Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food by Sabrina Dorsainvil

EV ERYDAY URBANITIES The Ecology of Street Food

Gabrielle Andersen . Sabrina Dorsainvil . Cristina Handal-Gonzalez . Jessica Kisner . Jonathan Lapalme . Bonnie Netel . Andrew Tucker

E V ERY DAY URBANITIES The Ecology of Street Food

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food, Thesis Volume I: Research Parsons the New School School of Design Strategies MS Design and Urban Ecologies New York, New York Fall 2013 Written By: Gabrielle Andersen, Sabrina Dorsainvil, Cristina Handal-Gonzalez, Jessica Kisner, Jonathan Lapalme, Bonnie Netel, Andrew Tucker Advisors: Quilian Riano, Beatriz Beckford Program Director: Miguel Robles-Duran SDS Dean: Alison Mears, Matthew Robb Parsons Dean: Joel Towers www.cargocollective.com/everydayurbanities

E V ERY DAY URBANITIES The Ecology of Street Food

Gabrielle Andersen . Sabrina Dorsainvil . Cristina Handal-Gonzalez . Jessica Kisner . Jonathan Lapalme . Bonnie Netel . Andrew Tucker

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents

Project Introduction Common history Common theory Common Methodology Project Site Map Claiming Spaces (JK) Social Infrastructure (CH) Spatial Subversion (BN) Anticipatory/Intermediary (JL) Food Linkages (GA) After Enclaves (DT) Embodied Streets (SD) Conclusion Foreshadow of Implementation: Design Framework (Beautiful Mash Up) About Us Photos(Maybe thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a diagram placing us within that network, too?) (Like a light version of a sociogram) Notes (If Needed) Glossary- Definitions of Key Terms

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

PROJECT INTRODUCTION

Introduction informal is actually innovation...because it IS how people live, everyday, creating new ways to survive

breaking down the urban planning practice and distribute it throughout the city.

It was about living and it was about people. It was of truly understanding the social, political and economical relations that happen in a given space and in a specific temporality. those underground, unexpected secrets a city has that need to be revealed or discovered.

a fixed need for nourishment, a source of employment for immigrant workers, the black, white, and gray laws governing this kind of industry, and the complexity of production, distribution and actual vending, posed ‘food’ to be a promising lens (C.H)

It was a way of understanding the multiplicity of factors that are present in the cities: immigration, economy, laws and regulations, black markets, consumption, production, infrastructure, culture, public space, claims, community groups, conflicts, just to name a few.(J.K)

Reading through the fine print and then looking up to see what the carts are following versus not following, you see that these “informalities” construct the urban environment in parallel with the restrictions (B.N)

Regardless of either [formal/ informal], everyday people create strong social and cultural safety nets that affected can potentially policy and allow for spaces of hope where hope is needed (C.H)

Thinking about the vendors allowed me to think about the importance of understanding history and learning about politics (S.D)

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITIES OF STREET FOOD VENDING IN NEW YORK CITY The narrative surrounding New York City, until recently1, has been shaped more around its vast economic wealth, opportunity, and its status as a ‘Global City’ (Sassen, 2005). This story continues, blinders intact, to create a vision of New York City that explicates and often valorizes, the ‘formal’ processes of laws and political-economy; while simultaneously mystifying how many ‘informal’ processes of production, distribution, and everyday life occur within the dual city. Our work, the research of Everyday Urbanities, attempts to make the implicit/masked/everyday processes of the city more explicit through a parallel investigation between the macro and micro, formal and informal processes, as they interact, contradict, and sometimes compliment one another. These interactive tensions, happening across multiple sectors, involving various actors, are truly how space is produced. One powerful case study, and the initial focus of our transdisciplinary research, is the case of local street food vendors. Many of these local startups are incredibly lucrative, and relatively easy entries into self owned employment. Unfortunately, the City of New York has been incredibly punitive with its regulations of where these vendors sell their wares. These restrictions have taken the form of legal obligations for vendors to locate their carts certain distances from doorways, commercial businesses, crosswalks, bus stops, fire hydrants, schools, hospitals, residences. This set of conditions is compounded by street restrictions by time, cart size/type/function specifications, and the private regulation of public space granted by city government to Business Improvement District’s (BID’s). In response to the critically restrictive nature of this process, not to mention the 1 The recent campaign, and subsequent election of Bill de Blasio as New York’s Mayor, has opened up an interesting, and hopefully not brief, conversation about New York City as a space of economic duality. The popular phrase of the day is, “New York, a tale of two cities.”

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

outrageous fees and fines required and levied against these new entrepreneurs, our team took on the task of understanding the complex ecology of street food vending in New York City. We each tackled the topic through different lenses: public space, alternative economies, radical architecture, food choice, crisis, enclave communities and collective identities. Through our individual analysis we encountered different ways of looking at the issues of street vending or informalities. In four months we researched, talked, discussed, dialogued, conversed, interviewed, read, walked the city, ate and dreamed about the everyday practices. Operating as a transdisciplinary team is no easy feat. It requires a multifaceted approach to identifying frictions2, sharing knowledge, analyzing and synthesizing of concepts across various disciplines/partners, and then the work begins. For this team, we made this semester into a space where we could investigate a variety of places, issues, and topics; each revolving around our central issue of Informality; in an attempt to hone in on a few solid places where urban centered design interventions could take place. We worked with VAMOS Unidos- Vendedoras Ambulantes Movilizando y Organizando en Solidaridad (Street Vendors Mobilizing and Organizing in Solidarity)- a street food organization dealing with social justice issues and immigrant rights. The organization helped us ground our research through interaction with the actual life of its vendors, that compose its membership. Most importantly, the organization shared their knowledge and experiences which then inspired our work.

2 Commonly thought of as ‘problems’, a word this group and program tend to avoid so as to keep from utilizing its converse, the ever sought out ‘solution’. Design and Urban Ecologies has always practiced in such a way as to focus on the dynamic and not the static. A methodology towards solving problems generally lends itself to finding solutions, often of the ‘Silver Bullet’ variety. This has for the most part always been a failing of urban design, planning, and interventions over time.

What is problematic about ‘informality’ is our incessant need to lock down a definition. It seems far more interesting, to me, to speak about the dialectical forces that create situations of (in)formality (D.T)

Introduction

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

COMMON HISTORY

Introduction

HISTORY The Historian of the Present: “They deploy the tools of the historian - research, analysis, synthesis - to not only chronicle the past, but also as a practical tool in shaping the future. History is treated as something that can be “re-designed, or “narrativised”; as Vanstiphout explains, “once you re-tell the story you have something you can manipulate, it becomes actionable” - Wouter Vanstiphout, Future Practice - Conversations from the Edge of Architecture

Approach The history of street food and the history of immigration in New York City are inseparably entwined. Considering the context of street vendors today and the harassment they currently face by authorities, we have decided to frame history through a framework of power relations based on Michel De Certeau’s (1984) definitions of strategies and tactics as a parallel process and looked for moments where strategies and tactics merged in recent history. As Michel De Certeau explains, what distinguishes strategies from tactics are the types of operations and the role of spaces: “strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces, when those operations take place, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces. (...) In short, a tactic is an art of the weak.” (De Certeau, 1984) The backbone of this historical research has been the research work of Ryan Devlin (2011), which explains better than anyone the informal processes at play in New York city around Street Food, as well as insights gathered throughour collaborative and multi-layered historic analysis, which we will get more in depth later on.

Strategies versus tactics: the Thirty Minute Law The Thirty Minute Rule law is an emblematic example of the interplay between the strategies of the dominant interests and the tactics of the most disadvantaged. This law was enacted in 1761 as a way to protect farmers from competition in public markets. Because it was much too difficult to enforce in some areas, the law was disobeyed more often than not, as is the case today with most of the laws in place around street vending. From the loophole inside the Thirty Minute Law, which forced vendors, technically, to not stand at a fixed

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

location for more than half an hour, the pushcart tactic was born. In 1966 on Hester Street, four jewish peddlers decided to officially break the Thirty Minute Rule. From this act of civil disobedience, the first pushcart market was established and other informal markets spread quickly across the island of Manhattan. The Thirty Minute law was abolished in 1915 and placed the pushcarts under a different jurisdiction, formalizing the pushcarts markets on one side, while simultaneously pushing vendors into informality (Bluestone 1991). Between 1890 and 1940, many identified them as evil, and a threat to the “beautiful, clean and efficient city” (Bluestone 1991:68 in Lofland: 1998:190), something that echos Mayor Bloomberg’s description of New York as a ‘luxury product’ and the fear that some New Yorkers express about the ‘third-worldization’ of their city because of the belief that immigrants are at the source of informality.

Factors that lead to informalization However, as Ryan Devlin notes: “strict laws would not encourage informal vending practices if resources were provided for the enforcement of these laws. Regulations alone do not lead to informalization. It is when regulations are coupled with the two other factors identified by Fernandez Kelly and Garcia, enforcement and conflicting mandates of agencies, that we see the full picture of how the state actively encourages informal activity to take place.” (Devlin, 2011) Therefore, even when a legal measure might appear as being ineffective in actually reducing the number of vendors on the streets, such as the first cap on licenses in 1928, what it actually succeeds in doing is pushing the immigrant worker into an informal zone that can then be leveraged politically. The flexibility and adaptability of the street vendor, which I will highlight throughout this paper, is thus not only relative to how they can respond and serve the ‘average’ New Yorker in times of crises, but also to how they can be managed by the authorities: in a decentralized, privatized and informal way through techniques of surveillance, intimidation and physical interventions on the sidewalks.

Political leverage The regulations are so convoluted that they can be instrumentalized against the vendor contextually by the state and private property interests when needed.

Introduction

“At the very least they (strategies) attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the analytical attribution of a proper place to each particular element and through the combinatory organisation of the movements specific to units or groups of units. The model was military before it became “scientific”. Tactics are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time - to the circumstances which they precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms, etc. In this respect, the difference corresponds to two historical options regarding action and security (options that moreover have more to do with constraints than with possibilities): strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the erosion of time; tactics on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play it introduces into the foundation of power” (De Certeau, 1984)

“When anti-vendor sentiment is low, vendors operate in an environment of tacit municipal acceptance. However if political pressure from local merchants and/ or business elites grows, the existing regulatory apparatus can be mobilized to crack down on vending activity”. This gives the moral leverage to the administration to portray itself as doing the just thing, by enforcing existing laws against whom they can now describe as lawbreakers and tax evaders, unfairly competing with legitimate hard working businesses people. This narrative becomes an important moral leverage in New York’s historical context since the myth of the successful hard working immigrant entrepreneur is at the heart of the foundational narrative of many middle and upper class families in the city. Macy’s started as street peddlers, for instance, but for some reason, that detail is not specified in the historical section of their website.

Our process: collaborative and multi-layered historical analysis Through looking at different topics, we started a historical map of street vending in New York as seen through the lens of informality, and overlaid other historical timelines relating to that topic, such as real estate, the price of land, public space and immigration. From the particular insights of the map created, there is one alignment of events that has been especially enlightening. The price per square foot went from $25 in the 1960s, to $45 in the 1970s, to $250 in the 1980s and $590 in the 1990s. During the first big increase in the 1980s, where the speculation around the land in New York augmented drastically (the average rent went from $350 in the 1970s to $1,700, to $3,200 in the 1990s), the Street Peddler Task Force is created (1987), whose only purpose ended up being to block streets to vending in the newly created business improvement districts (first one in Union Square in 1984) (show method map). Then, many acts to clean pushcarts markets are made, including Giuliani’s campaign against street vendors on 125th street. Another cap is made on licenses in 1988, which has not been changed since, even though New York grew dramatically in size. Interestingly enough, these events intersect to create a map of the period of transition from Fordist to Neoliberal (footnote David Harvey) economic thought and practice.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

COMMON HISTORY MAP

Introduction

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

GROUP PROCESS + METHODOLOGY

Introduction

PROCESS AND METHODOLOGY Part of the methodology of this project was to create a comprehensive map that both traces the route of our investigation across topics, and that would give the reader a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Governing Terrainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;1 of the intersecting topics that (re)occurred throughout our research. Our hope here was to create a process that would work retroactively to show us where we had been, what we found, and how the connections between these instances/actors/forces could propel us forward in our work. This map allowed us to work in a multi-disciplinary way around a broad swath of themes within our shared topic. When sharing the research generated from these investigations that often happened individually, we were able to utilize this tool to have a more in depth conversation across disciplines, theories, and instances of ethnographic experience. It not only helped us trace our journey in understanding the ecology of street food vending but it also highlights the gaps in our research. These gaps enrich our investigation as it opens spaces for more research to be develop.. As the map is constructed more and more questions arise, therefore this is an ongoing interactive tool, and not a final product. Finally, its is our hope that this map will present an ecology of the multitude of events, people, institutions, and forces that intersect around the seemingly simple topic of informality and street food vending.

1 Borrowed from the indefatigable wit of William Morrish

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Introduction

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

What methodology was the group using and why? did you prefer a specific method? Hahaha, sooo....this was a really interesting part of the work for me. I switched both my topic, and methodology mid semester from something I was very comfortable with (intensive reading and analytical research), to something I hadn’t done before. I chose a medium, in this case photography and some graphic design programs on my computer and ipad, and attempted to analyze the physical space and social interactions of Chinatown through a design perspective. I was literally attempting to create a forensic analysis of the space through reverse design. Having come from a philosophy background this type of analysis has been my challenge since day one. I believe that it was very successful. For me, the choice and execution of this methodology was so much more about creating an experience that would force me to learn a new process than an attempt to do something that could be considered successful. I’m glad I made the choice, no matter how painful the process was.

Drew, I’m glad this has been painful for you. Way to go.

I really wanted to push myself in my spatial investigation. I was able to connect my observations to work inspired by contemporary art. I wanted to break down the built by stripping visual connotations. I paid attention to the way things were described and tried to navigate available food resources in my particular area of interest. I spent a lot of time walking around my site and both casually and with particular questions talked to business owners and residents. I was fortunate to be able to connect to long time residents and vendors. So my methods included some ethnographic research, observational drawings, photography, mapping, and of course reading, reading, reading (I’m sure there’s more).

I agree with Bonnie completely. Conversations and dialogues are more successful than presentation when we are trying to share our findings. At the beginning we did a conversational dynamic, in a very casual way (we did some workshops too). This was very interesting and I think it helped look at the whole picture of street food vending. Though I think this process helped us, it was also very slow and time consuming, which was kind of stressful due to the individual work we needed to complete. When we noticed months had passed by and we needed to focus more in our individual projects, the group dynamic shifted and was lost. And though we This was a really hard question for me to answer, actually meet every Monday for long hours and some Tuesdays and weekends, it since it’s really hard for me to identify methodology when was less of sharing our work but more about moving forward. we are currently doing the thing (the research thing that I do think sharing knowledge was a better way of proceeding and a better is). We all began together, expanded into our topics and way to move forward, but I also acknowledge that this process takes more are finding our way back to each other. Personally, I’ve time, which we did not have. learned a lot alone from group conversations and the For my particular methodology I did on the ground fieldwork. I wanted not-so-structured here’s-what-I-am-going-to-tell-you-in-a- to do a spatial analysis of a place, thinking more from a planner’s view, presentation. Conversational rather than presentational is but once I was on the field, I realized that was exactly what I had been a methodology that often is overlooked and powerful. Of criticizing all the time about architecture and planning, so I opted to keep course, drawings along the way have really strengthened an anthropological approach to it. For me, space cannot be seen without these conversations as well. the human interactions that occur on it, or that construct it.

Introduction

I agree with many of you about Process is a constant battle of adjustments. We need to deliver at the same time as we try to develop our process, which makes it complex. I wish we would have had a more complete and thorough process as a team, as we tried to do at the beginning with a common methodology as well as complimentary ones that would have reinforced each other research a lot more, but so many objectives were conflicting: our ambitions as a group towards shared goals, our ambitions towards our partner, but also our personal ambitions towards our future career (not to talk about time constraints), which is the main reason why we are doing this master program. Still, we overall kept a relatively good balance between individual work and group work, which constraints of our convergent and divergent objectives demanded. But trying to reconcile all these different objectives has been a challenge. I think those tensions are unsolvable in a university context. No matter how much we want to try to emulate real work conditions, and have a strong praxis, at the end our academic context limits us. We can speak about real trans-disciplinary work all we want (not multidisciplinary, not interdisciplinary), which we don’t do enough, but I wonder if it’s possible to accomplish in school.

I was used to just “term-paper” style research papers, without any ethnography, or at least just minimal interviews. I wish that I would have pushed myself further from writing and more into visuals. I wish that our partner would have been more involved and accessible, but I don’t blame them, it’s just unfortunate that an organization that works so hard for the rights of so many people has so few resources. It’s also unfortunate that our topic which dealt with the outdoors began during the fall/winter season, where it’s difficult to observe and interview. Had we had the opportunity from Spring-Fall, the depth and breadth of the “people” piece would have been even more beneficial than what we have. I loved our long meetings, and I loved that everyone had different skills that supported and complemented everyone else. Collaboration was very easy going, and made for a great experience.

In the beginning I liked the free-form we had of all going out and exploring whatever lens we wanted to focus on. Then, towards the end of the semester we had a pow-wow session bringing some of our information together and I strongly believe this should have happened earlier in the process and more often. As Jess suggests, it does take more time, but is more fruitful. We learn a lot and quickly share knowledge that might otherwise stay in our individual computers/drives/ heads. This is where we find connections actively in one sitting and find what’s missing in our research as a collective. (Yes, our heads = drives = computers) The conversations I had with Rafael and, the vendor he introduced me to, Mari T, were enlightening. The relationship established by Rafael between the Vamos Unidos vendors and us has so much potential. In terms of a methodology, these should happen more often. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

GROUP THEORY

Introduction

THEORY From the very beginning informality presented both a an ontological challenge for this group. Our initial concern centered around how easy it was to throw around the word ‘informal(ity)’, while it was simultaneously very difficult to explain with any level of academic certainty. Some of us, having experienced a trip to Medellin Colombia knew that this word had a very powerful discursive nature to it. We saw how the ‘formal’ not only defined these spaces but also order them in such a way as to make them measurable, and ‘in need’ rather than self actualized sites of production (Illich). This discursive ‘branding’ allows for Medellin to become simultaneously the worlds most innovative city (“City of the,” ), while it forces areas of ‘informality’ into a centralized, market dependent economy; eliminating the smaller micro economies produced in those spaces through new regulations, licensing, and access to more ‘modern’ products. Naturally, our investigation of ‘(in)formality’ began as an exploration of the historiography of how this term was created, introduced academically, and used as a defining parameter of the everyday. The terms initial conception was during the 1970’s as the Chicago school of urbanism championed looking at cities as a set of relationships between community and individual, the nature of meaning and progress, and the relationships between patterns and processes of urban life (AlSayyed, 2004). Realized through a series of conversations around the movement of laborers to cities in the 1950’s and 60’s, this trend was codified by W. Charles Lewis as a set of two opposite sectors: the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. As multiple theorists visited these spaces and engaged with prior theories, two primary schools of thought emerged: the Structuralists and the the Legalists. Structuralists, composed of the International Labor Organization and advocates for the ‘informal’ economy, argue that it is the role of the state to work to mitigate the cleavages between the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economy in the realm of social and economic composition. This was contrasted by the Legalists who pointed towards state intervention in a free market economy as a barrier to inclusion by those utilizing the ‘informal’ sector as a survival mechanism. This line of thought emphasized what Legalists saw as the inherent entrepreneurialism occurring within the ‘informal’ sector. This theories leading proponent, 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Hernando de Soto, is still considered by some to have created the driving theory around the ‘informal’ sector, and much of the development happening in third world cities is driven by strict adherence to this type of theorization as it has been easy to co-opt into Neoliberal political-economic strategies. As these theories of ‘informality’ competed for prominence a series of international scholars began to address the inherent problems presented by a Western World analysis, by the Chicago School, of a ‘Third World’ space. Ann Varley, in her work, “A “Post-Colonial’ Informality?, offers us a survey of the authors, in many cases newly interested Architects and Urban Planners, engaged in this work from a perspective of those who actually located themselves within these spaces. These authors addressed many varied topics from ‘Post-Colonial’ theories of urban ‘informality’, ‘Informality’ as Resistance, to the Ambivalent Dualisms of ‘informality’ as a concept; and explored seminal issues such as the lack of resident voices in the academic work around ‘informality’, how these theories often gave life to old stereotypes, and how many planning ‘solutions’ within this realm are out of line with the actual desires of people residing in these places. As ‘informality’ studies advanced, new theories were needed to explain these spaces of within the context of more ‘developed’ western economies/cities. Sassia Sasken has taken up the gauntlet of writing about the ‘informality’ located within American ‘World Cities’, such as New York City. Sasken locates ‘informality’ as a set process, without explicitly stating this (a major theoretical move within the field), by describing its action through the economic polarization of New York City into two cities: one of wealth and the other of poverty. The expansion of both of these populations creates a set of forces that move lower income individuals towards taking advantages of niches outside the ‘informal’ economy. These niches are usually formulated around the production and distribution, to the more wealthy ‘formal’ economy, of low cost products that generate the opportunities needed for these individuals to survive. Sasken also explores how the consumer demands of the ‘formal’ economy create these opportunities. FInally, and most formative for our work, we have the theories of Colin McFarlane. McFarlane argues explicitly that (in)formality are a series of processes used by intersecting agencies, individuals, and sectors to generate certain kinds 00

Introduction

of relationships. He argues that these processes can be forces of Speculation, Composition, and Bricolage. This type of analysis allows us to move away from defining (in)formality as inherent characteristics of people and places, which clearly run up against a plethora of contradictions within the urban form. McFarlane’s work shows us that (in)formality is performed, reveals itself through crisis, has a shifting political nature, and by this framing necessitates that we dispense with the false dichotomies of poor/wealthy, ‘Third World/’First World’, productive/unproductive, and good/bad, often associated with the concept of the (in)formality. See Foldout to see the theory map or visit our website: www.cargocollective. com/everydayurbanities

References: AlSayyed, N. (2004). Urban informality as a new way of life. In A. Roy & N. AlSayyed (Eds.), Urban InformalityOxford: Lexington Books. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkley: University of California Press.City of the year. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/ad/ cityoftheyear Devlin, T. R. (2011). ‘An area that governs itself’: Informality, uncertainty and the management of street food vending in New York City. Planning Theory Sage, Retrieved from http://plt.sagepub.com/content/10/1/53 Illich, I. (n.d.). Toward a history of needs. Retrieved from http://www.primitivism. com/needs-illich.htm. Sassen, S. (2005). The global city: Introducing a concept.The Brown Journal of World Affairs, XI(2), Retrieved from http://www.saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publications/The-Global-City-Brown.pdf

CH. 01

CLAIMING SPACE

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

ROOSEVELT AVENUE TODAY Roosevelt Avenue in Queens is a diverse immigrant neighborhood. Walking through it is a wonderful experience full of a multiplicity of aromas, music, flavours, feelings and textures. Businesses range from mystical religious places, to quinceñeras birthday planning stores, from Bollywood video shops, to Guatemala’s famous Pollo Campero. From Jackson Heights to Corona Plaza you travel through many parts of the world just by walking on this street. It’s representative of a New York full of different ethnicities living in American territory but sharing and reproducing their country’s folklore and traditions on every corner. The seven train passes by on elevated tracks, creating a disruptive noise that interrupts every conversation, but seems to be naturalized by the inhabitants of the commercial corridor. Many things happen on Roosevelt Avenue, this street tells many stories. This lively street is always full of pedestrians, street vendors, drunks, children, mothers, and strangers. Roosevelt Avenue between 82nd Street up to 104th Street is a public place that highlights many important issues that are being dealt with today in urban scapes. There is a growing tension between the existing public space and the expansion of Eighty-second Street Business Improvement District (BID), called the Jackson Heights-Corona BID. BIDs are private-public associations that, by a collective, mandate extra tax agreed to by members (property and business owners), decide what can be done in these spaces, usually with the idea of “beautifying” space and making the area safe. This generally means to get rid of undesirable people, unfair competition, and garbage, as well as to create spaces for leisure, transit, and the promotion of development and quality of life. This last characteristic is clearly the idea of a few who decide what “quality of life” is. Because of its private-public character there is a subtle implied sense of privatization and a concomitant commodification of public space1. Much of the existing population in Roosevelt Avenue, such as the street food vendors and several of the local small business owners, do not support this initiative and believe it will bring displacement and gentrification to the neighborhood. Many academ1 Generating a greater discussion about the role of the government and public sector in the cities nowadays, and bring a greater debate revolting around the problematic and disappearance of the public spheres.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

ics who study urban issues have also disagreed with the BID model (Zukin, 1995; Low, 2006; Kohn, 2004); some even say it is a symbolic materialization of neoliberal growth (Robles-Duran, 2013), that creates exclusionary enclaves and a restriction of access of public space or, as Sharon Zukin (1995:36) suggests, a tool for “social stratification”. These commentators have argued that these private partnerships affect the potential for ideas of public space to be seen as a democratically oriented space. On the other hand, some business owners believe that the BID is the only way to protect their businesses from the consequences that might bring the construction of a mall at Willits Points in Roosevelt Avenue at 126th street, and also as a way of dealing with the prostitution and crime that plagues the street. Moreover, many city planners and policymakers have seen the BIDs to be a successful tool to finance supplementary public services to specific areas (Furman Center, 2007). The tension between these two groups therefor makes for an interesting case study to understand how public space2 is being negotiated nowadays.

