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Public markets were once essential parts of the cityscape and they are becoming so again. Markets serve several purposes, social, political, and economic, and so planners interested in multipurpose tools for development will be interested in public markets. Markets can help achieve a variety of goals including place-making, employment, and entrepreneurship. This article focuses on markets as tools of business incubation. Archival data and literature shows how important markets once were to cities. Ethnographically collected data from Chicago's Maxwell Street market illustrates the individual and structural factors that account for businesses created at the market. Rural and urban markets are emerging or being rehabilitated all over the country — this research helps planners understand the history of markets, their multi-disciplinary nature, and the circumstances of people creating businesses at markets.

Using evidence from Cusco, Peru, the paper examines the effects of the planned displacement of informal traders from city-centre streets. Although more than 3500 traders were relocated to new off-centre markets, the research identifies the emergence of 'unplanned' alternative city-centre locations for informal trade, especially the new courtyard markets. The municipal-led changes, influenced strongly by concerns to enhance tourism, reveal a process which displays many of the hallmarks of gentrification. Lower-class traders were displaced from city-centre streets for the benefit of middle-class tourists and local people. There was also gentrification of the trading activity itself: by manipulating stall allocation and pricing structures to exclude the poorest traders from the new higher-quality municipal markets. The changing pattern of informal trading can be viewed as an unconventional 'barometer' of the progress of policy-led gentrification, applicable to other cities in the developing world.

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.

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.

This is a study of Istanbul's periodic bazaars and an attempt to place them in the context of contestation over urban space, urban poverty and informality. The periodic bazaars in the city are either disappearing or being moved to the outskirts. These trends reflect and reproduce spatial unevenness in the city, manifesting new forms of social exclusion and polarization. The city's increasingly commodified urban space has become an arena of social and economic contestation. We address these questions by focusing on the story of the relocation of one of Istanbul's most popular periodic bazaars, the Tuesday bazaar in Kadıköy. Our analysis reveals that the relocation and reorganization of bazaars in Istanbul in the 2000s have largely been driven by rising real‐estate prices in the city: land has simply become too precious a commodity to be left to the bazaaris. Furthermore, in the context of a pervasive neoliberal discourse on urban renewal and modernization that promotes the notion of a hygienic city, the bazaaris, it seems, have become the new undesirables of the urban landscape, leaving them under double siege from the commodification of public land and from spatially defined social exclusion.

The renewed popularity of urban markets has generated substantial attention among policymakers, planners and urban scholars. In addition to their potential local economic impact, markets provide spaces for a variety of social exchanges and interactions that may strengthen communal ties, repro- duce existing social tensions or simply reflect everyday diversity; consequently, the social functions of urban markets differ depending on the specific social, political and economic context in which individual markets operate. Based on data from interviews, questionnaires and participant observa- tion, this article examines social exchanges and interactions within wet markets (meat, fish, fruits and vegetable markets) in Singapore. The types of social interactions found in wet markets are wide-ranging and informal, and occur across different ethnicities, generations, social statuses and classes; they can range from casual exchanges to planned gatherings to sustained relations based on mutual reciprocity and trust. Wet markets are significant to Singaporeans because they are spaces of unmediated social interactions and, within the context of state governance and ongoing modernisation, increasingly exceptional. The attachment to wet markets is a collective, social response to an ongoing process in which existing and meaningful social spaces (e.g. neighbour- hoods and markets) are being erased by a redeveloped urban landscape, a concomitant disappear- ance of unregulated community space, and the pervasiveness of normative consumerism.

This study explores the potentiality of markets as public space where multiple forms of sociality are enacted. Research was conducted in eight UK markets. The research revealed that markets represented a significant public and social space for different groups in the locality as a site for vibrant social encounters, for social inclusion and the care of others, for 'rubbing along' and for mediating differences. The article concludes by arguing that the social encounters and connections found in markets contradict pessimistic accounts of the decline of social association, offering a contrast to the shopping mall and providing the possibility for the inclusion of marginalised groups and for the co-mingling of differences where these are increasingly relegated to more private spheres.

