the city regulates where they can do business by giving permission (a permit) to conduct their business at one fixed location.4 The street-vendor, given the gift of life by the city, wishes nothing more than to repay her debt by making available both what the city knows it desires, and what it does not yet know it desires. In order to do this well, it has to take the measure of the city, understand its composition, how it’s being made and remade, its changing appetites. And this measuring exercise, unremittingly called for, is fraught with uncertainty. Like politicians misreading the mindset of the electorate, street-vendors too are susceptible to misrecognizing the mood of the city, its orientation to a particular thing at any specific time. A miscalculation of what the city is able to assimilate at any moment in time brings to street-vending the quizzical and questioning eye of the city that risks becoming inquisitorial, seeking answers. Street-vending has always troubled the city’s understanding of what constitutes the practice of doing business as a feature of free enterprise capitalism in the way that it mocks 5 this same by exceeding the conventional limits and boundaries of capitalistic business practices. 6 Yet the city always seems willing to suffer these ‘violations’ in exchange for both the utility that street-vending represents (satisfies a diversity of tastes and timetables in ways that are affordable), and the vitality it brings to street-life by inviting social actors to use public space in ways that are not linked to sedentary conventions and formats, uses of the street that exceed its arterial function. 4
This is a clear sign that the city understands street-vending as a business practice that needs to be regulated, to be watched with a close eye. 5 I owe this specific usage to Alan Blum. 6 Some of these excesses include: the exclusively cash nature of street-vending which is without doubt part of the unease that some feel – “[C]ash is the closest thing we have to contraband. When you see a lot of it in a movie, you know that something crooked is up” (Gopnik, 2001:285); its ability to defy spatial and temporal constraints (it can go anywhere, anytime); and its capacity to berelentlessly innovative (satisfying a diversity of tastes and timetables).
11 Dérivateur