CASE STUDY The following ethnography will look specifically at the area of Roosevelt Avenue between 82nd street to Corona Plaza in 104th street (see map No.1). Through the lens of informal urbanities, and more specifically through the focus of street food vending, it will try to understand the friction between the regulated and control entities of public space, and the emerging informalities within them. There is always an ongoing negotiation and reshaping of public space; thus how do these struggles construct new meanings to reveal and redefine public space today? And as the entities of control and regulation govern our public spaces, where do the informalities fit into the city? Informalities are crucial to comprehend the contradiction and negotiation of public space. Informalities will be thought of not with an economic lens (as they are usually thought of) but as covering more aspects of our everyday life. They 2 Notions of what Sharon Zukin (1995) calls “transactional spaces” (cyberspace and telecommunication) are not the focus of this work, which focuses only on public space in the geographical physical sense.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

are, in other words, all those actions (social, economical and political) made by the people in response to the regulated entities and institutions. Through the notions of Michel De Certeau’s (1984) strategies and tactics, informalities will be defined as the tactics and formalities will be defined as the strategies (see Diagram No. 1). This separation between the formal and informal is done only as a matter of clarity, as it encompasses a highly complex dialectic between the two poles and an inseparable and intrinsic relation within them. How are street food vendors negotiating their access to public space in Roosevelt Avenue and how, through their visibility, do they challenge some notions of public space? In New York City there is not a concrete number of how many vendors exist nowadays3; there is also the assumption that the majority are immigrants, and many are consider undocumented by the State. James Holston (1999) talks about insurgent citizenship and how many citizens fight for their legitimate status to be in public space and make claims for those spaces. According to Neil following Holston’s insurgent citizenship: is particularly visible in the case of documented and undocumented immigrants [and street food vendors] who, because they occupy the 3 Entities such as the Street Vendor Projects make an estimate of 12,557 vendors including merchandise, first amendment, food vendors. 6,000 of those are estimated to be unlicensed.

Diagram No. 1 Explaining the difference between strategies and tactics

126 STREET - 82 STREET = APPROX. 3.5 KM (2.2 MILES)

Map No. 1 Study Area. The map shows the proposed BID, the existing BID, important sites and institutions in the area and the development of Willets Point which is crucial to understand the expansion of the BID.

IMPORTANT LANDMARKS AND INSTITUTIONS IN CONSTRUCTION WILLETS POINT DEVELOPMENT

FLUSHING MEADOWS CORONA PARK

PROPOSED BID- JACKSON HEIGHT-CORONA PLAZA EXISTING BID 82 ST QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART

STREET VENDORS ARTHUR ASHE STADIUM

NY HALL OF SCIENCE PARK OF THE AMERICAS

WILLETS POINT DEVELOPMENT PLAN

PUBLIC LIBRARY

CORONA PLAZA-103 ST

CITI FIELD STADIUM- METS

126 STREET & ROOSEVELT AVEN UE

114 STREET & ROOSEVELT AVENUE

111 STREET & ROOSEVELT AVENUE

CORONA PLAZA 104 STREET & ROOSEVELT AVENUE

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

fringes of citizenship, challenge legal and normative conventions about the openness and accessibility of public space. (Neil, 2010:5 emphasis added)

NYC Department of City Planning. Source: MapPluto 2011

Community Board 3 Roosevelt Avenue Community Board 4

Commercial Use

48.3% INCOME SUPPORT

58.3% HISPANIC ORIGIN

69.3% RESIDENTIAL USE

14.1% TOTAL COMMERCIAL USE

These characteristics help to see the relation between informalities and control over public space and how it is being challenged and (re)negotiated. Whether they are grassroots organizations or everyday practices the insurgent forms challenge the strategies and the power entities and “disrupt established histories” (Holston, 1999:48). By showing the friction between the formalized city and informal everyday life, we can see the struggles and negotiations in pubic collective identity (Zukin, 1995). This presents a series of questions in relation to Roosevelt Avenue: how are these negotiations made in the everyday life? What do street food vendors do in order to govern their spot in public space? What tactics do they embrace to trick the strategies? And where does theory and everyday practice meet?

THE PROPOSED JACKSON HEIGHT CORONA BID

Figure No. 1 Roosevelt Avenue Separates Community Board 3 and Community Board 4.

New York City has the most BIDS in the United States, and in Queens there are 12 existing BID models. From those 12 BIDs, the 82nd Street BID, which has been

AREA OF STUDY 1.92 KM (1.19 MILES)

ELMURST HOSPITAL NEW PLAZA- 90 ST. PS 307

PS 19 COMMUNITY PLAYGROUND

JUNCTION BLVD-97 STREET

82 ST BID

100 STREET

JUNCTION BLVD & ROOSEVELT AVENUE

90 STREET - ELMHURST AVE

82 STREET & ROOSEVELT AVENUE

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

functioning since 1990, has a plan to expand all the way to 104th street1 -called the Jackson Height Corona BID-. This plan is still not official and it is in the first stage where it needs the approval from the urban planning commission. To do this, they need the signature of more than 50 per cent of affected businesses to agree on the proposal. Till this date, they are still collecting signatures and looking for approval, though the process was going to be due in October 2013; tensions between those in favored and those who oppose the expansion have delayed the decision until early 2014 (but also, most of the local business have opposed to the plan2). The pilot project to clean the streets in Roosevelt Avenue has been an initiative from the local government. It has been an initiative to show how the BID will work3, and campaigns for a cleaner and safer street (see below Pictures). Over the last six months there have been people sweeping, removing graffiti and garbage collecting to show the results on the mockup. New plazas have also started to pop up throughout the Avenue. Colorful chairs and tables, planters with flowers and trees, rocks separating the street from the invented plaza are some of the elements used to “beautify” and mark the spaces (see pictures below). The plazas are a project from the Department of Transportation (DoT) that have been popping all over the city, multiplying and generating the same aesthetic. Nonetheless they have open spaces for interaction and community gathering that the residents and neighbors seem to use often. These initiatives have changed the character of the neighborhood and have also been the flagship projects of the BID. As Devlin (2011) suggests, the streetscape design used by the BIDs is one of the most common strategies to keep the undesired people from frequenting the public space. These strategies include: planters, surveillance, and private security. 1 The original plan was up to 114th Street, but was narrowed it down, as Seth Taylor explained, “it was after they had done some further research that they thought the area between 104th street to 114th street wasn’t prepared for a BID.” Interview November4, 2013. This meant, for him, that there was not enough traffic and the area was not so dense. 2 Interview with Pablo October 16, 2013. The names of the people interviewed were changed to protect their identity. 3 The money from the pilot project has come out the city council’s discretionary budget.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

Even though in the BID’s website the street vendors appear to be one of the stakeholders, as Maria, a street vendor, says: it wasn’t until later that they were taken into consideration to be made part of the plan. This was mostly due to a protest held in Corona Plaza September 2013 against the BID (Barlet, 2013). While some may point toward the contentions in the community environment, the expansion of the BID has arguably helped local businesses and street food vendors to organize around a collective issue. It has also helped a disjunctive community get together and create a social infrastructure.

BEFORE GETTING INTO THE STUDY A BRIEF EXPLANATION ON HOW PUBLIC SPACE IS THOUGHT OF TODAY The BIDs have opened the space to discuss the future of public space. Though many of these issues have been questioned before, the BIDs have crystalized and made tangible the private-public partnerships that may lead to the disappearance of a democratically public space. The importance of understanding the implication of what it means for a space to have a privatepublic partnership can be seen through different scholars (Zukin, 1995; Low and Smith, 2006; Kohn, 2004; Holston, 1999), but mostly through the work of David Harvey. Harvey (2012) has argued how the neoliberalism has created cities that revolve around the idea of commodification, consumerism, economy of the spectacle and that this ideas have created a type of city that usually response to the private interests. The new urban political economy has thus revolt around the idea of privatization or quasi-privatization of public space.

Picture No. 1: BID’s Campaign New plazas such as the 90 Street plaza are popping through out the city

Privatization, commodification and securitization are some of the key concerns today in the social sciences as they create certain “public” spaces but more importantly they produce or promote particular social, political and economic relations. It is through these ideas that theories of public space are now moving on. These ideas are all intertwined and usually feed on the other to be able

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

to exist. They bring to the table greater discussions about the importance of democratically public spaces and the importance of the public sphere.

Privatization of Public Space The privatization of public space is a big topic in today’s analysis of the public. Setha Low and Neil Smith say, “the struggles for pubic space today has everything to do with contemporary debates of pitting the public against the private, and vice versa” (Low and Smith, 2006:14). Low (2006) emphasizes how the private interest has been taking over public space in many ways, such as park conservancies, gated communities and BIDs – that is why it is pertinent to understanding the current situation in Roosevelt Avenue-. Lofland (1998) has named the phenomenon the “private city” and has shown how most American Cities since World War II have been designed with these ideals in mind (also alluding to securitized city). Many have also highlighted how privatization reinforces segregation and exclusion. (Kohn, 2004; Holston, 1999) These studies therefore emphasize how privatization is an uneven and antidemocratic stance that is just in the hands of a few rather than represented by “collective responsibility for social production” (Katz, 2006:106). The privatization of the city cannot be understood without referring to the historical political situation in the United States that configures this model. It started from the privatization of public services in the 19th century, but recently has grown to conquer other spaces in the city such as public space. In New York City, the Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) emerged with the 1961 Rezoning Resolution that allowed developers to built higher buildings if “public space” was given to the city, creating a transformation in the public space. On the other hand under the Reagan’s presidency with the lack of funds from the American federal government to the cities in it led to the private-public partnership as the strategy to claim the economical loss. From the appearance of the POPS to the BIDs legalized in New York in the early 80’s, the control of public space in the city has changed from the government to the hands of private corporations and individuals. In New York City, after the 9/11 attacks, the ideas of securitizations took on another dimension. The “zero tolerance” policies, which have increased urban policing and private security safety (Robles-Duran, 2013) have generated 00

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

a lucrative private security business. This privatization happens by two factors, on the one hand there is an economic reason on the other hand, the private sector wants to have a greater influence in urban space. As Low (2006) says, “these ‘physical’ tactics, though, are bolstered by ‘legal and economic’ strategies in which private interests coopt the public, placing public goods in the hands of a private corporation or agency.” (p. 83) Therefore, privatization has made many of public spaces completely beholden to corporations, creating a commodification of these spaces.

Commodification of Public Space The commodification of public space thus goes hand in hand with privatization. With all the space being privatized it seems as if the city is being sold to private individuals and corporations (Kohn, 2004; Leeman and Modan, 2010). Culture has also been seen as a commodity tool to control cities and a way to advertise and market a space (Zukin, 1995; Leeman and Modan, 2010). Robles-Duran (2013) goes even further and argues that cities and public spaces are instruments of the neoliberal project where the only outcome is the productivity of urban space in a profitable manner for corporations. This commodification of public space has a greater impact in creating templates, monotonous lifestyle cities around the neoliberalism ethic project (Harvey, 2012:14) which most of the times erases the cultural and embedded meanings of a place. The commodity of public space thus is created by the privatization of public space. They start as a private good provided by the state, but as they start to get overcrowded they change into a commodified space. Once they are congested a private organization manages and maintains the space creating an exclusive and restricted area (Webster, 2007).

Picture No. 2: Sitting and resting Benches are one of the most obvious control material infrastructure we see in our urban landscape, designed specifically for a certain temporality, the benches are for just sitting and not for sleeping.

Shifting responsibility to a private or corporate partner, cities have reinforced their inability to govern and have started a commitment with the corporations that is very difficult to break. Not only from an economical position, but also mostly because in the imaginary of the citizens government can never perform a high quality and reliable service or a material infrastructure. Securitization has been the pillar for these ideas to be constructed upon.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Sanitation makes part of securitization and usually comes also with notions of beautification. Sanitation and securitization are key concepts when looking at what is happening in Roosevelt Avenue. The campaign for the expansion of the BID relies completely with the idea of a “cleaner” and “safer” space. What that means, continues to puzzle many, but the consequences it might have in a long term, can be those similar to the Manhattan’s midtown and financial district BID cluster that have created purely monotonous, commodified and securitized spaces.

Securitization of Public Space Many authors have talked about control and securitization in the cities. Foucault’s ideas of the panopticon (1975) have shaped our own idea of cities as a controlled environment. Many authors have used his writings to show the different forms of control that are being exercised in today’s spaces. From the multiplicity of surveillance cameras and police force (Blitz, 2004; Katz, 2006; Davis, 1990); to urban enclavization and gated communities as spaces of segregation in cities (Davis, 1990; Low, 2006; Holston, 1999); the idea of fear as a tool of designing our cities seems to be the path taken today by most city governments. As Davis writes, “there is a tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort” (Davis, 1990:224). Many of these security initiatives have led to segregated and privatized spaces. These control mechanisms are exemplified through the use of the built environment, showing how influential the material infrastructure is in our social relations and as Lyn H. Lofland (1998) argues it is one of the most successful tools of regulation.

The Rhythm of the Conceived, Perceived and Lived Spaces All these categories show how public space is now being built and many of the consequences the privatization, commodification and securitization of public space has. But how is this being materialized in the physical world? What role, for example, does infrastructure play in the creation of public space? As Lofland (1998) argues, the built environment shapes us and determines what we are able to do in space: what interactions occur and with whom. This might be an example of environmental determinism (Rapoport, 1980:26), as it shows

Every time there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. (Lefebvre 1992, p.15 )

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

the importance of the built environment as a space to create interactions. Most importantly it selects what those interactions might be and with whom, in designing spaces of inclusion and exclusion (Zukin, 1995; Kohn, 2004). As Amos Rapoport (1980) suggests the built environment is a setting for human activities: “such settings may be inhibiting of facilitating, they constrain choices selectively, and a particular setting may be facilitating to the extent of acting as a catalyst or releasing latent behavior” (p. 27). That is, according to Rappaport, the built environment doesn’t necessarily determine, but rather “facilitates” human activities. However, it is not only the built environment that decides every activity that happens within it. There is an inextricable relation between social actions and the physical space (Torre, 1996:249). Individuals, institutions and groups can organize and shape the public space, having a great impact on the city. These organized social interactions make up the social infrastructure that exists within a city in order for it to work. For instance, the everyday tactics done by many street food vendors are ways of challenging the system and creating new dynamics. These dynamics often result in transformations at a greater scale, disrupting the formalized categories in urban space (Crawford, 1995). In The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre (1974) he addresses how space comes into being and he pinpoints three types of spaces: conceived, perceived and lived. The conceived is the mental space where the dominant power orders and rearranges space. The perceived is the material-physical world, which is filled with social formations. The lived space is the social space where meanings, appropriations and complex symbolization are put into play. Each of these spaces works simultaneously and inseparably to create a given space or spaces. Thus it is the combination of the social space, the physical space and the mental space that make up space itself. The ideas of Lefebvre, Rapoport, Torre and others thus allow the observation that there is an intrinsic relation between the material and social infrastructure and the social-political structures that determines any given space. The importance of this intrinsic relation of Lefebvre’s spatial triode anticipates Rapoport’s (1980) and Loflands‘s (1998) point on the built environment as

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

an influential factor in our relationships, but also highlights how the power social actions affect designed spaces and indeed suggests the possibility of new designs. Who decides how a space is shaped becomes one of the biggest factor in controlling space, but also and more importantly in governing social interactions. Public space therefore, cannot be thought of without the idea of power relationships: who has access, what should it look like, who should create it, and who should use it, are a series of question which always brings up the factor of negotiation, exemplifying the power structures within it.

NEGOTIATIONS ON ROOSEVELT AVENUE TODAY These negotiations go beyond the problematic of the expansion of the BID and the street vendors. To truly understand how street vendors negotiate their access to public space, we need to understand how appropriation comes into play. Appropriation of space is an everyday practice. The formalized is always being challenged and transform, the spaces are created in the present, and the material infrastructure that was once built with a certain activity inscribed in it, can be a field of exploration and intended accidents that the different individuals construct with their ideals of place. Appropriation is a way of changing an existing space and embedding it with new meanings and uses (Getreuer-Kargli, 2012:169), it is a spatial practice that challenges the existing nature and modifies it with human needs and possibilities (Lefebvre, 2004). Informalities are all about appropriations. As Devlin (2011) comments, â&#x20AC;&#x153;informalities itself comes to operate as a mechanism of governance.â&#x20AC;? (p.55) Some of these appropriations are more noticeable; others make part of those invisible characters of a place. The visible appropriations can be spatially documented and are re-interpretations of the existing. With the construction of cer tain material infrastructure city spaces have acquire a variety of loose spaces or insurgent public space (Franck, 2007; Franck, 2011; Hou, 2012; Pask, 2010). The 00

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

emergent spaces have opened the possibility for citizens to appropriate space however they want to. They have challenge the predetermine activity of that space and inscribed a new meaning. These tactics of appropriation are seen throughout Roosevelt Avenue. The elevated tracks that support the train and the street infrastructure has created concrete â&#x20AC;&#x153;islandsâ&#x20AC;? of loose space that have been taken and shaped by the citizens or city entities to host different activities. Some of these spaces have been appropriated by the city with the creation of plazas, others by street vendors that have made a sidewalk restaurant that congregates the community to gather around tacos and quesadillas. The not so noticeable appropriations have to do with a social structure and a spatial form. These are designed by the interaction with the different actors, for example the police harassments, the friendships with store owners, the nebulous laws and regulations that are inscribed in the cart and the vendor, the language barriers, etc. help to appropriate a given space and start a negotiation. The invisible appropriations are lessons taught on the everyday. They depend on an intense knowledge of a specific place. They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rely on the physical or the material infrastructure to exist. They are symbolic actions that establish a new world of possibilities. Appropriations of space are ongoing negotiations with the formalized, with the informal and with the present. There are various negotiations and forces that generate conflicts and ties in the community. These give greater insight into how space is being negotiated but also into how it is lived and constructed. Through three lenses - cultural negotiations, negotiations of power and conflict, navigating the (in)formal - the work will describe the various struggles, the different actors and the individual tactics a person or group embraces in order to belong to and build an urban place.

Cultural Negotiations: an ensemble of the past with the dreams of the future in a creation of the present.

Picture No. 3: Cultural Appropriations Smells, Noises and Appropriations in Roosevelt Avenue

Belonging is different to everyone; in an immigrant life belonging is a complex state that goes beyond the idea of citizenship and identity (Yuval-Davis, 2007 in Viteri, 2011). Belonging creates a spatial relation where memory, history, 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

tradition and food play a great role in building space. Cultural negotiation of space – is the result of the exchange between the former territory with the cultural background of a person- is thus important in reading public space in an immigrant neighborhood. People make space and reproduce it according to their origin and their ideas, but also adopt and play around with the existing features of a space to create places of belonging. The Roosevelt Avenue commercial corridor presents a complex cultural negotiation where the multiple identities are connected in an intricate condition that creates places of belonging. The nostalgic idea of homeland in an immigrant neighborhood allows for a recreation and re-assembly of the public space. This nostalgic notion comes from the impossibility of returning to their country of origin (whether actual or imagined) that impregnates every aspect of the immigrant’s life (Vitari, 2011). Cultural traditions have to be contextualized into the new territory. Whenever there is a different cultural demonstration in space ideas, the idea of insurgent citizenship becomes clearer, “the new spaces of citizenship that result are especially the product of the compaction and reterritorialization in cities of so many new resident with histories, cultures, and demands that disrupt the

Pedro is Mexican. He sells tortas (sandwiches) in a food truck decorated with symbols and shields from Mexican soccer teams. He is all about soccer. He started working on the streets after an accident he had with his right knee that took him out of the restaurant kitchens. Because of the accident, he wasn’t able to find a job, so a friend lent him some money and he started selling tortas on the fields. Every Sunday he would go on his bike and sell 15, then 30, and then 40 sandwiches. As the business grew, Pedro decided to buy a pushcart, partnering up with his friend. After his pushcart was stolen in the parking lot he left it in every night, and after many tensions with his friend, he decided to start his own business- and soccer was not going to be out of the equation. He bought his food truck and built it himself. His menu refers to the Mexican teams, and you can have a torta from Los Pumas or C.F Monterrey. He has a huge television behind his grill where he plays soccer games from all over the world. He connects his 42” television to a stereo set making the volume so loud the seven train is hardly heard when it passes by. When there is no soccer playing, Pedro listens to salsa; his stereo lets him enjoy the sound of the timbal and piano without being disrupted. And because he has been there for such a long time, his neighbors don’t say anything about the noise either. He decided he was not going to buy a power plant to connect all his appliances (television, stereo, refrigerator, microwave), as he says “the train is loud enough, just imagine having a power plant!” So he decided to connect his truck to an apartment close by. He uses the subway elevated track material infrastructure to bring electricity and cable T.V. The dark green iron columns help to disguise the cables and whenever they are not connected they are just placed in the small hole the columns have. In the summer with the soccer season, he rents some chairs to put on the sidewalk for people to gather together to watch soccer and eat tortas. Pedro has created his own little place in the city, where soccer, community gathering, salsa dancing and knowledge are all shared while enjoying a gigantic sandwich..

Figure No. 2: It’s all about soccer and salsa Food Truck = community gahering

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

Ramiro sells Colombian arepas (a corn griddle cake), chuzos (shish kebab), and Colombiana, Manzana- famous Colombian soda pops. Ramiro had never made arepas before; he learned from a Colombian friend that introduced him to the business. He prepares his arepas, but buys his chuzos from a distributor in Astoria during the week, and goes out to sell every Thursday to Saturday from 11 at night till 6 in the morning. He likes working at night because the policeman doesn’t bother him at that time. He has been working on that corner with his portable gas grill ever since the policeman from a corner near 74th street displaced him. Because he hasn’t had a permit yet Ramiro gets harassed by policeman very often, a nightmare that will end soon because Ramiro won the lottery and soon will have a permit. He wants to name his new cart: Aracataca. Aracataca is the hometown of Colombian Nobel literature laureate, Gabriel García Márquez. Ramiro says he wants to teach about Colombian culture, not only to others, but also to his fellow Colombians that have forgotten where they are from; he sees himself like a cultural aggregate scattering Colombian culture in Queens and beyond. As he prepares the arepas and chuzos, the smell attracts different people from around the block. Shaking his head recurrently in a greeting manner, Ramiro acknowledges strangers and friends, but still longs for his homeland. He talks in his thick paisa accent about his dreams, his frustrations and his ideals. He used to be involved in the art scene back in Colombia and came to New York to follow a dream. And though he never saw himself selling arepas, today he enjoys what he does because he gets to meet and interact with different people from around the neighborhood.

normative and assumed categories of social life.” (Holston, 1999:50) The different histories, identities and traditions, disrupt the formal territory and inevitably demand for new urban spaces to be created. These challenges to the existing place always carry new forms of appropriation but also generate a new way of thinking about public space. Food and its vendors play an important role in this cultural production of space as it brings together a group with similar identities to unite and create history and a collective memory (Vitari, 2011), they help to create and re-create their culture and collective identity. In the case of food vendors and local restaurants the food distribution not only creates a link to their cultural background, but it also generates immigrant networks with the creation of small-local businesses that also promote informal functions of training systems and social infrastructures (Sanchez, 2013). There is thus a constant exchange of knowledge not only through the ways they to operate the streets but also through the products and food sold by each vendor.

Figure No. 4: From Colombia to Queens Culture aggregate of the streets

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

There is thus a sharing of knowledge that overpasses the political barriers and frontiers and helps other immigrants learn about the culture. This culture sharing in Roosevelt Avenue is one of its greatest assets. A majority of vendors learned how to make their own country’s food, proliferating their culture throughout the globe but have also learned to cook other country’s traditional foods: Mexicans learned how to make Ecuadorian tamales, Salvadorians learned how to make Colombian obleas (a typical dessert similar to a waffle made with caramel spread. Sharing cultural knowledge is therefore an important way of socializing, and in Roosevelt Avenue, everything has to do with a cultural representation. People are always bringing in their cultural identity to the space. An example of this how through 82nd Street to 104th Street, a predominant Latin-American population has built its place in relation to its background. Most of the signs are in Spanish, flags are displayed on light posts, on balconies, in windows, products from the countries are sold in the stores, famous food chains are seen throughout the Avenue, the smell of chuzos, fried chicken, tamales and hot chocolate fill the space. English is hardly ever heard, and salsa, corrido and norteña music is played on loud speakers that try to compete with the sporadic noise of the passing trains. The space is built in imaginaries of Latin America, but in American land- creating a new places that connects them to homeland. These connections go beyond the imaginaries, but are made physical in space. The smell of food is a reminder of home, but it is also a tactic used by many vendors to be noticeable. Some of the alternative modes of vending4 throw small pieces of pork to the improvised grill, to create a scent of BBQ, which attracts clients. The food sold comes also from different geographical spaces around the city and around the globe. The ecology of the street food vending thus becomes is a mixed network of cultural relations with the people’s origin and the present place. Oaxaca cheese made in New Jersey, Ecuadorian corn and cancha corn (typical from Peru) are brought frozen by ship and distributed in Queens, yucca is brought from Mexico and sold in fruits and vegetables carts. Here the food distribution works as a vehicle to create new social relationships that connect 4 Alternative modes of vending are mostly those vendors that don’t have a permit. They might have a license, but the mode of vending is usually one that is not regulated by city laws. This will be discussed in depth in the following sections.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

Diagram No. 3: Tensions and Appropriations of some Street Food Vendors Appropriations most of the times result on conflict. In this case the trucks used by the fruits and vegetables creates conflict with other street vendors, local governments and businesses. The extension of the fruits and vegetables creates conflict with other street vendors. The plastic used by some street vendors to cover themselves from the rain or snow creates continuous tension between vendors and businesses.

the space to different areas of the city but also to the world. This neighborhood has therefore learned to live with a variety of cultures. Though there are relations with other cultures -as explained earlier with the example of learning other foods from different places- usually the people gather and live together with the people from the same country and in that country people from the same region. In fact many of the Latin cultures donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t interact with one another. There are tensions between the different populations, mostly related to jobs and territories struggles. These tensions can be mostly heard through different comments individuals say about others, usually pointing out negative aspects. For instance, a group of Ecuadorians comments how the neighborhood has gotten worse since the Mexicans arrived. The Mexicans have supported the street vendors, which in the opinion of some Ecuadorians has made the area unsafe and dirty. Others also talked about the struggles between the Colombians and the Mexicans dealing with issues of drugs and comment how the neighborhood has declined because of these gang fights. Mexicans point out the bars and prostitutions near the Colombian area (closer to Jackson Heights in 80th Street). In fact, there was also a food vendor who showed us how he recognized the different populations just by their physiognomy and way of dressing. Knowing the differences and conflict between the residents also helps to understand how the space is being built up. Though there wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enough time to truly understand the tensions between the cultures and to know if they had to do with political, social, racial, economical conflicts and confrontations, it is important to highlight that these tensions exist and that make part of building space. The conflict is not only consequently limited by cultural differences; there is a lot of tension between the different actors that interact in public space as well, such as other street vendors and city authorities. In this neighborhood full of influences of many cultures, the connections go beyond the imaginary, where food and street food vendors play an important role in propagating the various cultures. This cultural exchange and cultural mergefrom food, to representations, to traditions- produces the space of Roosevelt Avenue. The cultural negotiations donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stand-alone; the conflict and power tensions produce a whole different layer that allow for certain social interactions to happen but also for space to be produced. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Diagram No. 4: Map of actors and their relations 00

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

Power and conflict negotiations: governing the right to the sidewalk Conflict between vendors is very common in Roosevelt Avenue and around New York City. As there is not much â&#x20AC;&#x153;freeâ&#x20AC;? space for the vendors, having a great location is such a great asset that it is usually passed from generation to generation. There is even a social understanding that a particular sidewalk is property of the vendor. Governing a street is a whole process of negotiations, but once you have control of a spot it is yours. There is a thin line of private-public use that usually is respected by the inhabitants. In the case of Roosevelt Avenue, the fruits and vegetables carts came after the street food vendors. This first conquering of the space, the entitlement that spot is yours, along with time on the street allows for a given vendor to have greater action. This creates a tension with those who arrive later, whether they are business owners or other street vendors. The tension grows even more by the ways a space is inhabited. The fruits and vegetables have made their spaces of sales larger than what the law allows them to by placing two tables close by and joining them with a flat surface. This is possible because the same person owns the permits of both carts. As time is an essential part in governing the sidewalk, having multiple stands is also a huge advantage. The fruit and vegetable stands, though position themselves later in the specific space, have acquire a lot of power as most of them have more than one permit. This has helped them fight the use of trucks-that are used for storage and transportation of the fruits and vegetables- and that has become one of the topics of negotiation with the BID. Apart from the appropriation of larger space, the fruits and vegetables vendors need trucks to supply them with produce everyday. These trucks are usually parked along Roosevelt Avenue just behind their stand. This tension between the different groups had not started if it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t for the expansion of the BID. Julissa Ferreras, the city council has a closer relation to the food processing carts, mostly because they have been there for such a long time, some, like Costanza who has seen the city council grow, has a close friendship with her.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

This relationship has given the food carts an advantage in the negotiation of the future with the BID’s expansion, but is has also created a tension with the other vendors. Some food carts have been meeting with the city council. Ferrara has expressed the discomfort of the parked trucks on the street, Constanza, who is s street food vendor, says that Julissa Ferreras, “will not take us out of our spot as long as the fruits and vegetables trucks are out of sight.” This has only been communicated to the food vendors and not to the fruits and vegetables salesmen, creating tension between the two groups. The local government want to remove the trucks from the streets arguing they are taking away parking for local vehicles. They also argue that the fruits and vegetables make more trash. The local authorities and some business owners also complain that they are not letting space for their stores to be supplied as the trucks are parked there from morning till night. Having another vendor close, not only takes away some of the clientele, but also might bring attention from the regulatory entities. This is why many of the street food vendors have encounters on a daily basis. Some argue that ever

Figure No. 5: Ecuador delicacies 27 years on the same corner

Selling Ecuadorian food- from pig’s head, to tripe, to corn to picada- Costanza passes her days in the same corner she set foot on over 27 years ago. She has seen the neighborhood change, seen how the Cuban place turned into a Colombian restaurant, how the Italians left for other neighborhoods, and how more tourists are now coming by. She has seen her smallest daughter grow up on that same sidewalk. From her first experience in a supermarket where she bought cat food instead of a can of tuna, Costanza has come a long way. She was the first vendor on that block and in that spot in NYC. She has fought for this spot many times and it is the same corner she has walked ever since she arrived in the United States. This spot is indeed an extension of herself. Mother of seven with no help from the father, Costanza has made a living selling food on the streets. She has never learned English, and as she says, she came here to work not to learn. She started selling tamales out of a small basket. At first she didn’t know how to make them and she called her mother for help. Back home she didn’t cook, she had help in her house that took charge of the household. Once she mastered the tamales she moved on with other Ecuadorian delicacies. It wasn’t easy, and as she remembers her first years, tears come down her checks. Police harassment was frequently, destroying her food and taking her to jail; but Costanza never gave up her corner. She traded the metal trays for disposable aluminum ones, just in case the police came the economic loss wouldn’t be so hard. She also developed a relationship with the police officers who have sent her to jail, and has gotten Chinese or McDonalds from them every time they caught her so she wouldn’t be hungry. She has fought for her recognition and has advocated for Roosevelt Avenue, going to the mayor’s office to argue and claim better services, sewage cleaning and waste pickups. The neighbors know her and everybody around passes by waving their hands or heads. Costanza sits patiently in a small bench every day waiting for people to come and try her food. As customers approach Constanza’s cart a big and welcoming smile that lightens her eyes appears in her face.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays? Maria has been selling nuts, churros, and chips for 20 years. She decided to start working on the street after several jobs as a waitress where sexual harassment from the customers was frequently. Maria learned how to make chips and nuts thanks to a Mexican compadre that taught her how to make them. She started in Jackson Heights, but was displaced by a police officer who later point out a possible corner she could sell, which is where she is currently. Though her first corner was much better, as there were more pedestrians, she decided she preferred not to have trouble with the authorities. Maria first started with her cart permit and hired a person that had a license; she would tell the policeman that he was her husband in order for her to be able to work with the cart. As she remembers, she said before that the police weren’t so strict and didn’t bother her that much. She has had tensions with her neighboring vendors, to the point that they have called the police just to accuse her of appropriating space. The plastic she sets every fall and winter next to her cart trouble some. She uses it as a tent to cover herself from the freezing cold and rain. The fruit vendors that are next to her usually assemble plastic when it rains, but attach them from to the signs of local businesses or to he urban material infrastructure. Going beyond the cart or stand limits is illegal, and you can get ticketed for it. In Maria’s case, because the plastic is tied up from her cart in the regular dimensions, she can make use of it. Nonetheless, she gets reprimanded. Maria tries to unite all the vendors, but she says that dealing with the fruits and vegetables stands has been complicated. Since they are there, she has noticed that the presence of the DoH is more frequent fining her for the 20 feet law that she breaks (as most of the vendors in Roosevelt Avenue). If things continue to be like this she thinks it is most likely that she will have to look for an alternative corner. The tensions between the other street vendors have just gotten worse every time, and she thinks that if they don’t unite as a collective group it will be very difficult to fight for their rights. Maria doesn’t give up though; she has recently joined advocating groups such as the Street Vending Project and Vendedores Unidos (a local group that started because of the BID expansion) and is one of the most active members in the area. She is willing to listen and to fight for her rights on the streets.

since the fruit vendors entered the street panorama the Department of Health (DoH) has come regularly increasing the probability of tickets and fines. The tension grows so strong between the vendors that some are even calling the police to come in order to accuse other vendors for misusing or abusing the public space. The reason a street vendor selects a particular area varies. It could be it was the only available spot in the street, proximity to their homes, recurrent pedestrian space, ties to the community, less regulatory entities control, etc. but once they are position on that spot an ongoing negotiation starts. Being on the streets is something you have to negotiate: with the community, the business owners, and the regulatory entities. One of the biggest challenges is dealing with police treatment and displacement. This is an ongoing game; whether the police give

Figure No. 6: Ecuador delicacies 27 years on the same corner

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

up or the vendors locates another sidewalk (usually, the police show the possible sidewalks and corners the vendors can inhabit) there is a constant interaction between the street food vendors and police force. In Roosevelt Avenue, the negotiation for a position in public space has different levels of complexities. Many vendors know that if they respect all the regulations the city has imposed on them, they wouldn’t be able to sell in this particular street5. This is a delicate topic and a current concern for the vendors because if the BID was to expand and if it wouldn’t want the street vendors in the sidewalks, it could by law, get rid of most of them. Also, the vendors have seen how the creation of the BIDs around the city has segregated them from selling on the streets: displacement by city regulation laws or from a more informal spatial management and control of public space (Devlin, 2011) - such as private police harassments, planters and plazas. Knowing that a possible displacement can occur has brought a lot of uncertainty to the street vendors and to the small local businesses. The small and local businesses have seen how rent is getting higher every time, have created certain tactics to be able to continue to sell on the Roosevelt Avenue. For example, the business sub-rent a small space in the same store so they can divide the rent and services costs. On a store you can find on the right side a business of party and stationary and on the left a mobile phones and computers store. Also, tables are placed on the sidewalk near the stores to sell fruits, juices, bread, or any other good. The expansion of the space or the division of the space are both tactics local businesses are doing to be able to keep with the high rent prices. This is why many have united creating groups such as RACA-Roosevelt Avenue Community Alliance- and Vendedores Unidos (Vendors United), two organized groups that have arouse from the intent plan of the Jackson Heights Corona BID. Many other residents have also joint the groups arguing that street vending is an alternative for them to get goods and food6 that adapts to their budget, 5 The regulation that doesn’t allow a vendor to be within 20 feet from a storefront, is a regulation that most vendors break (in Roosevelt Avenue). 6 The street food and fruits and vegetables don’t have tax, making the products less expensive. There is also a direct relation with the vendor that creates a space to bargain. The bargain usually happens with the fruits and vegetables stands. It is also pertinent to say that these stands do have very comfortable prices, but the freshness and quality of what is sold is very questionable.

Diagram No. 5: Time spend on the street The alternative modes of vending and the permit vendors have different schedules. The first set of vendors move around the city in a visible/invisible relation. The second set, are always in the same location and their spot on the street is identified as theirs by the other inhabitants.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays? “at three I have to get this little cart and move, don’t know where, but I have to move. Over there they don’t bother you, but here, uhh, it is prohibited. The ones that are ambulatory can’t sell here, what can I tell you, laws are laws”

but as a consumer said, “it also is to support my people.” The unity is only with the vendors that have a permit. In the negotiation of space, there is a hierarchy on who has a saying on what is to be done, and the alternative modes of vending (non-permit vendors) are low in the hierarchy scale. This does not mean they do not negotiate their access to public space, but their negotiation is more tactical.

Navigating the (in)formal: Understanding the everyday tactics

Diagram No. 7: Moving by the hour The everyday tactics are concern with time. Street food vendors without permits need to know at what time the police usually go by, at what time is the best time for selling, at what hour they should move. In this case, the vendors know that at 3 p.m they have to move from Roosevelt Avenue to other streets.

The formal, as explained before are all those strategies made by power entities, in this case the council city and other power entities. In New York there are many entities that control the street food vendors. The Department of Health, the police, Parks and Recreation, the Consumers Affairs and Environmental Control Boards, all have a saying on how, when, where and what street vendors can do. All these regulations are usually given to the cart, making it a mechanism of control. With all the regulations and permissions, many tactics emerge is counterattack of the strategies. Many of these new forces are not legal but are tactics that have sprouted due to the over regulated laws. The 3,100 caps on permits of street food vendors in New York have been the same ever since the Kosh administration in the early 80’s. This limited number has opened a black market for permit renting which is so common that is thought more of a secondary market. This permit distribution7-which some point to the veterans as being the source of the black market - are rented for exorbitant sums that go from 15,000 to 25,000 for a two year permit. The city, in the other hand, sells the permits for 200 dollars for a two years period. It later needs to be renewed but this renewal does not ask for the person with the permit to do it, but anyone can go in his or her name, this has made it easier for black market to continue happening. The limited cap has created this new type of market that has harmed the street food vendors adding an exaggerated additional cost. From all the interviews made to street vendors with permits, all of the vendors rented their permit from the black market. 7 The veterans do have priority in the waiting list and there are about 100 food-vending permits specifically for veterans.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

There was only one case, where a vendor had “won the lottery”, which meant he had won a spot with the city permit, and was doing all the process to legalize his place in the street. His name had been in the list ever since 19978. Before that permit, he had been vending without the obligatory city requirements being exposed to police harassment. The black market is more complex and it crosses many levels of illegality. In some cases, the permits from the black market have been cloned and the same permit is multiplied through any of the boroughs. The permits city process is different and very time consuming. First, there is not an option as there aren’t any spots open and the waiting list already has more than 2,080 people waiting to be call. But if by any chance you had registered your name and win the lottery, you will enter a process that is very time consuming and adds other layers and cost to the business. The process itself might not be that stressful, but having to deal with all the regulations concerning the cart, the spot, the parking lot, the transportation creates another level of preoccupation. The permits are only for the cart; there is another step to get the license, which is for the right for an individual to sell food on the street. The license is not very difficult to acquire ever since the Bloomberg administration allowed making the process with an IRS number and not a social security number. This has made it easier for many vendors to find jobs. Nonetheless, there are many regulations around the license, the vendors have to have it in a visible place, falling to do so, will conclude in a ticket (even though they present it and show it to the policeman later). For you to be able to acquire a license you need to register and pass the food-handling exam (Cost $53.00 US dollars) and then pay $10 dollars for non-process food, and $50 for process food, which needs to be renewed every two years. There is a difference between the vendors with a permit and the vendors that don’t have one. The vendors that have permits are in the same spot everyday and have a constant schedule. The ice cream carts are probably the only 8 The waiting list nowadays is for more than 2,080 people. People on the list are sometimes family members, this is not only to increase the probability of winning the lottery, but also as the black market has gotten to be such a great business, families are aiming to acquire permits to rent.

“They therefore arrange themselves accordingly, internalizing the variegated geography of anti-vending sentiment and effectively policing themselves... the geography of street food vending in New York is the consequences of innumerable episodes of individual conflicts and selective enformcement; it is an urbanism produced informally through techniques of intimidation, harrasment, discipline and evasion.” (Devlin, 2011)

Diagram No. 6: From one corner to another The street vendors without permits learn from experiences from the everyday where they can be. In this case, the vendor moves from one spot to the next depending on the hour (in rush hour she moves closer to the subway station). After many days and problems with the police, she notices it is better to cross the street south of Roosevelt Avenue where there is another police precinct is in charge that is not around as often as the other one.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

Carolina, an obleas vendor, moves around the public space looking for a good location to sell, but hiding from the police and the authorities. She pushes her laundry cart every afternoon until she reaches her usual spot. She tries not to move that much because she has a limp in her left leg that prevents her from bending her knee; this incapacity has made her look for different ways of earning a living. She moves through space in a game of visible-invisible that is very recurrent for many mobile street vendors and immigrants. She started not very long ago, but already has had some encounters with police and other street food vendors. Whenever the police approach her, she tries different tactics. She first talks in English, as she said it was a way of respecting the officer, but at the same time it’s a way of showing the police officer that she has been living here for a while. She says many of them don’t like it when people speak Spanish, and many are racists. Then, she will show a picture of her son who is a police officer in Vermont. This sometimes will help her to not get fined. But it hasn’t been the case lately, as one specific officer has constantly threatened her to leave the space. Carolina sells in a vibrant street where street vendors are not allowed; it is one of the few streets in Queens that is restricted from street vending. She is thus obliged not only to find tactics to keep out of the eyes of the police, but also to govern a spot in the merchant association street. She usually gives obleas to owners of the shops and builds a friendship with them. Lately, as the police have harassed her, she has decided to move south, crossing Roosevelt Avenue, where there is another police precinct that is not as strict as the one just across the street. After her constant confrontations, and her everyday living she now positions herself in a public space that is visible to the customers, but not as risky for her.

vendors with permits that are can move around in Roosevelt Avenue. Their negotiation to access space is completely different to those vendors that don’t have a permit. As these vendors have a legal status in the street, the regulated institutions are also different to those that have an alternative mode of vending. Having all the required permissions to be in the street enables them to feel certain belonging in space, but not necessary reduces the problems and tensions that street food vendors have to deal with in an everyday basis. The other set of vendors don’t have a permit9. For them being in the street is riskier. Because their relation to space and people is different being able to create a trust relation is more difficult, there weren’t many interviews that were made to the people of this sector and a conversation dynamic was the method that worked to be able to understand their negotiation with space10. 9 The mobile vendors don’t have a permit, but some do have the license. Others don’t have either. 10 There was only one interview that was made.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

The alternative modes of vending in Roosevelt Avenue are made by women in most of the cases that usually have a supermarket or laundry cart that is pushed around throughout different spots during the day11. They sell tamales in huge kitchen pots, hot chocolate, obleas, corn and grilled chuzos made from pork, beef or chicken. They create portable kitchens made from dispensable aluminum trays or pots were they put the hot charcoal and a grill on top to start cooking or they have everything prepared in containers that fit the cart (usually huge pots with lids). Only two male could be identified as non-permit food vendors and they have a more static cart. Their presence on the streets exposes them to many risks, but selling is another way to generate an income and/or the only option they can find to be able to sustain. There is some recurrent patterns with the alternative modes of vending, though they have more risk to be in a noticeable space, it seems that the risk is taken to a secondary level and a visible location is preferred to attract clients. This is true to most street vendors that position themselves in recurrent pedestrian spaces such as subways stations to have more opportunity to sell. The nonpermit street vendors’ mobility depends mostly in schedules and it is something that is learned in the everyday practice. Many non-permit vendors position themselves only when there is lunchtime (in the case of the 82 street that with the Elmhurst Hospital) others decide to be there in rush hours when people are going or coming from work, and others have learned to move around space avoiding police and other regulated entities. Rush hours in this particular area start at five in the morning and in the afternoon starts from four in the afternoon to eight at night. The time patterns are very important to really understand how the alternative modes of street vending relate to space. In fact, time is very important to understand the tactics that happen in the everyday. As one vendor explained, they know that in the weekends at three in the evening the police go through Roosevelt Avenue, that is why at that time they move south to another street and come back once they know the police have passed by. In other cases, the community will help them by yelling “van” to advise them the police is near. In this case they have to move fast and hide. Their way of selling gives the freedom to move around if the business is not good, in that 11 This is true for this particular area and through the lens of food vending only. There are many multiple vendors in Roosevelt Avenue that move around restaurants and stores selling merchandise.

Diagram No. 8: Social Infrastructure The expansion of the BID brings many questions to the table about the future of public space and street vendors in Roosevelt Avenue. As it has been a controversial project it has also brought the citizens to claim their right to the city organizing around a common topic and picturing a future.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

particular street or corner, and to have a flexible schedule but they also have a greater risk of being caught by the police. Because this form of vending is illegal in New York City, getting caught might end up in jail. This relation with visible invisibility is another way of negotiating and navigating through space that connects many of the social relations and networks created in public space. Interestingly, the mobile street vendors are located in what seem to be more regulated areas such as the pop-up plazas, Junction Boulevard and the existing 82nd Street BID. This could be because in those regulated areas there arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t any street vending competition that might give them a better chance of selling, or it could be that there is tension whenever a non-permit vendor gets near a permit vendor, it also can be that because this spaces have created their own services, such as garbage cleaning and some might have private police, the authorities donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bother to go there as there is someone already working in that area. This relation could not be seen through the work and are all assumptions. What could be seen is that there werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t many spaces where permit and non-permit vendors work in the same area. As Devlin comments, street food vending navigate and position themselves in space accordingly, internalizing the variegated geography of anti-vending sentiment and effectively policing themselves... the geography of street food vending in New York is the consequences of innumerable episodes of individual conflicts and selective enforcement; it is an urbanism produced informally through techniques of intimida tion, harassment, discipline and evasion (Devlin, 2011:59), I would add, that navigating the (in)formal is a learned experience from the everyday.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

CLAIMING SPACES: NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO CREAT PUBLIC PLACE Holston (1999) makes a great point when he states that city design has always focused in fixing the future and preserving the past, but has always failed to see the present. Planning has worked with the idea of a conflict-less society (Holston, 1999). Understanding the (in)formalities is then crucial to truly understand alternative modes of constructing a future, but to understand the conflicts that are inherent in every society. The expansion of the 82nd Street BID will bring huge changes in the way the population interacts with the public space. Many of the cultural value that is now inscribed in this place will be erased and many of the local business will have to close to give space for bigger and wealthier corporations. The idea of safety and sanitized space that the BID strongly boosts is one idea that captures the “imagination of the ruling elites” (Robles-Duran, 2013) so subjective that as many street vendors argue, “What does ‘clean’ mean?” These sanitized ideas of public space also abolish the cultural negotiations of space produced in Roosevelt Avenue. The BID expansion project mirrors many of the problems theorists have written on public space; nonetheless the BID project has tried to find a common ground for conciliation within different stakeholder. The BID is willing to open a space for a street vendor to make part of the board of director but many street vendors do not feel represented and don’t think one vendor is enough. The expansion of the BID has created a space for negotiation and a space for groups to come together for a collective objective, it has also bridged the gap between the different cultural nationalities that though living in the same territory have a very disjunctive relation.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

Claims, as Mandanipour (2010) suggests can be made by powerful individual and institution, but can also be made by small organizations and individuals who want to shape their own space. These claims can determine and imagine how they want their public space to look like, the absence of them can also determine the future of a space (Mandanipour, 2010). The design of the city is a field of contestation between the different actors, however in the case of Roosevelt Avenue the actors are being active in the decision of their space making. This active citizenship brings a space for opportunity for the community to unite and to create new projects around their collective imaginary of space. These claims are a living exercise of the right to the city Harvey incessantly rules for and a possibility of a â&#x20AC;&#x153;collective action to create something radically different.â&#x20AC;? (Harvey, 2012:xvii) The city is a dynamic landscape always reinventing itself, generating new cartographies and new forms to navigate it. The social infrastructure that has been developed in response to the expansion of the BID opens the doors for new opportunities and rethinking the possibility of the BID and the privatization of the public space. If the expansion of the BID was predominately made to counterattack the Willets Point development, the new social infrastructure that has been made can make the same resonance but from a community base initiative that involves more than just business and property owners, but the whole residential community that are the ones that should have a greater saying in what is to be done to their public space. This community based organized groups can demand from the city all the services the BID is proposing, or they could create a volunteer based programs that shape their public space how they would like them to be. The expansion of the BID has become a platform to discuss important issues in the community and a greater discussion about the public space. Street vendors are insurgent citizens that question and subvert the strategies. In Roosevelt Avenue the street food vendors make part of an immigrant groups that searches for ways of belonging and ways to be accounted. They navigate the city with a different perception; the public sidewalk is their work area, and not just a transitional point or a place for leisure. They struggle with the formal

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

and employ different tactics to govern a spot. The various appropriations that are employed on a daily basis to negotiate their space is an ongoing struggle with the city but also -and even more if the expansion of the BID is to occurwith private property interests. The various negotiations documented in the research process are just a few of what happens in the everyday life. The various strategies employed by the city and the power entities will always have a counterattack from the people that convert a space into a place New events, new technologies, new ways of responding to the neoliber alization of public space, new forms of social organization … are always creating alternative new spaces of and for public political expression … what ever the deadening weight of heightened representation and control over public space, spontaneous and organized political response always carries within it the capability of remaking and retaking public spaces and the public sphere (Low and Smith, 2006:16). Public spaces are different everywhere, in general we should not be talking of public spaces, but rather of public places as many scholars have advocated the difference between the two terms- space and place- (Massey, 1994; Agnew, 2011; Tuan 1977; Taylor, 2000). The first “denotes a location defined by abstract geometries of distance and direction” (Neil, 2010:3) while the second one is a specific location embedded with meanings and symbol that are attributed by the users (Neil, 2010:3). Tensions exist between both of the concepts, and as Taylor (2000) argues, both space and place can be and act as the same. Nonetheless, whenever we think of public space, it is always with the abstraction of a not very defined area, the idea of place does not come into our minds. It is in this separation of the lived experiences and meanings that I believe there is a problem of what public space is. It is not only a problem of the fluctuating character space has, but also an oblivious attention to the people and their attach meaning to a specific site. As urban theorist and practitioners we should not be talking about public spaces

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

but rather about public places evidencing and applauding to the differences in every place and to the constructions and meanings the people have embedded in them. The tension between those that produce space and those that built place (Taylor, 2000:548) would be less obvious if the design of urbanities is between the people that live those places and not through the imagine paradigms of a few that just see spaces. This is not to say that the places are dislocated from a greater systemic process and a connectivity city, but just to have a greater emphasis in the production of space the people have created. In this sense the gap between the theory and everyday practice narrows down.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

References: Agnew, J. (2011). Space and place. In J. Agnew & D. Livingstone (Eds.), Handbook of Geographical Knowledge. London: Sage. Barlet, J. (2013, September 12). Some protest Roosevelt Avenue business improvement district. Queens Chronicle. Retrieved from http://www. qchron.com/editions/western/some-protest-roosevelt-avenue-businessimprovement-district/article_dde428bc-0150-5a58-b4c9-8d1eb3636e6f. html Blitz, M. J. (2004). Video surveillance and the constitution of public space: Fitting the fourth amendment to a world that tracks image and identity. Texas Law Review, 82, 1349-1481. Retrieved from http://works. bepress.com/marc_jonathan_blitz/15/ Crawford, M. (1995). Contesting the public realm: struggles over public space in Los Angeles. Journal of Architectural Education, 49(1), 4-9. Retrieved from http://www.jsto.org/stable.1425371 pg. 4-9. Davis, M. (1990). City of quartz. (pp. 223-263). London: Verso. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkley: University of California Press. Devlin, T. R. (2011). ‘An area that governs itself’: Informality, uncertainty and the management of street food vending in New York City. Planning Theory Sage, Retrieved from http://plt.sagepub.com/content/10/1/53 Foucault, M. (1975). Vigilar y castigar: nacimiento de la prisión (Discipline and Punishment). (1976 ed.) Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Franck, K. A. (2011). Occupying the edge and the underneath: ‘other’ urban public spaces. In Hauck, T., Keller, R. And Kleinekort,V. (Eds.) Infrastructural Urbanism: Addressing the In-between. Dom Publishers. Pp.11729.

Claiming Spaces: How do Street Food Vendors Negotiate the Access to Public Space Nowadays?

Franck, K. A. (2007). Loose spaces: possibility and diversity in urban life. New York: Routledge. Furman Center: For Real Estate and Urban Policy. July 2007. New York: New York University, School of Law and Wagner School of Public Services. Getreuer-Kargl,I. (2012) Gendered Modes of appropriating public space. In Brumann, C. (Ed) (2012) Urban Spaces in Japan: Cultural and social perspectives. Routledge. Pp.167-183. Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. New York: Verso. Holston, J. (1999). Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship. Retrieved from http://tiranaworkshop09.pbworks.com/f/James+Holston+spaces+of+insu rgent+citizenship.pdf Hou, J. 2012. Making public, beyond public space. In: Shiffman, R. et. al. (Eds.) Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of assembly and the occupation of public space. New Village Press. Pp. 89â&#x20AC;?98. Katz, C. (2011). Power, space, and terror: social reproduction and the public environment. In S. Low & N. Smith (Eds.), The Politics of Public Space (pp. 105-122). New York: Routledge. Kohn, M. (2004). Brave new neighborhoods: the privatization of public space. New York: Routledge. Pg. 1-19. Lefebvre, H. (1974). The production of space. (1991 ed.) Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (1992). Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday Life. (2004 ed.). New York: Continuum Leeman, J. and Modan, G. (2010). Selling the city: language, ethnicity and commodiďŹ ed Space In: E. Shohamy, E. Ben-Rafael and M. Barni (Eds.),

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Linguistic Landscape in the City. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pg. 182197. Lofland, L.H. (1998) The public realm: exploring the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s quintessential social territory. Aldine de Gruyter. Pp. XV-22 (Introduction) and Pp. 17924. Low, S and Smith, N. (2006). Introduction. In S. Low & N. Smith (Eds.), The Politics of Public Space. S. New York: Routledge. Pg. 1-16 Low, S. (2006). How the private interest take over public space: zoning, taxes, and incorporations of gated communities. In S. Low & N. Smith (Eds.), The Politics of Public Space. S. New York: Routledge. Pg. 81-104 Mandanipour, A. (2010). Whose public space? In Mandanipour, A. (Ed.), Whose public space?: International case studies in urban design and development. New York: Routledge. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Neal, Z. (2010). Seeking common ground: three perspectives on public space. Urban Design and Planning, (DP000), 1-8. Pask, A. (2010). Public Space Activisim. In Hou, J. (Ed.), Insurgent Public space: guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of the contemporary cities. New York: Routledge. Pp.22â&#x20AC;?240. Rapoport, A. (1980). Cross-cultural aspects of environmental design. In Rapoport, A., Altman, I. and Wohlwill, J.K. (Eds.), Human Behavior and environment: environment and culture. Plenum Press. Pg. 7-45 Robles-Duran, M. (2013). For the Brief moments of Confrontation. In Ferguson, Urban Drift Project in cooperation with the Berlin Senate for Urban Development (Eds.), Make Shifts City, Renegotiating the Urban Common. Berlin: Jovis Publishers

Sรกnchez, A. I. (2013, February 5). Immigrant entrepreneurship and the city. QueensLatino. Retrieved from http://www.queenslatino.com/ Taylor, P. J. (2000) Havens and cages: Reinventing states and households in the modern world-syste. Journal of World Systems Research Festschrift for Immanuel Wallerstein, Part 1 XI(2), Retrieved from http:// jwsr.ucr.edu The street vending project. (n.d.). Retrieved from Streetvendor.org Torre, S. (1996). Claiming the public space: mother of Plaza de Mayo. In Argrest, D. (Ed.), The sex of architecture. Harry N. Abrams. Tuan, Y.F. (1977). Space and place. London: Arnold. Vitari, M.A. (2011). Nostalgia, Food and Belonging: Ecuadorians in New York City. In S. Albiez et al. (Eds.), Ethnicity, citizenship and belonging: practices, theory and spatial dimensions. Madrid: Iberoamericana Libros. Webster, C. (2007). Property rights, public space and urban design . The Town Planning Review, 78(1), 81-101. Retrieved from : http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40112703 Zukin, S. (1995). The culture of cities. whose culture? Whose cities? Oxford: Blackwell. Pg. 1-48

CH. 03

SPATIAL SUBVERSION

PHYSICALITY

OATH: Office of Administrative Trials & Hearings

Street Ve Proje (SVP Vamos Unidos

Promulgation of Rule July 3, 2013 Proposed Rule October 16, 2013

Vending Prohibited Within 20 Feet of Residential Building Exits Vending Prohibited Next to No-Standing Zones at Hospitals and Health Facilities Changes to Multiple Offense Schedule Vending in bus stop, sidewalk next to a hospital or health facility no standing zone or within 10 ft. of driveway, subway, crosswalk, [etc.] Green Cart umbrella not opened while vending 24 RCNY [6-01 (m)] 6-07(b) Green Cart umbrella not safely secured or in good condition or repair 24 RCNY [6-01 (m)] 6-07(b) Stand or goods against display window or within 20 ft. of entrance of any building or within 20 feet from exits, including service exits, to buildings that are exclusively residential at street level Admin. Code 20-465(d) Vending in bus stop, taxi stand, sidewalk next to a hospital or health facility no standing zone, or within 10 ft. of drive/subway/corner Admin. Code 20-465(e) Vending within 20 ft. of sidewalk cafes; within 5 ft of bus shelters, newsstands, public telephones, disabled access ramps Admin. Code 20-465(q)

Permit decal not visible and/or obstructed. 24 RCNY 6-04(b)(3)

$500

Using mobile unit for sleeping or residential purposes 24 RCNY 6-04

Vending non-food items 24 RCNY 6-03(f)

Unit exceeds length or width restrictions or longer side of unit not placed parallel to curb 24 RCNY 6-06(a)

$200

Food contact surfaces not maintained in good repair, or not clean 24 RCNY 6-04(a) Non-food contact surfaces not maintained in good repair or not clean 24 RCNY 6-04(b)

$275 $200

Insufficient ventilation 24 RCNY 6-04(d)

Insufficient lighting or unshielded light bulbs 24 RCNY 6-04(c)

No partition or a partition without a self-closing door installed in truck 24 RCNY 6-04(b)(4)

$200

Insufficient or no potable water 24 RCNY 6-04(f)

$275

$200

Handwash sink inaccessible or unobstructed 24 RCNY 6-04(i)(1)(A)

$500 $500

No "wash hands" sign posted. 24 RCNY 6-04(i)(1)(F)

No soap, paper towel/other hand drying device 24 RCNY 6-04(i)(1)(E)

Insufficient or no potable running water for handwash sink. 24 RCNY 6-04(i)(1)(B)

$500

No thermometers in cold or hot storage units 24 RCNY 6-04(l)(1)

$500

$200

Commissary contract not kept on unit or made available for inspection 24 RCNY 6-11(g)

Unit unsecured when left unattended more than 30 minutes. 24 RCNY 6-04(p)

$200 $500 $200

Environmental Control Board hearing s public

Police Officer

LAWS & REGULATIONS E

Promulgates the following rule that amends Section 3-107 of Subchapter G of Chapter 3 of Title 48 of the Rules of the City of New York (“Food Vendor Administrative Code Penalty Schedule”) and Section 3-109 of Subchapter G of Chapter 3 of Title 48 of the Rules of the City of New York (“General Vendor Penalty Schedule.

Multiple Offense Schedule (MOS) Health Code Chapter 6

17-325: Penalties Legislation: Int. No. 434-A NON-PROCESSING

tend tative at represen

Rules of the City of New York (RCNY) FOOD CONTACT SURFACES NON-FOOD CONTACT SURFACES

Laws of New York PROCESSING C

Local Law to Amend Section 17-325

Intro 324

Permit regular inspections Provide to the commissioner or officer name of commissary Do not use unauthorized food Surrender license upon revocation, suspension or expiration B A

Committe on Immigration

17-314: Duties of licensees and permittees. Loc

License must be worn on being Permit must be fixed to the cart New York City Administrative Code (NEW)

ctio d Se en Am w to al La

City Council Committe on Consumer Affairs

gives vendor a ticket

17-311: Display of license or plate. -30 n 17

17-307: Licenses, permits required; restrictions; term. Subchapter 2: Food Vendor

provide legal assistance to advocate against and fight tickets

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

17-308: Fees

17-315: Restrictions on the placement of vehicles and pushcarts

Community District 3 $500,000 discretionary funds

NYC Plaza Program

Andy Wiley-Schwartz, an assistant commissioner

Councilman Daniel Dromm

$2 Million

Department of Transportation

DIVERSITY PLAZA (37th Road Pedestrian Plaza)

Jackson Heights Beautification Group

SUKHI NY: Social Uplift through Knowledge & Hope Initiatives

TAKES CARE OF PLANS EVENTS FOR

PRODUCED

Department of Consumer Affairs

VENDOR

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT Department of Health and Hygiene

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

endor ect P)

Hibridos Collective Jackson Heights Arts Festival

Commissary/ Food Manufacturer Cart Manufacturer

World Health Organization (WHO)

Restaurants

Queens Council on the Arts

OPPOSITION

Political and Communal Programming Work around immigration rights and reform for the neighborhood

FOUNDER OF

Restricted Streets

Neighborhood Plaza Partnership Advisory Board

NYC Gov.

Bronx River Alliance HR&A Advisors NYC Department of Parks New York Restoration Project Trust for Public Land Horticultural Society of New York Institute for Transportation & Development Policy New Yorkers for Parks MIG Planning & Design Capalino+Company Time Times Square Alliance Day NYC DOT Location

Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Queens Agha Saleh Internet Café owner

Shazia Kausar Bombay Chat café owner

new crime

business dropped

Mohammed Pier president of the Jackson Heights Bangladeshi Business Association customers come to shop, not sit

Shiv Dass Jackson Heights Merchants Association hurting businesses

http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/08/20/jackson-heights-turnaround-business-owners-will-help-maintain-plaza/ http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131014/jackson-heights/diversity-plaza-get-more-seating-improved-lighting

SPATIAL SUBVERSION 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

SPATIAL|subversion I. INTRODUCTION The thesis of the project proposed that architecture must be catalytic to be both a reactionary and propositional tool for the people informally navigating the political system and social sphere. In this regard, architecture would be the transient mechanism and inclusionary tool for defending the metamorphic nature of the people’s interests and demands. As a research of the play between architecture and policy, street food vending is a specific scenario for unraveling this investigation as the street cart itself is a mechanism of control of the vendors and their ability to sell. By imagining the street cart beyond the cart itself, this project proposes to utilize architecture as a medium for street food vendors to place pressure on the legal boundaries that confine them and to become invulnerable to such imposing agency. II [a]: OBJECTS/SPACE What is space? How is it constructed? The definition of space is “the unlimited or incalculable great threedimensional realm or expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur.”1 However, does it serve the question well to simplify into broad terms and abstractions? The beginning of this study was sparked by the question for how the mobile street food vendor carves spaces within a compressed space regulated by numerous systems and agencies in New York City. To explore this question, what can be understood from illustrating and dissecting space? The word “space” is a buzzword that is instantaneously understood and glossed over in conversation, but what does it actually mean? How is it interpreted? How is it useful? Space is constructed by some, left for others to interpret. Beginning with the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s (CUP) project for Making Policy Public, CUP collaborated with the Street Vendor Project (SVP) to develop a fold-out pamphlet titled “Vendor Power” that will inform the vendor of his or her rights visually.2 Specifically, the fold-out distills dense city regulation to diagram the amount of space, using the metrics of feet and 1 space. (n.d.). 2 Vendor Power!. (n.d.) 00

inches, in which the vendor may occupy the street. This publication makes visible the compounding pressures that limit the vendors’ use of space that would otherwise be difficult to determine--to quantify space that is allowed to be used on the sidewalk. Space in this instance is representative and the resultant of the political pressure and regulation. Because this “space” is not automatically visible and understood, how does one visualize and analyze space in other scenarios? Architect Lebbeus Woods ponders space through both architecture and writing. Specifically his article “The Question of Space,” Woods analyzes how space is perceived and interpreted. Heading the article, Woods presents a planar, abstract drawing to introduce his thoughts. “How do we know that what we see is not an artifice of projections onto the brain? Ultimately, we do not. Space, in the end, is what we think it is.”3(Woods 2009) Woods then interestingly transposes this statement against virtuality and reality, tapping into ideas of memory and space. He compares the vividness of Piranesi’s paintings to that of the movies to that of the computer. Resultant of this line of thinking, we, the audience reading the article, are left to wonder then: what is real? Such a question is equally lofty to the question of space. Woods recognizes this and leaves the audience that because space and reality as concepts appear beyond tangibility, we latch onto the limitations perceived to attempt to define them. Moving forward with the concepts of perception and understanding information shared and transferred, there was a brief moment in which the transferral and receipt of that knowledge occurs. In Simon Sadler’s complication of Archigram’s work in “Architecture Without Architecture,” Sadler’s annotates work such as the Plug-In City and includes theory reminiscent of the 1960s era the group was situated. To pull one quote:

Title

Description

The deficiency of words, symbols, and visual information is that they cannot communication experience from one person to another. We can agree to agree, but there remains only mutual incomprehension. You only know what you like of what you know. Yet there is that desperation of trying to communicate to reach some understanding of one another’s understanding and preconception. We must submit to cause and effect to higher education. We must construct a living paradox which is able to recognize conflict without emotion.”4 (Sadel 137).

3 THE QUESTION OF SPACE. (n.d.). 4 Sadler, S. (2005). 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

How do we compensate for those differences? Thinking about how space, or information, is interpreted and who has a voice in such decisions, one can reference Donna Haraway’s “ Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Haraway speaks to not only the conversations of space but the limitations that Woods alludes to in order to grasp and relate to space. She says:

Their boundaries exist in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; “objects do not preexist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings, and bodies. Siting [sighting] boundaries is a risky practice5 (Haraway 595).

Does that mean the creation, or the definition, of space is risky practice? Would it be risky because conflict of interest becomes visible, or would it be risky because such conflicts are generally in flux? Or, both? There seems to be the distinction of what form does space take and who is making those decisions. In this case, is space an object? Is space information manifested as object as Lebbeus Woods describes? Reading “A Thousand Plateaus,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari create philosophical inquiries of space through tangible, physical examples. In particular, the chapter, “The Smooth and the Striated” discusses multiple manners in which the concepts can be applied elsewhere. Using fabric as their mechanism to explain smooth and striated, smooth is nomadic and equivalent to the fusion and consistency of fibers in felt. Striation refers to the woven fabric, or patchwork quilt of multiple entities work independently to create the whole. However, it is impossible to explain the striated without the smooth. Deleuze and Guattari state:

Yet the two are linked and give each other impetus. Nothing is ever done with. Smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth space, with potentially different values, scopes, and signs. Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space.6 (Deleuze 486).

5 Donna Haraway Feminist Studies 6 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Because of striation and smooth bleed into one another, it’s difficult to decipher between the two. However, Deleuze and Guattari further explain the concept in saying:

The sea is a smooth space fundamentally open to striation, and the city is the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it in back in operation everywhere, on earth and in other elements outside but also inside itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of worldwide organization, but also a counter attack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town; sprawling temporary, shifting shanty towns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant.7 (Deleuze 481)

When applied to a relatable subject such as the city, one can look beyond the terminology of smooth, and striated to understand that there are conflicting paradoxical relationships and systems shaped by and shaping the object. The in this case, the object would be the built landscape of the city, Deleuze and Guattari focus on the people in the city attempting to mesh within, while people are also being pushed into the periphery as a result as well. Both systems point to alternative economic models to survive the disadvantage of the other (capitalism). To return to the work of Lebbeus Woods, Woods wrote another article titled “Walls of Change.” In the article, Woods describes space, or regulation as manifested through a wall and its consequent effects. Woods begins his passage with a photo of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989 and with:

Walls are meant to separate, that is true. After all, it is an essential mission of the architect to ‘define space’ which means to construct limits, edges, boundaries that carve out particular pieces of undifferentiated space for human purposes.8

Woods then moves forward to describe the essential aspects of the materiality of the wall and how the wall can be an “armature for change.” His drawings to follow display the repurposing of the walls of a decaying city and the reimagining of new spaces for interaction. What are tangible examples 7 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). 8 WALLS OF CHANGE. (n.d.). 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

N IO TE RA CT IN C

ECT T ROPH

OP HI TR

INDIR

N TIO AC

R TE IN

COMMENSALISM

HI OP TR

PROPHESIS

CT RE DI

IC INT ERAC TION

SYMBIOSIS

HARM

BENEFIT

EXPLOITATION

MUTUALISM

for which walls, the constructors of space, can become this “armature of change?” Focusing on the wall since it delineates space figuratively and literally, the International Design Clinic (IDC) created the fencePocket to explode a wall’s function and perception. Since walls, and fences, define the hard edge between different ownerships of property, the project proposed by the IDC leeches onto the chain-link fence as the ownership is considered ambiguous.9 Students and mentors involved with the International Design Clinic designed a manual for which anyone can use strips of recycled fabric to weave benches, planters, and so forth into the fence, challenging the use and image of the fence. As a larger scale maneuver, Santiago Cirugeda and Recetas Urbanas test the regulations for which new spaces can be built. The project “Building Yourself an Urban Reserve” is also a manual for constructing space, giving the reader/actor a step-by-step process for which one can use the regulations affiliated with scaffolding to build anew. 10 II [b]: Biological Relationships

Title

Description

In order to understand the vendor within the broader scope of space, it is important to note that the perception of the role of the vendor within the urban realm may be positive, negative, or neutral due to his or her active engagements of others in that space. The vendor’s interaction with the urban can be referenced from biological explorations of interaction in its natural form. Interactivity between two entities then can be a transferable idea to explain the current condition of the vendor as seen from multiple perspectives. The state of street food vending in the urban environment echoes the state of symbiosis in which the vendor and the urban ecosystem “live together”11 (Leung,Poulin 1). Symbiosis, as a term to describe coexistence of multiple entities, represents a larger umbrella of relationships between entities that are negative, positive, or neutral. Such relationships include: phoresy, commensalism, exploitation (parasitism), and mutualism. Each relationship is also definitive of a level, or lack of, tropic interaction, or the “nourishment” directly or indirectly gained through interfacing. Phoresy implies a relationship of neutral value because energy is not transferred between the two entities. When defined, phoresy is “an association between two organisms in which one (e.g., a mite) travels on the 9 fencePOCKET :: IDC. (n.d.). 10 RECETAS URBANAS. (n.d.). 11 Vie et milieu - life and environment, 2008, 58 (2) : 107-115 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

body of another, without being a parasite.”12 In its linguistic origins, phoresy is the derivative of Greek phorēsis for ‘being carried.”13 “When a butterfly obtains nectar from a flower, it will become dusted with pollen and then, when it moves to the next flower, pollen is carried with it ensuring fertilization of the second flower. There is, however, no trophic interaction or transfer of energy associated with the interaction between the butterfly and the pollen.”14 Commensalism overlaps with phoresy but diverges since energy transfers between entities indirectly. This is a relationship in which one positively benefits from the interaction while the other remains neutral without gain or harm.15 “A frequently cited example is the relationship between sharks and remoras. When sharks feed on large prey, they scatter pieces of flesh. Remoras feed on these scraps, thus deriving energy from the actions of the host even though the transfer of the energy is indirect.”16 In this instance, the shark does not aim to assist the remoras in gain, but the remora survives by the product of the shark’s survival mechanisms. The shark survives remotely, while the remoras depend on the byproducts. While commensalism portrays a relationship of effectual gain, mutualist and parasitic interactions represent direct trophic outcomes. Mutualism is the sharing of benefits between entities while parasitism describes a relationship where one positively benefits while the other is harmed. However, as a result of the direct interaction, both partners in the relationship are dependent upon one another. Specifically to expand upon mutualism, one can draw upon a writing by Douglas H. Boucher, Sam James and Kathleen Keller titled “The Ecology of Mutualism.” Written in 1982, the piece unpacks the different typologies of mutualism and the implementation of such theory in a biological framework. Since mutualism describes a scenario in which entities involved all benefit, Boucher, James and Keller further the discussion about the number of partners involved in the scenario. The authors describe the mutualistic relationship to often be monophilic where two species, or partners, are independent of one another but work cooperatively.17 In this instance, while independent in terms of their individual characteristics, the cooperative relationship is considered one. To elaborate on this interaction and the 12 Definition of phoresy in English. (n.d.) 13 Definition of phoresy in English. (n.d.) 14 Bush, A., Fernandez, J., Esch, G., & Seed, J. R. (2001). 15 Bush, A., Fernandez, J., Esch, G., & Seed, J. R. (2001). 16 Bush, A., Fernandez, J., Esch, G., & Seed, J. R. (2001). 17 Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 1982.13:330 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

outcomes of such partnership, the authors state:

“Interaction with one species requires interaction with the other. These are the species for which high evolutionary risk has long been proclaimed. They have given up their “freedom” and depend, evolutionarily and ecologically, on the presence of a species whose genome evolves independently. They cannot exchange genes with it, are subject to its mutability or lack of mutability, and must endure situations imperiling its survival. Selection will occur, of course, but the mutualist is a victim of the fitness of its partner, rather than a direct participant.18

In other words, while this partnership provides gain in what is being nurtured and shared, the otherwise independent entities are now fully dependent on the other’s resources. If one were to change, the other would change, regardless of that outcome. In a static scenario, mutualism is a joint benefit; however, the dynamism of relationships cause for a more vulnerable, precarious relationship for both involved. In summation, indirect or direct, phoretic (0), mutualistic (+/+), parasitic (-/+), and commensalist (0/+) relationships share characteristics which deteriorates the isolation of such interactions from one another. However, commensalism is considered to be “the middle ground of a spectrum of relationships” given the balance of neutrality and gain in respect to a lack of negative outcome.19 At its etymological root, commensalism refers to the 1400s Old French saying commensal for “one who eats at the same table.”20 How can the vendor be equally at the table as the these other agents in the larger matrix that the vendor is situated? III. PARALLELS OF LAW-VENDOR DEVELOPMENT

Title

Description

Politics and the regulation in New York City shape the current position of the vendor in the public space and in the eye of the prospective consumer. During the course of existence for the vendor in New York City, the debate has revolved around locating the business within city-controlled markets or allowing the sales to happen on the street. As political power and historical events have shifted, the deliberation of embedding the vendor into 18 Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 1982.13:330 19 Bush, A., Fernandez, J., Esch, G., & Seed, J. R. (2001). 20 Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

the streetscape, agglomerating all vendors into one location, or eliminating street vending altogether has been consequential of the larger, wavering economic and political circumstances of the time. Rewinding to the New York Ordinances of 1691, the ordinance forbade that “hucksters” may begin to sell until two hours after the public markets opened. Not long after in 1707, all street hawking was forbidden entirely (Bluestone, The Pushcart Evil). As captured well in “A Pushcart Evil,” Daniel M. Bluestone follows the incessant debate over markets versus the allocation of carts on the street. Bluestone annotates the heart of the debate through the opinion of one critic to pushcarts in the 1930 and parallel arguments in stating that:

the pushcart markets are as characteristic a part of the New York pageant as the skyscrapers.” Some observers of the urban landscape viewed pushcart markets picturesque places steeped in urban cosmopolitanism. For many reformers, however, the coexistence of pushcarts and skyscrapers evidenced a disquieting polarization of urban life between poverty and progress.21 (p74-75)

Fiorello LaGuardia after having been elected in 1934 exemplified the ideal of regulating the peddlers through the establishment of indoor markets such as the Essex Street Market from the aid in part provided from the New Deal. In tandem with the implementation of indoor markets, a law was then passed to prohibit peddlers from taking the city streets, not only to formalize the peddler’s practice but to cleanse the street in preparation for the World’s Fair in 1939. Ultimately, the leadership of LaGuardia in the 1930s demonstrates the psychological and political dichotomies searching to legitimize the peddler with the accepted commercial Market in New York as an alternative to the peddler’s practice that often served the needs of the poor. This “polarization of urban life between poverty and progress” and reallocation of vendors reemerges over time including the leadership of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In 1998, Giuliani implemented a rule restricting street food vendors from 144 streets. As quoted in the New York Times article “Giuliani to Bar Food Vendors on 144 Blocks” to defend the rule as to shift the vendors to benefit quality of life, “‘It’s a rule of reason.... That’s part of living in a civilized city, as opposed to a place that’s chaotic.’’22 Such rules of reason have been developing for decades not only to 21 Ward, D., Zunz, O., & Bluestone, D. (1992). 22 Allen, M. (1998, May 24). 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

regulate the demeanor of the peddler through the space in which he becomes situated, but the process to gain permission to sell and the physical cart in which he sells from. To pull from the evolution of the Ordinance for the City of New York, one can begin to understand the narrative in which laws for street vending have become further detailed to annotate become registered with the city, what agency to legitimize that relationship with the city, and the properties of the cart to characterize those parameters. For instance, in 1845, the Ordinance did not define street peddling in its rules but in terms of cartmen. The 1845 By-Laws and Ordinances of the Mayor, Alderman, and the Commonalty of the City of New York in 1845, outlines in Title I “Of Licensing Carmen” that the Mayor maintains the power to issue and revoke the license for carts. Given these regulations, the license would only be awarded to a United States citizen of at least twenty-one years old that can provide a good cart. The license then would expire on the last Monday of July the following year, as provided in Section 5 of that Title.23 Beyond the issuing of licenses, Title II describes Regulating and Numbering of Carts with dimension and materiality. Section 1 states that “each sled, cart or dray employed in the transportation of any goods, wares, merchandise of other things excepting firewood, shall be two feet five inches wide between the foremost rungs, and two feet nine inches wide between the hindmost rungs, and no more; and all the rungs shall be three feet inches high above the floor of the sled or cart, and no morel under the penalty of five dollars for every such offence.”24 (p484) These By-laws and Ordinances define that the decisions regarding the vendors were sourced directly from the Mayor. Materials and dimensions of the cart are also controlled by the city at this point. The 1905 Revised Ordinances of New York City specified regulations for “Peddlers, Hawkers, Venders and Hucksters in Section XIII, page 74. Licensure in 1905 still depends upon the Mayor, but the rules to earn and maintain such licensure have become more complex. For instance, Section 523 details that the license number recorded by the city must correlate with the sign on the cart as well as the badge specifically to “be worn on the left breast of the outer garment.”25 The cart and licensee are recorded as one entity in the eyes of city legislation. Since the legislation of 1905 has become further specified in which

Title

Description

23 1845 By-Laws and Ordinances of the Mayor, Alderman, and the Commonalty of the City of New York in 1845, Title I “Of Licensing Carmen” 24 1845 By-Laws and Ordinances of the Mayor, Alderman, and the Commonalty of the City of New York in 1845, Title I “Of Licensing Carmen” 25 1845 By-Laws and Ordinances of the Mayor, Alderman, and the Commonalty of the City of New York, Section 523 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

the vendor must conduct business, one can pair the legislation to a previous article written in the New York Times from June 8, 1904 to gauge the sentiment towards street vending during that time to give momentum to such amendments to the New York City Ordinance.26 Written prior to the 1905 Ordinance, the author’s strong voice recognizes that laws established up until the publishing of this article, have not been enforced in such a manner for the vendors to take seriously. Either the laws have been completely disregarded or an emergence of counterfeit licenses entered the market in lieu of conforming to the city. [In connecting to work written about by Jessica Kisner, this may be the birth of the Secondary Market /Black Market for permits that is seen in street food vending today. Since fees from violations were incorporated into normal business expenditures, the Mayor at the time, George McClellan, Jr., instituted rules such as the following in order to solidify punishment not only for the initial violation but for failing to acknowledge those repercussions. 27 § 533. No peddler, hawker, vender or huckster of any kind of merchandise shall conduct or carry on, in the City of New York, any business as such peddler, hawker, vender or huckster until he or she shall have first obtained a license in compliance with the provisions of this ordinance. Any person violating the provisions of this section shall be punished upon conviction by 26 New York Times 1904: The Mayor’s public duty in this matter is very clear. The charter provisions, laws, and ordinances under which licenses are granted are not mandatory. He need not grant them if he does not want to, and he should not want to. The revenue to the city from this source is a mere bagatelle compared with the burden it imposes upon the taxpayers. It is not enough that an applicant desires a license, which he will probably abuse as soon as it is received. Before he gets it he should be required to show that his prepared to render a necessary or at least a useful public service in exchange for the privilege he asks. Not one in a thousand of the applicants for pushcart and basket licenses could comply with this condition. There are now in force between fourteen and fifteen thousand licenses in the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx. Probably ten thousand of these are properly forfeit for misuse and should be canceled forthwith. The small fines imposed in the police courts for ordinance violations are not deterrent. They are regarded as part of the cost of doing business from pushcarts and wagons. The loss of their licenses is all these people are afraid of. 27 Useful for proposing a different version of a cart today based on law from 1905: § 539. Each and every peddler or hawker of clothes-lines in the City of New York, and each and every individual engaged in put— ting up and aﬁixing clothes-line connections to poles, fences, houses or other property, or taking down the same, shall be regularly licensed by the Mayor, upon proof of good moral character, and for such license shall pay a fee of two dollars into the city treasury, which license shall be valid for one year from the date thereof, and each and every peddler or hawker so licensed shall not enter any house or premises without the permission of either the owner, lessee or occupant of such house or premises, and shall abstain and refrain from all shouting and crying out of his wares and occupation in back yards of residences, under a penalty of a revocation of his license, and upon arrest and conviction, a ﬁne not exceeding ten dollars shall be imposed for each and every such offense. (0rd. appd. May 5, 1892, as amd. by 0rd. passed May 28, 1892.)

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

a fine of not more than twenty-ﬁve dollars, or in default of payment of such fine, by imprisonment In addition, this amendment to the previous Ordinance elaborates on the exact positioning of the cart on the street. § 526. No licensed peddler, vender, hawker or huckster shall permit his or her cart, wagon or vehicle to stand on any street, avenue or highway within twenty-ﬁve feet of any corner of the curb, nor within ten feet of any other peddler, vender, hawker or huckster. (Sec. 11 of Id.) § 532. The violation of any of the foregoing provisions of this ordinance, or any part thereof, shall be deemed a misdemeanor, and the offender shall, upon conviction, be fined or imprisoned, or both, as provided by section 85 of the New York City Consolidation Act of 1882. (See. 17 of Id.) In 1912, an article from the New York Times titled “Pushcart Question Reduced to Politics,” the author notes that vendors still have yet to adhere to the regulations. In the article, the Bureau of Licenses and the police are acknowledged as additional entities facilitating the Mayor’s agenda to control the vendors. Since of licenses recorded was 2300, the disproportion of vendors on the street in the numbers between 10,000 and 15,000 in Manhattan was concerning due to not only the disregard for the law but the congestion of the streets and unhealthful conditions developed as consequence. 28 Additionally, a shift the mindset of how the street is to be used occurs. The article mentions that the vendors “were a hindrance to the free movement of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, and that there was no more justice in allowing the streets to be used for market purposes than for industrial or manufacturing purposes.” Therefore, “The resolutions provided that on an after Aug. 1, 1912, all pushcarts should be installed in open-air markets, temporarily provided, where they would cease to impede traffic or be a menace to the public health.”29 Spite the disconnect between the city and the vendor and the negative connotations toward the vendor derivative of that tension, the vendors proved beneficial to the city not long after pushcart vendors are allocated to public markets. As a response to World War I, the Food Council of

Title

Description

28 PUSHCART QUESTION REDUCED TO POLITICS; Those Who Profit by Lack of Regulation Expected to Oppose Reform.. (1912, July 7). 29 PUSHCART QUESTION REDUCED TO POLITICS; Those Who Profit by Lack of Regulation Expected to Oppose Reform.. (1912, July 7). 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

this time utilized the carts to aid the poor in tenement districts with food.30 In this case, when the New York City government is shaken by a larger crisis, legislations become amended or temporarily dismissed to quickly disseminate aid to the public affected by such crisis. [Please refer to Jonathan Lapalme’s discussion on crisis and diffused architectures to understand this in further detail.] While this information merely touches upon the historical narrative of street food vending and “pushcart peddlers” in New York City, one can grasp the tensions that exists in its foundations in pairing this with the historical section earlier in this book. In terms of power during the early periods of vending, the Mayor has the power. As time progresses, the rules imposed by the Mayor becomes a ballad between the vendors disregard for the law, and the Mayor in power then amending those rules in attempt to curtail those violations. Even though the Mayor has historically controlled much of what happens to vendors, other agencies have materialized over time as well. For instance, the Division of Food Inspection and Offensive Trades was created by the Department of Health in 1884. In an Annual Report from 1916, a section within the Bureau of Food and Drugs is dedicated to the inspection of Pushcarts.31 In 1916, the inspection process worked based off of the assumption that the carts were not sterile or kept clean. However, this section highlights that there was no penalty to the carts since they were necessary for the success of neighboring businesses. This section merely illustrates that street food vending is a thriving industry that is not sanitary, but there 30 DEMAND PUSHCARTS AS AID FOR POOR; Return of Cheap System of Food Distribution to be Tried in This City.(1918, February 5). 31 The report succinctly states on page 77: “The itinerant dealer in any food commodity has always given trouble to the authorities no matter under what governmental agency they work. One of the most perplexing of these problems is involved in the handling of the push carts of New York City, and in properly controlling them without undue severity. It is obvious that they are facilities without facilities for keeping the wares and the persons of the vendors in a cleanly and sanitary condition, or for sterilizing glasses when beverages are sold. It is estimated that there are at least 10,000 of such peddlers in the City who deal in food each day. Unfortunately, a dealer in food today may be a dealer in shoe strings or underwear tomorrow. On the East Side alone there are about 27 streets devoted to push cart markets. The natural supposition that so widely spread a custom has an economic basis behind it has been confirmed by investigation by this Bureau and others. Neither property owners, store’keepers, nor tenants object to the push cart. The majority of merchants maintain that their business is improved because of the fact that the push carts bring more people to the street, the landlord is benefited by increased store rentals and more room rentals. It is a curious fact that people of very limited means can buy from push carts in small quantities and more cheaply, ordinarily speaking, than from the stores. Owners of stores, not infrequently, operate push cart stands in front of their premises as an extension to the business. However, all this does not improve sanitary conditions in the sections in which push cart markets are located.”

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

is no measure for how to prove this or be held accountable. This report is situated between the establishment of pushcart markets and the need for the pushcart during World War I, in which the value of the cart economically thrives while the cause for concern of sanitation and health rises. As the city becomes further complex, with the insertion of the vehicle and the evolution of technologies and manufacturing, larger scale resolutions such as relocating vendors to centralized markets entered the back and forth nature of city versus vendor, or in the language of the earlier article “poverty versus progress.” Rather, this is a narrative in which the commercial market of New York City thrives within the ordinances and alternative economy develops in parallel. This has been the case for the entirety of street vending in New York City, including today. Rather than pitting one market against one another, how can both co-exist?32 IV. VENDOR AND THE LAW In order to be a street food vendor, there is a tension between what the vendor needs to sell and what the city dictates that the vendor needs in order to sell. Regulations and laws aside, the vendor needs a space to sell, mobile or fixed, “something” to vend from, and the food. On the other hand, New York City restricts where the vendor can sell, requires a permit for a city approved food cart and location to store the cart, and outlines acceptable food providers to purchase ingredients.33 Spite the immense amount of money invested in buying a cart, without a permit, the cart is rendered useless. The regulations set onto street food vending suppress any ability to have ownership. The notion of using the street cart as a tool of oppression taps into some of the fundamental discussions concerning property. The city creates the narrow framework for which the cart can exist, therefore mimicking the Roman law for property. As Proudhon explains the Roman law for property in his work “Property Considered as a Natural Right--Occupation and Civil Law as Efficient Bases of Property,” property is “the right to use and abuse one’s own within the limits of the law.”34 Proudhon considers that in its simplest form of power over something, this is considered to be naked property.35 The other type of property is possession in which Proudhon quotes Duranton

Title

Description

32 General Ordinances of the City of New York:1905 33 1977: Local Law No. 77 established the City’s comprehensive licensing scheme and imposed restrictions on the placement of vendors’ vehicles, pushcarts and stands. 34 Proudhon. (n.d.). What is Property?. 35 Proudhon. (n.d.). What is Property?. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

to state “is a matter of fact, not right.”36 To elaborate on this dichotomy of property, a proprietor describes an owner that can rent for use while the possessor is the tenant.37 Property highlights the injustices and inequalities amongst people, but paradoxically, private ownership of property is argued by Proudhon as impossible. What does this mean for the street food vendor that invests money in a street cart to be acceptable by New York City law? The vendor may “use and abuse” his or her cart within this regulatory framework, but if the vendor does not abide by regulation, the city may seize the cart and render the vendor powerless. This logic undermines the vendor as a proprietor in the macroeconomic and political systems, highlighting the vendor vulnerable to the power of law. Law, a system enforced by some to control the behavior of others, dominates property and claims property for its own. In “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property” by Carol Rose, Rose states that “...exclusive private property is thought to foster the well-being of the community, giving its members a medium in which resources are used, conserved, exchanged to their greatest advantage.”38 However, in the case of the vendor, even though the vendor purchases and “owns” the street cart, the city finds that by controlling the cart as property through the permitting process, this will “foster the wellbeing of the community.” The City recognizes that the vendor facilitates the vitality of street life in New York City in providing quick, inexpensive meals and revenue for the city but inserts systematic control over the operations of vendors in order to respect other merchants and create food practices that are healthy.39 For instance, the implementation of restricted streets for vending aim to avoid congestion on the streets based on time and location. Local Law 17 of 1983, Section 17 declares that the Commissioner determines the health, safety and well-being of the public of a particular street given a public hearing prior. The City establishes regulations on property, whether it be the cart or the land it occupies, as a mechanism to establish fairness amongst people, inherently creating inequality due to the nature of property itself. Furthermore, on February 3, 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani signed Local Law 15 that amended Title 17 in order to no longer allow for a vendor to be issued more than one permit, temporary or full-term.40 Local Law 15 was 36 Proudhon. (n.d.). What is Property?. 37 Proudhon. (n.d.). What is Property?. 38 Rose, “ The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property” 712 39 Int 0511-1999. (n.d.). 40 Title 17 now also compels the Commissioner to establish waiting lists which areto be administered in accordance with procedures to be established by rules of the Commissioner. (Administrative Code § 17-307 [b] 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

met with opposition in the lawsuit of Big Apple Vendors (Plaintiffs) v NY City (Defendant) in December 1995.

In short, the vendor’s position according to the suit:

Plaintiffs further contend that Local Law 15’s multiple permit restriction violates their due process rights in that it deprives them of a constitutionally protected property right. Plaintiffs argue that the standard for renewing food vending permits has always been lenient and that reliance on such a standard, permit holders have invested substantial amounts of time and money in developing their businesses and this has led to the creation of a constitutionally protected property right which the City cannot alter without cause.41

The City defends:

The essence of due process of law is fundamental fairness....”It demands that that the government treat all justly by granting to the individual against whom governmental decisions operate the right to be heard.”....In order to state a due process claim, a plaintiff must show that it has been deprived of a liberty or property interest which is created or recognized by State law..... As the United State Supreme Court noted “To have property interest in a benefit, a person clearly must have more than an abstract need for it. He [or she] must have more than a unilateral expectation of it. He [or she] must, instead, have a legitimate claim of entitlement to it.”....

Plaintiffs have not shown that a property interest has been created here. Generally a license is subject to reasonable restrictions and to revocation by an issuing authority.....The State may change the right to hold a license which it has been granted or the conditions under which it may be held because it is not a vested right.....42

[2] [b] [ii]; [e]; [f] [3] [d].)

Title

Description

The new law also designates 200 of the 3,000 full-time permits for use exclusively in the four boroughs outside of Manhattan, 50 for each borough. (Administrative Code § 17-307 [b] [2] [b].) Finally, Local Law 15 states that mobile food vending permits shall be issued only to persons who at the time of the application have not had a permit revoked or suspended and who satisfy the Commissioner that they are fit and able to conduct, maintain or operate a food vending business. (Administrative Code § 17-307 [b] [2] [c]; [f] [3] [b].) 41 BIG APPLE VENDORS v. NY CITY | Leagle.com. (n.d.). 42BIG APPLE VENDORS v. NY CITY | Leagle.com. (n.d.). 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

The suit explains that the vendors are suing on the violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments. Essentially, the claim of unconstitutionally was denied due to the lack of proof that their right to due process had been compromised. The City argues that such restrictions on the vendors do not prevent the vendor from continuing to sell. The vendor, based on the law, does not have a right to license or a permit. By deduction, the vendor does not have the right to sell from his cart, nor from any particular location. If the vendor is investing in this business as they argue in this suit, at what point can the vendor take ownership? Is natural property possible, or is the vendor only in a constant state of possession defenseless to the laws that govern the means of possession?43 The problem in which the vendors are facing are not of the question of their right to property but the pressure of the laws that govern property to create fairness to community and the inherent inequality as consequence. Property establishes what is mine from what is yours. Prescription of such legislators and judges support and instill such logic. Proudhon argues that so long as legislation is trusted to be the defining principle, inequality will thrive and rights will be difficult to maintain. For as long as legislation governs the street food vending practice, the vendor’s rights will continue to remain at stake. Moving forward, the discussion may not be to defend the vendor from this position but to find other means of ameliorating such conflicts within the confines the law provides. IV. CURRENT POSITION OF VENDOR Currently, multiple agencies exist to place pressure and regulate the street food vendor while surges of advocacy organize to resist and change those measures. According to the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s 43 To return to Proudhon, Chapter III: Labor as the Efficient Cause of the Domain of Property,” the text surfaces the idea of law as prescription and the contradictory, paradoxical dichotomy between prescription and property. Proudhon proposes: Indeed, if we see in the institution of property only a desire to secure to each individual his share of the soil and his right to labor; in the distinction between naked property and possession only an asylum for absentees, orphans, and all who do not know, or cannot maintain, their rights; in prescription only a means, either of defence against unjust pretensions and encroachments, or of settlement of the differences cause by the removal of possessors,--we shall recognize in these various forms of human justice the spontaneous efforts of the mind to come to the aid of the social instinct; we shall see in this protection of all rights the sentiment of equality, a constant levelling tendency. And, looking deeper, we shall find in the very exaggeration of these principles the confirmation of our doctrine; because, if equality of conditions and universal association are not soon realized, it will be owing to the obstacle thrown for the time in the way of common sense of the people by the stupidity of legislators and judges.... 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

Applies for

Restricted Permit to vend

Department of

Parks and Recreation Office of Administrative Trail and Hearings

STREET FOOD

VENDOR Applies for

Permit for the Cart

License to Vend Food

if a No ven tic do eo rr f V ece iol iv ati es on a :

one of the 4 Tribunals of: â&#x20AC;&#x153;enforcedâ&#x20AC;? by:

Department of

Police

Health Tribunal

through Processed by: mitigates process to make sure vendor has tax clearance Department of

Finance

Department of

Health and Mental Hygiene Sets guidelines for permit and license

contest in court through the:

Consumer Affairs 1996 Intra-City Agreement set to connect DOHMH & DCA

Mimics DOHMH regulations

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

SPATIAL VIOLATIONS

Article 17-307: Judge determines the fine for carts that are in bus stop, w/in10 ft. of crosswalk/subway/driveway

Article 17-307: Judge determines the fine for carts that are against a building or structure

Article 89: $1000 fine for failing to have a permit decal on the cart

Article 89: $1000 fine for the cart not abutting the curb

Article 89: $400 fine for the cart taking up more than 10 feet of linear space on the sidewalk

Article 17-307: Judge determines the fine for carts that are on a sidewalk less than 12’ wide.

Chapter 6.01 24R RCNY- $200-$400 fine for non-processing cart selling processing food

Article 17-307: Judge determines the fine for carts that are vending at restricted time or place

F B

C: $1000

E: $400 ”

’-0

D: $1000

Title

Description

A 00

’-0

”

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

fold-out brochure â&#x20AC;&#x153;Vendor Power,â&#x20AC;? the following agencies are involved with regulating vendors: Consumer Affairs, Health and Mental Hygiene, Sanitation, Environmental Protection, Finance, Parks and Recreation, and the Police. Since this is a generalized list that pertains to all vendor types, some agencies concerns street food vendors more than others. Also, agencies beyond the larger New York City department entities cause conflict for the vendors invisible to the processes recognizable on the street. By no means do these agencies affect the vendor in a linear fashion nor do these agencies influence every vendor the same way. To begin with two dominant entities, The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) and The Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) output duplicate information for which the vendor can conduct himself of herself in space, via restricted streets, permitting, licensing, and etc. The mirrored information between agencies exist since the DOHMH and DCA declared an intra-city in 1996 that stated that the responsibility for administrative tasks concerning license and permits be relayed to the control of the Department of Consumer Affairs. 44 After being audited in 2003 by the New York State Comptroller to review the effectiveness of this relationship, the responsibilities were outlined to be:

Title

Description

DCA is responsible for processing all applications and issuing all licenses and permits, while DOHMH oversees the processes. DOHMH is responsible for establishing the policies, guidelines and operating procedures relevant to the issuance of licenses and permits, and for ensuring compliance with these policies, guidelines and procedures. All license and permit transactions are entered by DCA on the automated City Agencies Management Information System (CAMIS).45

Therefore, the DOHMH follows the code laid out by the Administrative Code of New York and the Rules of New York City, implements these policies to define the requirements for licensure and permit. The vendor applies for the Mobile Food Vendor Licensure as proof of ability to handle food and applies for a permit for the food cart through the DOHMH. The DCA then processes this information. When reviewing the requirements for licensure and permitting, the DCA mirrors the information output by the DOHMH. If the vendor violates a law implemented through the DOHMH, the vendor then will receive a Notice of Violation in which he will she will be 44 Memorandum Of Understanding. (2010, July 1) http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/about/agree1. pdf 45 Memorandum Of Understanding. (2010, July 1). 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

penalized and fined. To contest these violations, the food vendor has the opportunity to appear in court through the OATH Health Tribunal, one of the four tribunals under the NYC Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH). If the food vendor is not in violation of the health code, the food vendor will then be heard by the Environmental Control Board. However, if he or she does not appear in court, the vendor will be held accountable to pay the default fee. In regards specifically to situating the cart on the street, the DOHMH also documents the streets that the vendor may not vend on, during this day, at such-and-such time. However, in the permit application process, the application further states that a Restricted Permit to allow the vendor to sell in an otherwise restricted area are a separate permit entirely. This permit is to be obtained through the Department of Parks and Recreation, or obtain permission directly from the Commissioner of Parks and Recreation.46 In another scenario, the vendor also applies for a Restricted Area Permit if wishing to vend on private property outdoors in a commercial zone. 47 Additionally for existing in the streetscape, the vendor must be mindful to not obstruct the sidewalk as to comply with the Department of Sanitation as well. Once the vendor has been established but needs to renew his or her license or permit, the vendor must be certain that he or she is current with their business taxes. New York City Department of Finance refers to this as a tax clearance. The Department of Finance advises the vendor:

If your permit application says “You have not been cleared by the New York City Department of Finance,” or if DOHMH directs you to get clearance, this means that DOHMH was not able to determine your tax clearance status automatically. Instead, you must obtain tax clearance from Finance and submit a Vendor Tax Clearance Certificate to DOHMH with your application and submit it in person to Finance. 48

Again, while the tax clearance refers to the Department of Finance specifically, the DOHMH mitigates this process still given the department oversight of license and permits as clearly outlined in the agreement between 46 N.Y. ADC. LAW § 17-315 : NY Code - Section 17-315: Restrictions on the placement of vehicles and pushcarts; vending in certain areas restricted or prohibited. (n.d.). 47 NEW MOBILE FOOD VENDOR PERMIT CHECKLIST. (n.d.). http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/permit/mfv_permit_appl.pdf 48 Business - Street Vendor Permits & Tax Clearance. (n.d.). http://www.nyc.gov/html/dof/html/business/services_vendors_tax.shtml 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

the DOHMH and DCA. The New York City Police Department also is involved in terms of ticketing the vendors in the public space. The police are told to enforce rules produced by the above agenices; however, each precinct may differ. For instance, after referring to Gabrielle’s discussion of the Green Carts, the placement off such cart typology is based on police precincts. Some precincts, as shown in Jessica’s work, are more strict in the adherence to these restrictions. In the instance of an unpermitted vendor near the 82nd Street Business Improvement District and Roosevelt Avenue, the woman would get ticketed on side of Roosevelt Avenue but simply relocated to the other side of the avenue where she no longer receives tickets due to the change in precincts. While the rules put out are overarching, such rules are inconsistently enforced. Such inconsistencies emerge from the conflicting interests in the public sphere. An example of such differing ideas for how it is used is highlighted in the New York Times article from 1981 titled “Police are Stepping Up Anti-Peddler Campaign.” In the article, the chief of police describe three opposing forces:

DIVERSITY PLAZA

Jackson Heights Woodside Elmhurst

Corona

‘’The police are caught among three opposing things,’’ Assistant Chief Milton Schwartz of Manhattan South said. ‘’Business people who pay taxes and overhead and want to make a profit, peddlers who want to make a living and people who want to buy at a cheaper price.’’49

These opposing forces allude to the multitude of methods in which the vendor can be perceived and interacted with space symbiotically. Given these many departmental entities of New York City governing mobile food vending, the vendor is entangled in the multiple lines of communication around his or her ability to sell. V. LOCATING IN SPACE: [DIVERSITY PLAZA]

Title

Description

In examining a particular location, one can view the dynamics of street vending in Diversity Plaza in Queens. Diversity Plaza, often known as 37th Road Pedestrian Plaza, is located at the convergence point of the neighborhoods of Woodside, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights, in Community District 3. Close to the major transportation hub in Queens, Jackson HeightsRoosevelt Avenue, the site has strong access to transportation to the subway lines E,F, M & R as well as bus lines. Specifically, the Plaza is located on 37th Road between 73rd and 74th Streets. 49 Johnston, L. (1981, December 15). POLICE ARE STEPPING UP ANTI-PEDDLER CAMPAIGN. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

The councilmember also secured $10,000 in discretionary funding to include the services of the Horticultural Society and ACE New

50 Pedestrians-Diversity Plaza. (n.d.). 51 Rennison, B. (2012, August 16). Leaders, merchants reach deal on Jackson Heights plaza. 52 SUHKI. (n.d.). 53 Rennison, B. (2012, August 16). Leaders, merchants reach deal on Jackson Heights plaza. 54 Jackson Heights plaza to get $500K in enhancements. (2013, October 23). 00

Community D

Neighborhood Plaza Partnership Advisory Board

In 2011, the Department of Transportation implemented the plaza in order to address traffic safety, sidewalk crowding, vehicle congestion, parking availability, slow bus service and a lack of public open space.50 The Department of Transportation developed these improvements by adding a pedestrian plaza, rerouting the bus to 75th street, adding a bike lane, adding public furniture, and so forth. However, there were motivations for the plaza beyond those directly related to transportation. Prior to Diversity Plaza, the homelessness, drunkenness and crime threatened local community businesses by provoking the businesses to close earlier.51 However, the proposal of the plaza had induced opposition as well. Some actors opposed to the implementation of the plaza included Agha Saleh, Shazia Kausar, Mohammed Pier, and Shiv Dass. Agha is an internet cafe owner that disagreed with the project out of fear for new crime. Shazia Kausar, owner of cafe Bombay Chat, projected that business will drop as a result of the plaza, and Shiv Dass of the Jackson Heights Merchants Association shares the same sentiment. Further, Mohammed Pier, president of the Jackson Heights Bangladeshi Business Association advocated that the customers came to the area to shop, not to sit.52 In light of the scheme, husband and wife Agha Saleh and Shazia Kausar formed Social Uplift Knowledge and Hopes Initiative (SUKHI) in order to create positive improvements through the plaza. As a reflection of the cultural integrity of the area, SUKHI was derived from “a Punjabi word meaning prosperity and happiness.... Kausar said the partnership changed what was a nightmare into “a dream of prosperity.”53 SUKHI is the non-profit organization spearheading community support for the plaza and is recognized by the Department of Transportation as such. Council Member for Community District 3 Daniel Dromm has been proactive in securing funds and support for the project. Dromm secured $500,000 in capital funds for the project in addition to the $2 million dollar support from the Department of Transportation.54 According to an article written in the Queens Courier on October 23rd, 2013:

Councilman Dani NYC Plaza Program

Andy Wiley-Schwartz, an assistant commissioner

$2 Million

Department of Transportation

$10,000

ACE NY

Horticultural Society

DIVERSITY (37th Road Pede

PRODUCED

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT Hibridos Collective Jackson Heights Beautification Group preserve, restore, revitalize and maintain the community of Jackson Heights.

Jackson Heights Arts Festival Queens Council on the Arts

Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Queens

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

In addition to these services, programming has livened up the space, including town hall meetings for elections, Jackson Heights Arts Festival, and so on.

District 3 $500,000 discretionary funds

iel Dromm

Clean Streets Initiative

Cleans plaza and surrounding places

Town Square

SUKHI NY: Social Uplift through Knowledge & Hope Initiatives

TAKES CARE OF PLANS EVENTS FOR

INITIAL OPPOSITION

Political and Communal Programming

Agha Saleh Internet Café owner

Shazia Kausar Bombay Chat café owner

new crime

business dropped

Mohammed Pier president of the Jackson Heights Bangladeshi Business Association customers come to shop, not sit

Title

Description

Short Film Series through Queens World Film Festival

Work around immigration rights and reform for the neighborhood

FOUNDER OF

PLAZA estrian Plaza)

“The Little Plaza that Could”

Open Air Community Board 3 Meetings

$60,000

DOE Fund

York, which will offer a monthly power washing and horticulture care as part of daily maintenance and cleaning services for the plaza. Dromm had already allocated $60,000 to the Doe Fund to clean both the plaza and surrounding area.55

Shiv Dass Jackson Heights Merchants Association hurting businesses

The vendors are positioned in the periphery of Diversity Plaza and nearby contexts. Four different locations exist within this particular site. Firstly, two vendors are located immediately adjacent to the main entrance to the Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue station, at the corner of 75th street and Roosevelt Avenue--one being a taco cart, the other a Nuts-for-Nuts cart that changes while the product sold remains the same. Next, there are the vendors adjacent to Diversity Plaza at 73rd Street and Broadway. 37th Road has a few more vendors at the perimeter of the bordering residential complexes. Then, there are the alternative vendors to the regulated carts that float along 39th Road. The vendors around Diversity Plaza are reflective of the cultural identities that embody the space. A dichotomy exists in between Tibetan cuisine and the Halal carts. After speaking to the cart located adjacent to the 7 overpass tracks on Roosevelt, the vendor of the cart explained that while he doesn’t own the cart and did not know of the exact reasoning for the location, the specific location for the cart did not matter. Regulars would visit the cart, especially since a large population in the vicinity could not eat the meat used in Tibetan food. This cart in particular is worked by three people, through friends and family. On the other hand, a Halal cart across Broadway has existed for twelve years in the same location, prior to Diversity Plaza. This was the first Halal cart in Jackson Heights and boasts being a Vendy Award winner on the side of the cart. Two people worked the cart at this time, while two others worked another shift, shared business amongst friends. The cart is built in a fashion where the consumer would order with the one employee on the right, and the food would be produced and delivered on the left. This cart also has a security camera as well. Three Halal carts exist on this corner, but the two carts, one including this one, are owned by the same person. As a means of vending outside the parameters of New York City, defines as street vending, 39th Road could be seen with multiple different instances. For example, one vendor had a small, closed stand as wide as he is. The stand was an extension of the business he sat against, sourcing ingredients from the grocery across the street. Another woman was mobile 55 Jackson Heights plaza to get $500K in enhancements. (2013, October 23). 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

and walked up and down 37th Avenue with her Churros cart. Many of the businesses nearby included groceries/markets, merchandise vendors, city newspaper stands, restaurants, and restaurants that had windows to vend to the street from standing within the building. VI. THE CART [SITE BASED] As enforced by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the permit for the cart is split between two different applications, one for nonprocessing and another for processing. Within these two typologies, there are five classifications, A, B, C, D or E, in which the cart will be categorized depending on the type of food the vendor wishes to sell and the processes used to prepare that product.56 The cart classification also determines what facilities that cart must have, such has hand-washing sinks, and so forth. As outline in Chapter 6 of the Health Code for Mobile Food Vending Establishments:

Processing Carts A, B:

A: grilled or fried meats, sausages, poultry, shish kebab, hamburgers, eggs and gyros. B: sandwiches prepared on the unit, raw fruits, vegetables and salads, breads, bagels and rolls buttered or topped with cream cheese on the unit, smoothies and soft serve ice cream.

Non-Processing Carts C, D, E:

C: prepackaged frozen desserts, prepackaged sandwiches, and prepackaged and presliced fruits and vegetables D: brewed coffee and tea, donuts, pastries, rolls and bagels buttered or topped with cream cheese at a commissary, popcorn, cotton candy, nuts, candied nuts, soft pretzels, and chestnuts, regardless of whether

56 3. The term “food processing establishment” means any place which receives food or food products for the purpose of processing or otherwise adding to the value of the product for commercial sale. It includes, but is not limited to, bakeries, processing plants, beverage plants and food manufactories. However, the term does not include: those establishments that process and manufacture food or food products that are sold exclusively at retail for consumption on the premises; those operations which cut meat and sell such meat at retail on the premises; bottled and bulk water facilities; those food processing establishments which are covered by articles four, four-a, five-a, five-b, five-c, five-d, seventeen-b, nineteen, twenty-b, and twenty-one of this chapter; service food establishments, including vending machine commissaries, under permit and inspection by the state department of health or by a local health agency which maintains a program certified and approved by the state commissioner of health; establishments under federal meat, poultry or egg product inspection; or establishments engaged solely in the harvesting, storage, or distribution of one or more raw agricultural commodities which are ordinarily cleaned, prepared, treated or otherwise processed before being marketed to the consuming public. http://www.agriculture.ny.gov/FS/industry/04circs/Art20CLicofFooCIR951.htm 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

such foods are heated for aesthetic purposes. E: only non-potentially hazardous uncut fruits and vegetables are sold or held for sale or service.57

In addition to the physical amendments to be included, the DOHMH also requires that the cart follow the material specifications for food-contact surfaces and non-food contact surfaces. Food contact surfaces cannot be porous and must be smooth; therefore, materials used are aluminum and stainless steel. Additionally, if wood were to be used on the cart, the wood too must be wrapped in metal.58 Zooming out in scale to the cart as an object in public space, the cart may be no larger than five feet by ten feet, and the code requires that the cart site itself in regards to distances in which the cart needs to avoid conflict with other objects and actors on the street.59 Here is a list of tickets recorded through the Environmental Control Board and the Penalties that are affiliated with those violations. 17-315 C: ITEMS NOT IN OR UNDER CART EXCEPT WASTE CONTAINER ($100) AD 17-315 E:VEND IN BUS STOP, NEXT TO HOSPITAL 10 FT OF DRIVE, SUBWAY, CROSSWALK ($100) A.C. 17-307 B: UNPERMITTED MOBILE FOOD UNIT A.C. 17-307 A: UNLICENSED MOBILE FOOD VENDOR H.C. 81.31: EQUIPMENT NOT CLEAN; IMPROPERLY MAINTAINED ($300) H.C. 89.13 G: ALLOWING UNLICENSED PERSON TO VEND AC 17-315 D: VENDING UNIT AGAINST DISPLAY WINDOW OR 20 FT. OF ENTRANCE OR EXITS ($100) H.C. 89.05 A 2: NO PROOF MFVU SUPPLIED SERVICED AT PERMITTED COMMISSARY FACILITY ($200) H.C. 89.13 J: OPERATE MFVU IN AREA NOT AUTHORIZED BY PRIVATE RESTRICTED AREA PERMIT 17-315 A: VENDOR ON SIDEWALK LESS THAN 12FT., OR NOT AT CURB ($100) H.C. 89.23 F: FAILURE TO PROVIDE HAND WASHING FACILITIES ($550)

Title

Description

57 Chapter 6 of New York Health Code, Article 89 58 ยง6-04 Mobile food vending units: pre-permit construction and equipment requirements for all classes of mobile food vending units. Mobile food vending units must be constructed and equipped so that they may be maintained and operated in a clean and sanitary manner, in accordance with all applicable law, so as to protect foods from contamination by dust, dirt and toxic and other substances, and the public from risk of injury, and must be equipped in accordance with the requirements set forth in Table 1 in ยง6-05 of this Chapter. Units and equipment must be manufactured from easily cleanable, durable, hard, smooth, non-porous, non-absorbent, non-reactive and non-toxic materials. All equipment must be fastened securely to the mobile food vending unit, 59 Chapter 6 of New York Health Code, Article 89: 6-01 (d). Administrative Code ยง17-307 (b)(1) 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

17-311: FAIL TO DISPLAY LICENSE AND OR PLATE ($100) H.C. 81.19 B: SHATTER PROOF OR SHIELD LIGHT BULB NOT PROVIDED WHEN REQUIRED ($200) H.C. 81.19 C: INADEQUATE VENTILATION ($200) H.C. 89.23 B: VENDING FROM ANY PLACE OTHER THAN A MOBILE FOOD VENDING UNIT ($385) 17-315 I: VENDING WITHIN PARKS JURISDICTION WITHOUT COMM. APPROVAL($100) H.C. 89.13 E: OPERATING W SUSPENDED, EXPIRED OR REVOKED PERMIT OR LICENCE H.C. 89.19 A: VENDING FOOD FROM UNAPPROVED SOURCE ($550) VII. MOVING BEYOND THE CART Looking at “ H.C. 89.23 B: Vending from any place other than a mobile food unit,” there are many alternatives employed by vendors that find other means of selling beyond the DOHMH approved food cart or expanding beyond the spatial limitations of the cart. In East Harlem, one vendor used the scaffolding, appropriating the public space for his use, to hang bananas. While today this is considered to be in violation of the New York City Health Code, this method of vending harks back to a law that allowed vendors to hang clothing from lamp posts.60 Referring to Santiago Ciguerda’s work, one can imagine methods of tapping into older mechanisms such as the lamp post with objects in space that can be applied for legally, such as with permits. How can street food vending be expanded beyond the cart in such a way that adheres to the laws of space and materiality outlined by the governmental agencies. Since the New York Charter allows the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to create and amend laws as seen fit, this may allude to a more temporal mechanism for vending, a method for vending that adapts with the changing of the laws. With this, the hope would be that the vendor maintain or gain agency in the field of work he or she is situated within.

60 refers to law mentioned in the historical section 00

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

WORKS CITED space. (n.d.). Dictionary.com. Retrieved October 15, 2013, from http:// dictionary.reference.com/browse/space?s=t Vendor Power!. (n.d.). CUP: Vendor Power. Retrieved October 15, 2013, from http://welcometocup.org/Projects/MakingPolicyPublic/VendorPower THE QUESTION OF SPACE. (n.d.).LEBBEUS WOODS. Retrieved October 15, 2013, from http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-question-ofspace/ Donna Haraway Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599 Sadler, S. (2005). Archigram architecture without architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. WALLS OF CHANGE. (n.d.). LEBBEUS WOODS. Retrieved October 15, 2013, from http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/walls-of-change/ fencePOCKET :: IDC. (n.d.). IDC RSS. Retrieved October 26, 2013, from http:// internationaldesignclinic.org/make/f RECETAS URBANAS. (n.d.). RECETAS URBANAS. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http://www.recetasurbanas.net/index1. php?idioma=ESP&REF=1&ID=0003 PARASITISM, COMMENSALISM, AND MUTUALISM: EXPLORING THE MANY SHADES OF SYMBIOSES. (n.d.). Life and Environment. Retrieved October 9, 2013, from http://www.otago.ac.nz/parasitegroup/PDF%20papers/ LeungPoulin2008-V&M.pdf Definition of phoresy in English. (n.d.).phoresy: definition of phoresy in Oxford dictionary. Retrieved November 15, 2013, from http://www.oxforddictionaries. com/us/definit

Title

Description

Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 1982.13:315-347. Downloaded from arjournals. annualreviews.org by University of Kanas-Lawrence & Edwards on 09/26/05.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Bush, A., Fernandez, J., Esch, G., & Seed, J. R. (2001). Parasitism: The Diversity And Ecology Of Animal Parasites By A. O. Bush, J. C. Fernández, G. W. Esch & J. R. Seed, Pp. 566. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2001. ISBN 0 521 66447 0. £29.95. Parasitology, 123(03), 1-12. Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.).Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2013, from http://www.etymonline.com/index. php?term=commensal Ward, D., Zunz, O., & Bluestone, D. (1992). The Pushcart Evil. The Landscape of modernity: essays on New York City, 1900-1940 (pp. 74-75). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Allen, M. (1998, May 24). Giuliani to Bar Food Vendors On 144 Blocks. The New York Times. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http://www.nytimes. com/1998/05/24/nyregion/giuliani-to-bar-food-vendors-on-144-blocks. html?pagewanted=all&src=pm DEMAND PUSHCARTS AS AID FOR POOR; Return of Cheap System of Food Distribution to be Tried in This City. ICE SITUATION SERIOUS Governor Holds Conference on Next Summer’s Supply, and Mayor Also Takes a Hand.. (1918, February 5). DEMAND PUSHCARTS AS AID FOR POOR. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B1EFA3B5 B11738DDDAC0894DA405 Proudhon. (n.d.). What is Property?. What is Property?. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/360/360-h/360-h. htm#link2HCH0002 Int 0511-1999. (n.d.). The New York City Council. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail. aspx?ID=432291&GUID=A782B5BC-9C83-492A-89D1-5EFA671B4D4C&Optio ns=ID|Text|&Search BIG APPLE VENDORS v. NY CITY | Leagle.com. (n.d.). BIG APPLE VENDORS v. NY CITY | Leagle.com. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http://www.leagle. com/decision/19956511 Memorandum Of Understanding. (2010, July 1). NYC Gov. Retrieved November 13, 2015, from http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pd

SPATIAL | SUBVERSION

N.Y. ADC. LAW § 17-315 : NY Code - Section 17-315: Restrictions on the placement of vehicles and pushcarts; vending in certain areas restricted or prohibited. (n.d.). Findlaw. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http://codes. lp.findlaw.com/nycode/ADC/17/3/2/17-315 NEW MOBILE FOOD VENDOR PERMIT CHECKLIST. (n.d.). NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND MENTAL HYGIENE . Retrieved November 9, 2013, from http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/p Business - Street Vendor Permits & Tax Clearance. (n.d.). Business - Street Vendor Permits & Tax Clearance. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http:// www.nyc.gov/html/dof/html/business Johnston, L. (1981, December 15). POLICE ARE STEPPING UP ANTI-PEDDLER CAMPAIGN. The New York Times. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http:// www.nytimes.com/1981/12/15/nyregion/police-are-stepping-up-anti-peddlercampaign.html Pedestrians-Diversity Plaza. (n.d.). NYC DOT. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/publicplaza-sites.shtml Rennison, B. (2012, August 16). Leaders, merchants reach deal on Jackson Heights plaza. Queens Courier. Retrieved November 12, 2013, from http:// queenscourier.com/2012/leaders-merchants-reach-deal-on-jackson-heightsplaza/ SUHKI. (n.d.). Diversity Plaza. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http:// diversityplazajh.wordpress.com/sukhi-new-york/ Jackson Heights plaza to get $500K in enhancements. (2013, October 23). Queens Courier. Retrieved November 14, 2013, from http://queenscourier. com/2013/jackson-heights-plaza-to-get-500k-in-enhancements/

Title

PUSHCART QUESTION REDUCED TO POLITICS; Those Who Profit by Lack of Regulation Expected to Oppose Reform.. (1912, July 7). PUSHCART QUESTION REDUCED TO POLITICS. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70A14FD3A5E13738DDDAE0894 DF4

Description

CH. 04

DIFFUSED ARCHITECHTURE AS ANTICIPATORY INFRASTRUCTURE IN URBAN CRISIS

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Title

Natural Disasters and Social Options - Sandy On the Sunday when hurricane Sandy hit, I was in Montréal ready to go back to New York. I had heard that there was a storm on its way, but had no idea it would end up being one of the deadliest and destructive hurricane in United States’s history. All trains, buses and planes from Montréal to New York were cancelled. When the buses started running again a few days later, I took the first one back to New York, wondering if the neighborhood where I was living t the time had been affected. The effects of the storm started to be visible from New Jersey, where I saw from the bus hundreds cars in line at every single one of the gas stations that had not been emptied already. The queues were framing both sides of the highway in almost continuous lines. highlighting our addiction to fossil fuels. Once I finally got to Port Authority terminal, New York felt unusual. My trip from the central bus station to my apartment took almost two hours and provoked many questions about how we live together as an urban community and how we come together in times of crisis when resources are dramatically scarce. I waited for around 30 minutes from a cab next to Times Square, which was projecting (...) as if nothing happened. On a “normal” day, I would not be surprised to see two New Yorkers fighting over a cab, both claiming to have called it first. But in the aftermath of Sandy, I saw repeatedly people getting a cab and, before entering, screaming their destination to the people around so that they could join share a ride. And old lady did the same to me. When I got in, I asked the cab driver to bring me to Brooklyn. “I can’t go to Brooklyn”, he said, not because he wanted to stay in Manhattan and make a maximum of money, but because he simply didn’t have enough gas. The word gas, however, was pronounced with an accent I had a hard time understanding, and after asking him to repeat twice, the lady I was sharing the cab started screaming at me something like: “No gas! Hurricane! No gas! Don’t you watch the news”, thinking I was perhaps some stupid tourist. Some things never change in New York. This Sandy fragment might seem anecdotic, but there are multiple apps that exist trying to make people share cabs. Furthermore, this tactic exists in the everyday life of various cities around thw world. The unusual behaviors that emerge out of crisis are therefore showing that our social options can be different. “Individuals are not alone in making choices (...) Any given solution was not imposed by an absolute necessity. Other routes were possible. (...) In any event, a bifurcation has been reached, possibilities have been separated, and one possibility has been adopted to the exclusion of others.” These “others” became more visible during Sandy. 00

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

Scarce ressources Dependance on gaz Unequal power Full light inTimes Square Collaborative consumption Instinctive cab sharing Disaster Opportunity Private light sources sold on the street Intermediary Infrastructure Street carts as public lighting Back-up transport Buses as subway trains Shared experience Strangers talking to each other

Crisis is what draws clearly and sharply the perimeter of everything -Romolo Bugaro, Bea Vita, Laterza 2013

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

WebEthnography - The uses of mobile vending in times of crises As a starting point to explore the uses of street vending during times of crises, I have used online ethnography to study the uses of street vending as an infrastructure and perception that the citizens and medias had of vendors during different types of acute crises (protests, natural disasters and terrorist attacks), in New York and abroad. The spatio-temporal components were determined through keywords referring to specific time and place. This method might not allow me to have a representative sample considering the biases inherent in the medium and who is using it, but I wanted to focus on the unusual and what happens differently. In other words, on things that are worth mentioning. My online ‘ethnographies’ have been purely observational of a past space in time, which does not allow me to get into thick descriptions allowed by the real immersions of traditional ethnography. That research method has however helped me define the three levels of crises, as well as the case studies for each. Only examples of momentaneous and acute crises were found, perhaps because they are the two most sensational levels and the levels to which the users of Twitter can identify the most. The most chronic types of crises seem to be less appealing for such media because of their slow-motionless, the fact that the disadvantaged parts of the population that are affected by it often are not present on Twitter, and perhaps also because the association with street food is less obvious. For momentaneous crises, I looked at one case related to temperature: rain. And for acute crises, I looked at examples related to terrorism (9-11), political protests (Occupy Wall Street and Taksim Square) as well as natural disasters (Sandy). Some characteristics, such as the adaptivity and ingenuity of vendors were observed across examples: vendors always being there when it rains, providing anonymous masks during Sandy, being the closest thing to a street lamp during and being open when all restaurants are closed after Sandy, etc. Some other characteristics were however observed in only one crisis: Occupy Wall Street. Many vendors used their generators to supply with electricity the infrastructure of the protestors. Undercover cops then seized the generators, claiming that they were not “up to code”, but many clearly saw the act as one of intimidation and harassment, allowed by their blurry legal status. From an infrastructural perspective, the uses of street vending during Occupy Wall Street at Zucotti Park was among the most interesting. Street Vendor Project created a website that allowed international supporters to sponsor free meals to protesters through street vendors and, as one New Yorker pointed out, the best falafel in NYC became the HQ of Occupy Wall Street. And finally, the criticisms about vendors themselves were made about the cheap umbrellas that do not resist wind and of the vending of memorabilia items around World Trade Center, considered disrespectful.

Many of the cases highlighted in this research will be investigated in more depth in the following pages. 00

Momentaneous Crisis: Weather

Raining

Keywords: rain, umbrella, street, vendor

Criticisms by the customers

Adaptivity and Ingenuity

Harassement by the authorities

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

Acute Crisis: Terrorism

9/11

Keywords: World Trade Center, vendor, street, 9/11

Acute Crisis: Political Protest

OCCUPY WALL STREET Keywords: occupywallstreet, vendor, street, Zuccotti, park, occupy

Acute Crisis: Natural Disaster

TAKSIM SQUARE Keywords: Turkey, street, vendor, Taksim, Istanbul

SANDY

Keywords: hurricane, Sandy, vendors, street food, New York, NY, Frankenstorm, Superstorm

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

CRISIS LEVELS I have distinguished three different levels of crises to which street vending is answering. I have chosen to focus on times of intense difficulty and turning points because of how sharply they define the perimeter of everything around them. I have identified the three levels of crises as follow: acute, chronic and momentaneous crises. The acute crises can be man-made, natural or both. They are experienced suddenly to a severe degree and their sensationalism is generally accompanied with significant media attention (international terrorism, natural disasters, epic civil disobedience and protests, etc.). The chronic crises, on the other hand, are slow-motion crises (joblessness, food desertsâ&#x20AC;Ś). They are sufficiently great to be noteworthy, but because of their complex structural causes, they are harder to recognize and act upon. Finally, the last and more banal type of crises is the momentaneous one, which, even though it is marked by a brief time, can also be experienced intensely and cause, to a certain degree, anxiety and even distress (rain, lack of time, micro acts of violence and terrorism).

CHRONIC

The idea of levels implies that there are clear differences, transitions and gaps in between them, which is contradictory to what I am interested in looking at, especially in regards to the role of street vendors in the continuum across all three levels and in the city in general. While this approach allows me to make my process sharper and more explicit, I recognize its subjectivity and relativism. The challenge is to keep its dynamism and show how these different scales are interconnected and can potentially inform my design framework in the way it will shape the objectives and inform its subordinate strategies and tactics. As Henri Lefebvre argues in the Critique of Everyday Life: The schematic of a scale or of a formal hierarchy of degrees is much too static. Although by definition they are distinct and are located at different stages, levels can interact and become telescoped, with differing results according to what the encounters and circumstances are. As one level mediates another, so they act one upon the other. At one particular moment of becoming, in one particular set of circumstances, one level can dominate and incorporate the others. The idea of a structural set of precise and separate levels is untenable.

ACUTE

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

MOMENTANEOUS

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Momentaneous Crises Permanent eyes on the streets May 2010, Times Square: Duane Jackson, a vendor is praised for spotting a car bomb. In the multiple interviews that he will give following the event, tells the New York Times: “There are a bunch of us disabled vets selling here, and we’re used to being vigilant because we all know that freedom isn’t free, (...) All of us vets here are the eyes and ears for the cops.” If this incident is indeed the expression of a naturally constructed “city watch” that ensures a certain level of safety, thanks to the special status of veterans when it comes to street vending, then they are bringing the concept of “eyes on the streets”, explained by Jane Jacobs in the Death and Life of Great American Cities to a whole different level, because their eyes are permanently on the streets. This allows also for a different understanding of the concept, from keeping the streets safe, to providing it with what it needs as well. Time Tactics New York is a time-starved city. During my observations, I witnessed a driver making a quick transaction with a food cart by pulling over next to the sidewalk in order to buy fruits and vegetables without even getting out of his car. The same behavior has also been observed with cab drivers, who will buy a snack for the road. The food cart as a drive through. Besides reducing the time of transactions, street vendors are also good at being present just in time. For example: you walk down the street and as you turn the corner, it starts raining; you look on the other side of the street and a man stands behind a table with umbrellas. In itself, rain is a very common occurrence that yet not everyone think to plan for in advance. At the heart of these service offerings lies an understanding of the relationship between the citizen’s behaviours and their environment. The street vendor selling umbrellas understands that people don’t always look at the weather forecast and/or forget to bring an umbrella with them. The city as the vendor’s material The dense city becomes the material for the the creative intelligence of the street vendor, on which he depends to make a basic living wage. Whether it is in their response for momentaneous, acute or chronic levels of crisis, the characteristics related to their precarity and how well they serve New Yorkers are very

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

similar. If we take the temperature response of the vendors during rainy days and bring it to a more acute level of climate disaster such as Sandy, for instance, the role that they play in adapting to the needs of New Yorkers demonstrate a level of adaptability that is unparalleled. Their level of correlated precarity in these same contexts is however, also equally unparalleled. Nonetheless, times of crisis highlight how street vending plays the role of an intermediary infrastructure in New York. By focusing on the the most unusual and useful uses of street vending during times of crises, by intention is not to romanticize the â&#x20AC;&#x153;informalâ&#x20AC;?, especially considering that many of the people concerned are not considered informal economically speaking, but instead to amplify the underpinning and hidden value of the tactical structure of the spatial distribution and social contingency of street vendors on which future political representations and actions can build upon. + INTRODUCING THE SECTIONS

Title

Description

Natural Disasters and Social Options - Sandy (follow-up from page XX) Factors that lead to informalization As Ryan Devlin notes: “strict laws would not encourage informal vending practices if resources were provided for the enforcement of these laws. Regulations alone do not lead to informalization. It is when regulations are coupled with the two other factors identified by Fernandez Kelly and Garcia, enforcement and conflicting mandates of agencies, that we see the full picture of how the state actively encourages informal activity to take place.” Therefore, even when a legal measure might appear as being ineffective in actually reducing the number of vendors on the streets, such as the first cap on licenses in 1928, what it always succeeds in doing is pushing the immigrant worker into an informal zone that can then be leveraged politically. The flexibility and adaptability of the street vendor, which I will highlight throughout this paper, is thus not only relative to how they can respond and serve the ‘average’ New Yorker in times of crises, but also to how they can be managed by the authorities: in a decentralized, privatized and informal way through techniques of surveillance, intimidation and physical interventions on the sidewalks. Political leverage The regulations are so convoluted that they can be instrumentalized against the vendor contextually by the state and private property interests when needed. “When anti-vendor sentiment is low, vendors operate in an environment of tacit municipal acceptance. However if political pressure from local merchants and/or business elites grows, the existing regulatory apparatus can be mobilized to crack down on vending activity”. This gives the moral leverage to the administration to portray itself as doing the just thing, by enforcing existing laws against whom they can now describe as lawbreakers and tax evaders, unfairly competing with legitimate hard working businesses people. This narrative becomes an important moral leverage in New York’s historical context since the myth of the successful hard working immigrant entrepreneur is at the heart of the foundational narrative of many middle and upper class families in the city. JP Morgan (to verify) and Macy’s started as street peddlers, for instance, but for some reason, that detail is not specified in the historical section of their website. Everyday Crackdown One example of a poignant and representative micro-crackdown is Farha, a vendor from afghanistan, who was pushed to to leave her position in front of a MacDonald 00

STRATEGIES

TACTICS

1761: 30 minutes law (to protect farmers)

1800+: Big companies start in the street.

1987 Street Peddler Task Force

1940 CRACKDOWN LSE - Essex Market 1894: Veterans Law

1916 All licenses expire

1886: First Pushcark Market 4 peddlers decide not to move

1940: "Street peddler" no more in U.S. Census,

1930: Depression: more native born citizens vendors

1960 BIDs

1990's 1998 Giuliani against Cap on vendors on 125th licenses

2001 CRACKDOWN 9/11

Emergence of black market

Sandy

1930’s CRACKDOWN LaGuardia

Green Carts

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

2011: NYC Food Trucks Association 2010: Vamos Unidos 2009: Vendor Power with CUP

because of the harassment from the manager who invoked fake laws and sent a fake police man to tell her that she could not vend there, when she actually could. Since she did not want to leave her clientèle, she moved right on the other site of the street, where it is technically illegal, but where she ended up being safer because she developed a relationship with the owner of the drug store, also from Afghanistan, in front of which she placed her cart. Laws are being governed informally. “Regulatory ambiguity and informal practice are intrinsic to the day-to-day management of street vending in New York and discusses how informality itself comes to operate as a mechanism of governance”. By relying on informalized, privatized and decentralized techniques of control the state is able to smooth over these conflicting mandates and, through provisional forms of governance, manage contradictions resulting from conflicting imperatives that are characteristic of the ongoing project of neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002)”. Typology of a big crackdown, following a crisis While micro crackdown happen individually to many vendors quotidianly, major crackdowns, on the other hand, happen more rarely. Devlin covered in his paper two of them (Essex market in the Lower East Side and Giuliani’s campaign against 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

street vendors on 125th in the 1990’s.) and came to the conclusion that the conditions of these crackdowns “has more to do with economic and political conditions than conditions in the streets.” The economic and political setup is generally expressing coalitions of interests made of real estate/redevelopment interests, reform-oriented mayoral administrations as well as, to a lesser degree, small businesses. By the amount of tickets that vendors get regularly, one can wonder who sets the priority for the NYPD (not only the NYPD), especially when considering that most of the fines do not get paid because of how unreasonably priced they are, yet they are kept at a high price, further damaging the image of the immigrant (in)formal street vendor. Crackdown following a crisis - 9/11 Can the underlying and economic conditions that drove the vending crackdowns documented by Ryan Devlin help understand a crackdown related to acute crises? The crackdown on illegal selling of 9/11 memorabilia at Ground Zero in 2008 appear to have a a very similar set of political and economic environment, to the difference that the moral leverage that the city had at the time was especially strong. The vendors were hawking photographs of the twin towers crumbling and other related images to tourists visiting the site, which was considered distasteful, especially since it was ‘in the face’ of anyone passing by on the sidewalk. Some offered generic merchandise while others offered some custom-made items such as toilet paper with Osama Bin Laden’s caricature and the phrase ‘Help Wipe Out Terrorism’. The best seller: NYPD and NYFD hats, which became very contested items to sell, unless it was through an ‘official’ provider. Scott Stringer, Manhattan borough president said at the time: “It gives Ground Zero a carnival atmosphere. It’s inappropriate, especially for the families that go there to pay their respects.” As the previous crackdown showed, the coalition of interests only needed to enforce existing laws to dramatically reduce the number of vendors the next day. In this case, 9-11 justified a law that prohibited vendor within five-block surrounding the World Trade Center. At first glance, it is very hard to go against the position of the borough president. It does sound distasteful. But his use of the word ‘carnival’, I would argue, is key to the underlying nature of his argument. Carnival can be described as a period of public revelry and is often associated with temporary amusement show or circus. “The informal is devalued as not only legally illegitimate, but visually, socially and spatially illegitimate”, making unworthy of a ‘luxury product’ such as Manhattan. To what extent was the intervention about the distastefulness of the act of selling memorabilia? After all, the city put up signs in parallel asking tourists to not support street vendors, and suggested that tourists instead go to the Tribute Centre gift shop, which offered officially authorised commemorative WTC items with 00

PHOTO

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

proceeds donated to the September 11th Families Association. Furthermore, memorabilia was not the only thing vendors in the area were selling at the time. Many of them were also selling the usual knockoff designer bags, watches and sunglasses as well as t-shirts and hats. “The police move us and give us tickets,” said one photo vendor who did not want to give his name. “I’ve been doing this for two months, and it puts food on the table for my family.” He said he knows some people are offended, “but the tourists are really interested. They want to know what happened here,” he said in Spanish. Many of the vendors that had their business around the site used to work somewhere close, but lost their job following the attack. Others were veterans, for whom the ban also applied, and who expressed how therapeutic mingling with people was, as well as how gratifying the recognition was from the patriotic customers who interacted with them. Many complained that the crackdown took away what little they had. “As for disrespect, I think it would be people who are building on top of that,” one of them said, pointing to the pit across the street. Indeed, it seemed as though all the conflicts existed over the question as to “who should legitimately profit” from the tragedy, because no one opposed the selling of memorabilia by Century 21 or the closest Hallmark, for instance, nor the construction of the biggest mall in New York on the site later on. Many visitors even said that they would have less of a problem with street vendors being on the site if part of their profit went to the victims, not understanding how precarious their situation was, nor how some of them were indirect victims of that attack.