Although often intended to address injustices in food access, farmers markets tend to cater to affluent communities, and to exclude on the basis of race and class. One means of addressing this is federal subsidy programs, like the Senior Farmers Market Nutritional Program (SFMNP). We explore the dynamics of the SFMNP program in Memphis’ farmers market landscape in 2011. We examine the visible barriers experienced by SFMNP patrons to market access including delays in establishing the program in a largely African-American neighborhood, and the more subtle barriers such as perceptions of more affluent markets as white spaces. We then explore some successful efforts to make these issues visible and address them, including activism on the part of seniors and public dialog in social media. Despite this, we find that ongoing resistance to acknowledging farmers markets as spaces of racial inequality continues to challenge their food justice potential.

This paper examines how the decentralization of state power and, advent of mayoral elections in Bogota ́, Colombia, enabled municipal government, with the help of a cadre of professional planners and designers, to transform the city socially and physically by reinventing civil society and public space. Three contiguous mayoral administrations used public space as a setting and tool to reinvent a culture of citizenship as well as to demonstrate competency on behalf of the mayors. The mayors’ strategy was largely successful as Bogota ́ has experienced a move from individualism to collective spirit, and citizens report improvements in civility, friendliness and quality of life. Much of the city’s success derives from the vision of the mayors and the important role urban planners and designers provide in implementing that vision. By examining Bogota ́’s transformation, it is possible to better understand how local politicians and planning and design administrators are key to that change.

Recent scholarship contends that the rise of shopping malls, gated communities, and gentrification as well as citizens' withdrawal to the private realm have eroded public life in U.S. and Latin American cities. Malls' suburban location and security policies exclude the poor and restrict free speech; residents and fences in gated communities exclude outsiders; and police and businesses in downtowns and high-rent districts limit poor people's access to public areas. I expand this discussion with an analysis of the accessibility of Santiago, Chile's retail areas, the social relationships present there, and marginalized groups' informal resistance to their exclusion. The city's distinct segregation pattern, transit system, and state-licensed street markets permit greater contact between rich and poor and foster vital public spaces. I adapt Lofland's typology of fleeting, quasi-primary, and intimate secondary relations in public to examine social interactions in street markets, flea markets, and shopping malls. The distinct mix of relationships within these markets reflects the characteristics of users, varying degrees of accessibility to diverse populations, and state policies toward markets. Marginalized groups' informal resistance is pervasive in each setting. In contrast to the dominant view that public space is declining in contemporary cities, Santiago residents are not universally reclusive, antisocial, or reluctant to engage in cross-class public encounters, and the city retains vital public areas. The findings demonstrate that our understanding of public space is incomplete without an awareness of social relationships and informal resistance alongside structural constraints to the accessibility of urban locales.

Problems encountered in public open space provision in the urban context are investigated through a case study of the Chicago metropolitan region. Correlation and regression analyses are utilized in an attempt to explain local public open space acreage levels in terms of readily available data. Park district directors, chief municipal executives, forest preserve and conservation district directors are surveyed and interviewed in order to gain more qualitative insights. Governmental regulations in general and funding allocation practices for the region are examined for any effect on provision levels. Basic impediments to public open land provision are identified, and several solution strategies are suggested.

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).

The resurgence of informal street trading poses serious challenges for local officials responsible for the maintenance of public space. This article contextualises the tension between public space recuperation and informality, providing a detailed case study of Bogotá, Colombia (population 7.6 million). From 1988 to 2003, Bogotá's mayors implemented one of the most ambitious public space campaigns in Latin America. The 'tipping-points' behind Bogotá's transition are illuminated with emphasis on the introduction of free mayoral elections and the enervation of informal vendor unions. Using a cohort panel design, this research also examines the working conditions and occupational hazards faced by vendors both before and after relocation to government-built markets. It reveals how formalised vendors experienced declining income levels, but improved working conditions. The final section examines public policy implications and the extent to which Bogotá's experience follows traditional models of public space planning in Latin America and the Caribbean.

As one of 725 UNESCO World Heritage Properties, Antigua, Guatemala, is subject to local international regulations related to building codes and how streets and public places are occupied. These regulations are discussed within the theoretical framework of spatial governmentality to explore that relationship between governance and Maya street vendors’ economic practices. I situate the scholarly discussion of spatial governmentality within a specific economic context by highlighting how street economies are affected by what Foucault calls the “era of ‘governmentality,’” especially in an ethnographic context. In this article, I argue that horizontal and vertical forms of governmentality affect the economic practices of street vendors within Antigua’s sociopolitically constructed spaces. Understanding how spatial governmentalities work in a particular place helps explain why street economies persist and why new ones emerge. In Antigua’s case, a new mobile form of street vending emerged because of newly implemented municipal regulations and policing priorities.

We study the link between self-employment and some salient aspects of entrepreneurship – namely business creation and innovation – in urban and rural labour markets. In order to do so, we combine indi- vidual and firm-level data for Britain aggregated at the Travel-to-Work Area level. We find that a higher incidence of self-employment positively and strongly correlates with business creation and innovation in urban areas, but not in rural areas. We also document that more rural than urban workers become self- employed in areas with comparably poor labour market opportunities, although this heterogeneity is not evident when focussing on entrepreneurship. Finally, we show that the misalignment between self- employment and our proxies for entrepreneurship in rural areas disappears once we account for local labour market conditions. Our results suggest that self-employment, business creation and innovation are well lined-up in urban areas because they capture the same economic phenomenon – namely, gen- uine entrepreneurship. This is not the case for rural areas.

A case study of the renovation of New York City’s Bryant Park, this article revisits the end of public space thesis. The renovated park signifies not the end of public space but the new ends to which public space is oriented. In Bryant Park, a new logic of urban publicity was assembled and built into the landscape. The social and technical means by which this transformation was achieved are analyzed. New public spaces of this sort promulgate a conception of the public that is decoupled from discourses of democratization, citizenship, and self-development and connected ever more firmly to consumption, commerce, and social surveillance. If such places do not herald the end of public space, they do represent “publicity without democracy.”

This article examines two different models of space management, devised by NGOs to confront the marketization of public space in New York City through privatizing the land of community gardens. The Trust for Public Land promotes a model that emphasizes community ownership, while the New York Restoration Project promotes a model that emphasizes the preservation of land. The article compares the two models of NGO management of community gardens particularly through the lens of community participation, sense of ownership and control over space, and argues that both models transform the meaning of public space in ways that undermine its opportunity to develop as an autonomous community space.

This paper plots the recent changes in the uses of public space in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is argued that the economic and social changes in contemporary Vietnam have paved the way for a dramatic transformation in the ways in which streets, pavements and markets are experienced and imagined by the populace. The efflorescence of individual mobility, street-trading and public crowding around certain popular events has led to the emergence of a distinct public sphere, one which is not immune from state control and censure but which is a flagrant rebuttal of the state's appeal. The immediate struggles over space herald a new discursive arena for the contest over Vietnamese national imagery as represented in cultural heritage and public space, memorials and state-controlled events which the public are rapidly deserting. The paper concludes by suggesting that the everyday cultural practices that have created a bustling streetlife in urban Vietnam will inevitably provide the vitality and spectacle for the destabilisation of state control in a struggle for meanings in public space.

Residential neighbourhoods developed using various techniques in Kathmandu by both the public and private sectors have not only provided a poor urban setting and failed to address socio‑cultural needs, but are also poor at building a community and creating links to the built environment, with the result that the planned areas lack a sense of place and the inhabitants lack a feeling of home. Although traditional neighbourhoods in the historic core area had many features of a good residential neighbourhood in the past, they are currently undergoing rapid destruction. The residents of these neighbourhoods have little awareness of these issues. The existing legal and institutional frameworks are inadequate and ineffective and cannot address these problems, and so the formulation of design guidelines, their strict implementation, and enhancement of socio‑cultural events including social networking are recommended for future residential neighbourhood development.

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.