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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.

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.

The current debate on the tourism-development nexus has a rather static and narrow focus on the impact of tourism and overlooks that tourism has become strongly dependent on links between different localities. This article eschews these place-bounded approaches and focuses on linkages and the interplay between the social and the spatial within tourism developments. Drawing on the empirical case of street vendors in the tourist centre of Cusco, it explores how social capital and the way street vendors manoeuvre themselves in and through global and local environments offer new opportunities for tourism to contribute to poverty alleviation. It is maintained that social capital and interconnectivity are of fundamental importance in gaining a better understanding of the development potential of tourism.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Around the globe, streets and sidewalks in cities are being contested as spaces that should be used for more than transportation. This article challenges our understanding of both property rights and public space by applying a property rights framework to situate sidewalk use debates. It analyzes and maps the sidewalk property regimes of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, through a novel integration of surveying and ethnography. The case illuminates the feasibility of a mixed-use sidewalk that can be shared between various kinds of uses and users. A mixed-use sidewalk that is both cooperative and livable is possible if planners incorporate time into planning space in order to expand the sidewalk's flexibility and if local society can renarrate and enforce new legitimacies on the sidewalk. Takeaway for practice: Sidewalk space deserves more attention as an important public space. In our era of historic urbanization, we should reconceive sidewalks as a mixed-use space rather than an exclusively pedestrian zone. Moreover, North American planners would benefit from engaging with public space experiments happening in cities in the developing world. Research support: This research was supported by MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.