Governing the nurturing city: the uneven enforcement of street food vending regulations

ABSTRACTStreet vending has drawn recent attention from city governments in both the Global North and the Global South. This paper focuses on the regulation of street food vending and its enforcement in four cities: Bangkok, Chicago, Hanoi and Montpellier. It draws upon qualitative interviews, archival and newspaper research, and ethnography. The regulatory frameworks raise several issues, because they deny access to space and income for groups that are often underprivileged, and they neglect the roles of street food in the urban food system. We show that the actual enforcement of regulations is uneven between and within cities and between vendors. In some cases, street-level negotiations around enforcement may actually mitigate the negative effects on underprivileged vendors. Hence, the governance of street food vending appears to be more nuanced than the formal regulations that exist. We argue that the design of regulations should better consider the street vendors’ voice and their needs.KEYWORDS: North–South comparisonpublic spaceurban planninginformalityurban food system AcknowledgmentsWe would like to thank our research assistants: Kittima Leeruttanawisut in Bangkok, and Nguyen Hai Thanh as well as the FAVRI (Fruit and Vegetable Research Institute) in Hanoi. We would like to thank Christophe Soulard for his insights at the early stage of this paper, and David Giband for his comments and suggestions that helped improve this paper. Finally, the first versions of this paper were mostly written during lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore we would like to acknowledge our families’ support to take care of our children while we were writing.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThe research presented in this paper has received financial support from INRAE, CNRS, the MITI interdisciplinary programs (under the MUTALIM program), the MUSE-EXPLORE#2 Program (Montpellier Université d’Excellence), and from a Chicago State University sabbatical award.