Title

Description

Curiously, veterans and grass-root capitalism were not welcome around a symbol for war on terror and global trade, even though “bringing money into downtown was a major justification for the city’s decision to open the site to tourism. In this situation, commerce is paradoxically defined as healing the city as a ghoulish profit from death”. Nonetheless, the meaning of the place was highly contested, and many interests were at play in deciding who would build that meaning. Why not develop a partnership between vendors and the official Tribune Center by asking everyone to give part of the money to the victims, if this is truly the objective? Because one again, the crackdown had more to do with the coalition of interests supporting it than with the actual conditions on the streets, especially when you consider that vendors were selling items related to the attacks since the very day it happened. To seal the case, the president of the Alliance of Downtown New York even used at the time the ultimate all-encompassing argument to support the crackdown: public safety. She added: “It’s crowded with hundreds of thousands of people. There is construction, and illegal vending frankly violates the sanctity of the site.”

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Coincidentally or not, the crackdown happened during the last economic crisis, considered the worst since the Great Depression, which had a very big impact on retail businesses, among other sectors of the economy. The Great Depression, on the other hand, had a different impact: faces of vendors changed temporarily. Street vending being most often than not a last resort attempt to make a living (getting a cab driving job is often considered as graduating from vending according to the director of Street Vendor Project), the economic crisis pushed many native born citizens to take on street selling. Street vending thus appear historically to play an intermediary role economically, a buffer zone. Especially in recent history, with Bloomberg ‘partnering’ with street food vendors to address food deserts and and hurricane Sandy, both of which I will investigate further in this paper.

Case Studies: Food Trucks and Airbnb So far mobile vendors have been mostly regarded as businesses, but rarely as an infrastructure. To describe the idea of mobile vendors as a diffuse model of architecture programming that could serve as an anticipatory infrastructure, I will refer to the description of the Amsterdam Playgrounds (Aldo Van Eyck, 19471978), designed first as children play areas on leftover parcels and then later on used as community spaces, after having been abandoned and neglected. In Social Infrastructure and The Right to The City, (authors) explains that these 700 spaces throughout the city have the potentiality to “form a network that move throughout the fabric of the city without imposing a formal order on it” while embracing the city’s “chaotic” and “kaleidoscopic” nature. Because of their mobility and flexibility, envisioning mobile trucks or carts as flexible extension increasing the reach of fixed systems, rather than as objects, opens a realm of opportunities for urban praxis. The informal sector, also known as System D “is recognized as a productive micro-economic and ecological system, one designed and developed as a vital social and economic landscape or network in a city’s civil terrain, it has the potential to materialize in local urban space, creating new spaces of economic opportunity, citizenship, and culture. In effect, System D can restructure the idea of the citizens’ agora from a single, central space to a field of unified hubs and points across inhabited terrains where people do the everyday work of city making.” While some organizations exist to make them work together, the nature of their daily practice makes many street vendors having to compete, whether for desir00

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

able spots or because of ticketing, instead of collaborating towards a shared common goal. Working as a network of mobile social infrastructure worked so well during Sandy that it attracted significant media attention. Henri Lefebvre argues that the place to begin the work around more inclusive production of space are “holes and chasms that exist between the planned and formal structures of dominant society”. These spaces, according to Lefebvre, are often “overlooked as valueless and thus provide an opportunity for the study of new, more inclusive production of space”. but ad hoc and out of the norm skills, agility, initiative, and morale Mobile food carts and trucks are not considered like holes or chasms, however. They are, to many, bumps. And they are far from being overlooked - they are are the constant focus of many dominant interests who see in them either an unfair competition responsible for why their profit margin is going down, or a sign of the third-worldization of New York, which goes against the ‘luxury product’ that many of them would like to sell New York being sold as. Some of them might have recognized the important role they played during Sandy, but the everyday reality of food vendors did not change following the disaster. They might have gain discursive legitimacy to a certain degree, but it has not served their interests in any noticeable way on the long run. ***They could however be considered as outposts. *** Bloomberg quotes before and after? To explore the idea of diffused architecture as anticipatory infrastructure, I will build on two case studies with many similarities in the way they are perceived by the dominant class in times of crises and in the everyday urban life: the temporary partnerships that Bloomberg’s administration developed with Airbnb and NYC Food Trucks Association. ***Can be for both emergency but to extend the fixed or bigger system reach into - with… they are a bridge into populations and across divides...gaps

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

AIRBNB A few years ago, when Airbnb was on its way to becoming what it is today, Mayor Bloomberg made it illegal and punishable to rent an apartment for more than 30 days. Coincidentally, the 30 day law reminds us of the 30 minute law imposed on street vendors in 1761 to force pushcart to re-locate every thirty minutes, both being in a very grey area of legality. During Sandy, however, Bloomberg embraced Airbnb by partnering with them to create a platform to host people who had lost their house temporarily. Emergency housing is one of the most pressing and immediate challenge for the state following a disaster. When hurricanes struck, such as Katrina, one of the tactics of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is to provide accommodation for people by paying hotel rooms at a fairly high price. In the case of Sandy, the average cost per room approximated $250 per night. The advantage is that people can be hosted for a much longer period than Airbnb, which I suspect might be possible mostly in the emergency period of post-disaster, but is the cost truly justifiable? And could it be invested in a more constructive way? This raises the question of bureaucracy, because FEMA pays for the hotels while the funds that could be accorded to more long-term rental assistance depends on funds that are dependant on the Congressional approval as well as interagency agreements. Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions, a nonprofit organization working to end homelessness in New York said that for â&#x20AC;&#x153;For a fraction of the cost, families could be in a stable situation and getting a running start in putting their lives together.â&#x20AC;? Staying in a hotel room without a kitchen for months might indeed not be the best way to regain a somewhat normal life. The hotel programs of FEMA in New York region cost $103 million, plus $73 million for the city program. Around $176 000 000, were invested in these programs, all of which mostly benefited hotels, which, as far as I can could find, did not give any discount to FEMA on its rooms, while more than a thousand New Yorkers were hosting people for free through Airbnb. Seven months after Sandy hit New York, a state court judged that New York City could not end its hotel program for Sandyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s evacuees and evict the homeless people from the hotels. Ironically, a few months later, New York City was yet again fighting Airbnb in court asking the private data of more than 15 000 users for an investigation against illegal hotels. Meanwhile, Airbnb developed from the tweaks of the systems that allowed people to host for free the evacuees a system to streamline the process. If a disaster happens anywhere in the world where Airbnb users are registered, the system will kick into action in 30 minutes or less and will 00

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

send alerts to all the hosts in the area asking them if they are willing to help and will connect guests via a different landing page. Same guarantees, but fee-free. The system was engineered with the advice of IDEO, San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, and other groups. During a short period of time, AirBnb materialized in some way the thought experiment MegaHouse by Atelier Hitoshi Abe in Japan. The project, a management system, was building on the “loss of sense of place and its ambiguity of boundaries between the private property and public space”, suggesting that individuals should be able to inhabit the underused spaces of the city as an enormous “house”. Airbnb and the “altruistic community” that emerged in the aftermath of Sandy created a sponge-like aspect of the city, in the shape of an interim-service, an intermediary infrastructure. The context that stimulated MegaHouse in Japan, on the contrary, had to do more with the slow decline of the Japanese population and consequently, the gaps that have appeared in the urban landscape. Did Sandy show us a glimpse of commoning, by regrouping the underused spaces of the city as one mega house whose walls were made more porous by the ‘generosity’ of more than a thousand New Yorkers? Could this glimpse be built on an expanded?

Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one half of the time. It’s time we have this some thought -Buckminster Fuller

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

FOOD TRUCKS

In the aftermath of Sandy, many people were looking after street vendors. On blogs and on Twitter, many were worried of not seeing the usual street vendor at the corner. There were indeed less carts and trucks in the streets, and it was not because of the harassment of the NYPD this time. Many food trucks were busy donating food to the people in the most affected areas, such as Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, Red Hook, New Jersey, Hoboken and the Rockaways. 350 000 free meals were served in total. Some food trucks owners, mostly members of NYC Food Trucks Association, had started on their own right when the hurricane hit. But the effort got a boost later on from Jet Blue, private donations (50 000$ were gathered in five days from donors as far away as Australia), and the Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fund for the advancement of New York City (who sponsored 20-30 food trucks). The latter is quite surprising, considering the Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s measures taken against street food vendors before Sandy and the constant harassment they face by the NYPD. While many were happy about this unusual cooperation, some wondered if the spirit of collaboration would remain postSandy. If whether or not this partnership was truly a form of collaboration can be challenged. Behind the surface dynamics of the strategies of engagement that were chosen lie different aspects of power dynamics. By approaching the collaboration through a critical perspective, rather than as a functional one, I am wondering if it was not more a form of compliance, where the stronger partners were regulating and using, in some way, the weaker party (food trucks), which had to meet the standards and requirements, rather than a true form of collaboration where the power is shared. Yes, for a specific moment in time, they were able to align their synergy and creativity around a common set of goals, beliefs, values and scarce resources. These values, as we have seen, decided on whether or not some stakeholders would be part of the deal or not, since Jetblue, as I will show later on, could not have partnered with an organization like Vamos Unidos, which mostly regroups undocumented immigrants and unpermitted vendors, while the New york City Food Trucks Association assures on their website that all their members have their permit and license. The formal authority of the City of New York, through the Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fund, was much higher, since they normally worked against street vendors. Certainly, all of them had an opportunity to gain discursive legitimacy around city preparedness. David Weber, the president of NYC Food Trucks association coordinated this big administrative undertaking of dispatching mobile kitchens to the storm-torn

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

parts of the city using a basic Google spreadsheet. But the simple operations had a big follow-up in the medias and in the collective imaginary. The following quotes exemplify it very well: “The food trucks, which are “self-contained and self-sufficient” were able to fill the gap while restaurants struggled to maneuver flooding, storm damage and power outages.” “Usually standing on a thin line between love and hate, food trucks in NYC are finally proving their worth to the haters, says Bloomberg Businessweek. While many of the city’s brick-and-mortar establishments are trying to get everything up and running, food trucks have been rolling out to the streets with various outreach efforts.” A week after being branded as terrorists by the fire department, New York vendors are showing their service in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which left millions without power, transport, and food. Vendors, who don’t rely on any power grid, are perfect for such situation. ““We take for granted having hot food,” he said. “I feel a bit like a hero, like I did something good.” I spoke with Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at University of Michigan in Flint, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He wrote by email to a journalist from Bloomberg Businessweek who covered the story that the strongest positive feedback of the operation:

Interorganizational Strategies of Engagement Beyond Surface Dynamics: A critical approach to collaboration, rather than functional Hardt and Phillips, 1998

“Perhaps we have inadvertently and unintentionally added a new flotilla/fleet/ armada of national “emergency response” mobile food providers. It would seem that food trucks are perfectly situated to go to areas in need of food, and can get there often before the Red Cross or FEMA or the National Guard, especially in places where there is no power, etc. And it’s a way for food trucks to maintain their business following disasters, whereas restaurants might be shut down weeks. So it’s win-win-win.” Perry has been writing about street food on his blog for many years, interested by the entrepreneurial spirit surrounding it, but also by the complexity of its economic status in terms of offer and demand as well as the legality of it. It turns out, however, that he is not an expert in the question. The journalist who reached out to it simply saw that an economist covered the food trucks effort

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

and wanted that specific take on the initiative. In an email exchange that Perry transferred to me, journalist Susan Berfield writes on November 1st 2012 at 3:07 p.m. an email that is univoquely neoliberal: Subject: Food trucks in NYC and free enterprise Mark, I’m writing a quick piece for Businessweek about food trucks in NYC and noticed your blog post. Would you care to elaborate, briefly: is there anything else new about the food trucks’ response? think they can do anything better than government organizations? Thanks very much, Susan Here is how the idea to collaborate with Food Trucks came up. The marketing and corporate social responsibility department brainstormed various tactics about how to help the victims: Jet Blue water bottles (served on flights), Jetblue generators, etc. One night, however, Jamie Lawson saw at the corner of 2nd avenue and 7th street a food truck that was not normally there. They talked and mailed with an idea for an initiative to serve the community, and they redirected them to the president of NYC Food Trucks Association David Weber. All of it was done very quickly and by 8 p.m. on October 31st, day of Halloween, the final arrangements were made to go serve the next day. They started with just a few locations the first day, mostly in Manhattan close to where some of the food trucks were used to vend (Astor Place, Brooklyn Bridge, Union Square, etc.), but decided to expand and reach out to other hit areas further away the next day. Lawson told me how wonderful it was to witness the collaboration organizing so fast, the crew members of Jetblue joining the effort, the different partners emailing late at night to organize everything for the next day, and so on. But this collaboration did not fit exactly in the frame of pure “altruistic post-disaster community” and selflessness. The effort were obviously branded with Jetblue shirts and products. Lawson also insisted on telling me that what partly motivated her initiative is that “food trucks right now are a thing”. It was, in other words, an excellent “brand fit” for Jetblue. This side of the story does not necessarily takes anything out of what they did. After all, it is no different than any regular New Yorker volunteering for one day after Sandy and then updates their status on their social media platforms in order to portray a vision of themselves that is both descriptive and aspirational. It does, however raises the question of a hierarchy among street vendors.

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

If we look at the evolution of the Google Searches about Food Trucks, Food Carts and Street Food, the correlation in recent years with the rise of popularity of food trucks and street food is obvious: As it happened during the great depression, the faces of street vending are changing. Following the crash of 1929, it was more frequent to see more US born street vendors taking on the streets in a desperate attempt to make a living, while it is normally more an immigrant work position. Partly because of their cost, Food Trucks have contributed to changing the landscape of street food in New York into a more gourmet (and whiter) one. At some point in the research, I started wondering if the food trucks were not in some ways gentrifying street vending by legitimizing a certain esthetic to the detriment of others, and by making the landscape more attractive at the same time it is making it more dangerous and harder to live for the previous inhabitants, the street carts. I found at least one case: the hot dog vendors were banned Washington Square Park in November, while other more “aesthetically pleasing” vendors are still allowed on the site such as Melt, a Lower East Side bakery that will sell gourmet ice-cream sandwiches, and Mario Batali’s Otto Enoteca Pizzeria Gelato Cart. The ban was therefore not about removing street food from the park all together, but about removing a certain type of food, and along with it a certain type of workers. Some immigrant workers had been selling in this buzzing center where tons of NYU students walk and hang out for three years before being forced to relocate so Parks Department can “ensure clear views of the fountain and arch and . . . to bring in a more diverse selection of food options.” This “diversity” argument was also used as an argument to justify the subsidized gentrification of Downtown Brooklyn, which ended up displacing local businesses suited for long time residents. But instead of provoking-supporting-letting “natural” market forces do the unfortunate displacement of bystanders through a “difficult” but “necessary” change, they are simply kicked out (not without protests). The decision with complaints they received from some of the neighbors who qualified them as “unsightly”. Among them, George Vellonakis, the architect behind the $30 million park redesign.

Title

Description

I do not know to what extent gourmet street food is displacing non-gourmet vendors, but one thing that is for sure is that it has transformed the general perception that the general public has of street food, including Jetblue. Lawson made sure to distinguish the type of street food vendors Jetblue was partnering with, “tasteful”, from other types of “dirty” street food. Furthermore, the strong

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

social media presence of New York’s food trucks scene allowed Jetblue’s “disaster marketing stunt” to be retweeted even more, which would not have been the case with food carts. In this case also, class positionality played a crucial role in terms of the resources and social protections that were granted to some vendors as oppose to others during Sandy. The level of vulnerability generally recognized as being correlated to race, class and ethnicity was observable in who has the right to help the city recover. As oppose to the precariousness linked hazardous areas, the spatial dimension was expressed here by the fact that the carts are a lot less mobile than food trucks. This aspect, which makes the everyday more difficult for food cart vendors, since they have to either push the cart every morning and night to the closest, but still very far, garage, or have the it drove by a commercial vehicle, this lack of mobility and independence also hurt them in the aftermath of Sandy. According to Rafael, none of the vendors he works with benefited from such a partnership and many, including him, were struggling during the aftermath of Sandy. From the interviews I did with the food truck heroes of hurricane Sandy, however, the harassment they are going through by the NYPD and closeby brick and mortars restaurants seem to be constant. If whether or not the harassment that the food trucks vendors is as strong or not would need more investigation, but the heroic act of some of them did not help to win their cause and the daily struggles remain. One of the seasonal food trucks told me that the situation was remarkably worse for him personally after Sandy. He got five tickets during the summer before Sandy, and 55 after. If we go back to the win-win-win that Mark Perry spoke about, we then need to ask: what was the win for food truck vendors on the long run? Is there any long-lasting that could be thought of on the long run for being part of the city’s preparedness such as a break from certain taxes or simply from constant harassment by the police? While the public’s perception of street food has changed perhaps for the better now that is is more diverse, one thing that still seems to unite vendors from home made push carts to the food trucks is, to a certain degree, their common opponents. I say to a certain degree because the aesthetics of “dirty” food carts make New York look “thirdworldly”, poor and unorganized, which developers are afraid might hurt the revitalization projects they want to capitalize on. The aesthetics of Food Trucks and gourmet food, on the other hand, make New York look hip and open. If it is true that the unfair competition argument does not stand because a customer will not decide in between a hot dog on the street and a gourmet meal indoors, they might however reconsider if it is a gourmet street meal.

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

Nonetheless, some of the similitudes across classes of street vendors, some historical political economic factors were still determinant in the production of inequalities among them in Sandy’s recovery. This contrasts with my initial assumptions about the “unique” social processes that seemed to emerge engendered by Sandy, which appeared as different from those found in the pre-disaster setting. This assumption is also reinforced by mainstream disaster research, but also by the poetics of disaster and the idea of an “altruistic community” which emerges in the emergency response, but disappears hastily afterwards. Altruism, by definition, is about showing a completely disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. The partnership initiated that the corporate social responsibility department and, most importantly, the marketing department of Jetblue initiated was partly motivated by helping New Yorkers recover, but it was also a very good “brand fit”, which can thereafter consolidate consumer loyalty. I think no act is ever entirely altruistic. The same logic was behind the involvement of Wal Mart with Katrina in New Orleans, which also ended up being way more effective than FEMA on many regards. Actually, I found later in my research that some neoliberal economist had the same argument as I was having about street vendors during Sandy, but about Wal Mart during Katrina. This scared me. Was I in the process of making a neoliberal argument to support street vendors at The New School? They would fail me for this. But this questions needs to be raised.

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

FROM DISASTER CAPITALISM TO DISASTER ACTIVISM? The corporate geography of time In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes Disaster Capitalism as two folds: the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, and an orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of a catastrophic event. The former characteristic was observable in what surrounded the work of street vendors during Sandy, to the difference that some were criticised for being opportunistic, while others were praised for their generosity. Disasters as exciting market opportunities was exemplified in one specific case: street vendors selling candles, batteries and flashlights at a higher price on the street versus Duracell and its Power Forward squat team who gave the items for free. Selling items at a higher price in a state of emergency, price gouging, is illegal (it was simply considered under speculation in the Soviet Union). While some free market economists could argue that price gouging is necessary because it helps to allocate scarce resources (at what price? for whom?), the way bigger companies see the situation is much different. During Katrina, Home Depot executive commented that any profits it might lose in the short term were more than compensated for by increased customer loyalty: “If we can be there when a customer needs us most, we can win that customer for life” (qtd. in Ward 2005). To brand a company through disasters, price gouging is the worse tactic. It would be sacrificing long term benefits for short-term ones. Similarly, Duracell had the privilege to deploy that long term brand building strategy on the territory of street vendors, using their tactics, while vendors were depending on a short term, localized and less refined version of profiteering. Crisis as a strategy and tactic Friedman once described its core strategy by writing that “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” In a way, the transformation of Occupy Wall Street into Occupy Sandy relies on a similar 00

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

principle. However, I would add that the actions that are taken in times of crisis not only depend on the ideas lying around, but also on the relationships already in place. If we look at FEMA’s shadow structure of disaster gypsies, their answer to the disaster is described as a “synthesis of past disaster relationships and newly acquired friendships which form to meet basic needs for affiliation.” Our resiliency therefore depends on what our interconnectedness (knowledge, food, social relationships) with our existing environment. After having been used as a strategy by the economists of the Chicago school to push neoliberal agendas all over the world for decades, could shock be used as the core tactic of activists as well? FEMA In the case of FEMA, the privatization of reconstruction since the terrorist attacks of September seem to have had a pernicious effect. The weaken public sector becomes increasingly ineffective and unable to perform its function without contractors, therefore fueling a parallel rich corporate sector where the best experts now work. “When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.” On top of that, as Mike Davis showed, the hierarchy of subcontracting bring a lot of inequalities. Some contractors are hired by FEMA only to hire contractors, and the workers who do the basic work on the ground are often underpaid hispanic workers lacking papers. The fact that many of the ex-heads of FEMA quit to work in the private and lucrative world of disaster preparedness and government contracts, such as Joe Alibaugh and Michael brown, exemplifies that transformation. Naomi Klein describes the process as follow: “stay in government just long enough to get an impressive title in a department handing out big contracts and to collect inside information on what will sell, then quit and sell access to your former colleagues. Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex.”

Title

Description

But no matter how privatized FEMA has become, the organization’s ineffectiveness is still being used by neoliberal economists as an argument against the public sector and for free market. It is easy to say that the state failed after it 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

has been weakened so much. Could the public sector take a few lessons from the private sector in terms of organizational structure and leadership style, or is it, as …. argued, characteristics that are mostly a product of the competitive market in environment in which private enterprise operates? Can it be inculcated through different incentives? Because the same thing that was said of Wal Mart about people being on the site before and after FEMA was also said of Occupy Sandy in the aftermath of Katrina. And it was also said of many big box companies and… food trucks. What is being said though is not about government versus private enterprise, but how they operate, how they are incentivized and how localized is the response they are enabling. At the end, we are more talking about decentralization and a flat hierarchy, increased local responsibilities, tacit knowledge…. The same arguments that are in the theory of the commons? Gimpse of commoning? Wal Mart and Katrina: a model? During Katrina, Wal-Mart used its own hurricane-tracking software that they developed, which was motivated by the protection of their own capital during the frequent past weather catastrophes that they had to face, and therefore went into disaster preparedness in advance. Given the spatial reach of the company and the specificity of all the cultural contexts in which they operate reach as well as the unusual conditions that arise during a disaster, they encouraged local managers to not follow protocol and rely on their metis knowledge, which allowed them to be more agile and intuitive and make better decisions. Their stock was full of what people needed where people needed it and everything was ready to be deployed. If we rely on the conventional argument pro-freemarket, we can say that private ownership of disaster relief did in this case provide the right incentives for the managers at Wal-Mart to produce the outcomes that were wished for by their clients, even though the actions were more selfinterested that they would care to admit. Indeed, for Wal-Mart, meeting the need of their customers, and profiting from accomplishing its mission, is their main incentive. Which works also during times of crisis. On the opposite, FEMA’s role is more framed as coordinating other agencies. “Coordination” by itself is really a second-order output; the results of such coordination are what ultimately matters. