitimate users and uses of the city. Such framings are exclusionary of cartoneros and other marginalized urbanites. As with most forms of actually existing neoliberalism, this regime is contradictory and unstable, both containing and provoking challenges to its coherence. This case study of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in Buenos Aires encourages analytical focus on moments of shift and renewal in urban processes of neoliberalization. In this case the shift marked by the introduction of the regime of public space reveals the priorities and agendas of urban elites as championed by municipal governments, makes visible the paradoxes and contradictions inherent to neoliberal urbanisms, and also exposes openings for resistance, opposition, and renegotiation of urban neoliberal agendas (including protest, discursive reframings of the city and its uses, and the forging of indeterminate alliances).

Since the 1970s, in the Philippines, increasing rural to urban migration and a lack of income-generating employment have led to new forms of livelihood characterized by complex intersections of formal/informal and legal/illegal work and public space use. This paper uses Baguio City’s new Harrison Road Night Market to argue that both street vendors and city officials are complicit in reconfiguring informality and legality as urban organizing logics—unmapping and remapping urban public space and livelihoods to their mutual advantages—increased rental income for the city and viable jobs for vendors. To this end, street vendors use everyday and insurgent public space activism to secure their right to street-based work. Simultaneously, the municipal government, variably tolerates, regularizes, or penalizes street trade as it gauges its potential to enrich city coffers. Such political-economic manoeuvering by both parties, moreover, also reveals insights about the intersection of different forms of power—that between vendors and the city, between vendor associations, and among vendors themselves. By successfully securing government permission to establish a “legal” used clothing night street market on Harrison Road, a main city artery, Baguio City’s previously marginalized street vendors visibly assert their legitimacy and rights to livelihood in arenas of power from which they have been largely excluded.

Recent work on entrepreneurial urban governance has focused on the new forms of exclusion produced by neoliberal entrepreneurial urban strategies, arguing that local forms of social–spatial organization are being dismantled through practices ranging from the privatization of urban public space to the emergence of gated communities. By exploring the role of agency amid these changing structures of constraints, this article interrogates processes of socio-spatial exclusion under entrepreneurial forms of urban governance. I argue that despite constraints placed upon different groups of affected citizens, excluded groups develop survival strategies that enable them to maintain a livelihood and in some cases empower them to thrive. I use the case of a recently implemented entrepreneurial policy in Mexico City called the Programa de Rescate (The Rescue Program). The prime objective of the policy is to revitalize and beautify the streets, buildings and central plaza of the city's Historic Center. Although this policy seeks an improvement in the quality of life for the local population, it excludes particular forms of social interaction that are central to the well-being of a large sector of the population, particularly street vendors who rely on public spaces for their daily survival. I use the case of the Programa to show how street vendors have struggled to remain on the streets of Mexico City's Historic Center.

Drawing on recent developments in field theory, this article analyzes the struggle for survival of São Paulo’s street vendors in the face of a massive eviction campaign. I conceive of street vending as a social field divided into two unequal categories—licensed street vendors and unlicensed street vendors—and show that responses to the campaign varied along group lines. Unlicensed peddlers either abandoned the field or drew on local networks to continue peddling under harsher conditions, whereas licensed street vendors relied on well-established ties to actors in the political field. After these ties proved ineffective, licensed street vendors survived thanks to the intervention of a non-governmental organization (NGO) that activated the judicial field and mobilized the legal capital vested in the licenses. The linkage role performed by this actor with cross-field networks and expertise shows the strategic import of interfield relations, which replicate and reinforce the unequal distribution of assets inside the field.

Urban public marketplaces in Global South cities host a vibrant mix of retail and wholesale trade. Yet local-to-national governments increasingly promote sanitized and privatized urban spaces by privileging modern retail outlets (malls and supermarkets) and discouraging “traditional” livelihoods (street vending and market stalls). These political decisions dramatically disrupt the public market trade that has provisioned urbanites for decades. To address this issue, this article analyzes how retailers working in the renowned Baguio City Public Market, northern Philippines, sustain their livelihoods given that Baguio City’s first phase of market redevelopment failed to meet their needs (e.g., insufficient store size and banning enterprises). Problematizing legal–illegal work and urban public space use, I argue that public marketers engage everyday and insurgent public space activism to protest their disenfranchisement. Although marketers generally have achieved selected demands, some have benefited more than others. Thus, I suggest that we consider not only marketers’ resistance but also the uneven political landscape within which they work—the power differentials among and between marketers and the state. The extent to which variously positioned marketers can realize livelihood rights highlights the unpredictability of civic engagement and “extralegality” when competing ideologies clash over access to urban public space, legal–illegal practice, and appropriate urban provisioning.

This article examines the new phenomenon of “citizens’ groups” in contemporary Mumbai, India, whose activities are directed at making the city’s public spaces more orderly. Recent scholarship on Mumbai’s efforts to become a “global” city has pointed to the removal of poor populations as an instance of neoliberal governmentality as espoused by the Indian state following the “liberalization” of the economy in the early 1990s. However, in this case, it is these civil society organizations, not the state—whose functionaries in fact benefit from a certain element of unruliness on the streets—who are the agents of increased control over populations and of the rationalization of urban space. This article, based on fieldwork-based research, argues that the way in which citizens’ groups exclude poor populations from the city is more complex than a straightforward deployment of neoliberalism, and is imbricated with transnational political economic arrangements in uneven and often inconsistent ways. In particular, this article explores how civic activists in these organizations envision their role in the city, and how their activism attempts to reconfigure the nature of citizenship. For instance, civic activists consider themselves to be the stewards of the city’s streets and sidewalks, and wage their battles against what they consider unruly hawkers, a corrupt state, and a complacent middle-class public. Moreover, civic activists render street hawkers’ political claims illegitimate by speaking on behalf of the abstract “citizen” of Mumbai, thus implying that hawkers’ unions speak only on behalf of the vested interests of a single population. In this way, they mobilize a normative notion of civil society in order to exclude the vast segment of city residents who either sell or buy goods on the street. In doing so, the civic activists transform the discourse and practice of politics in the city, so that, ironically, while on one hand using the rhetoric of citizen participation, they in fact undermine the radically heterogeneous forms of democratic political participation the city offers.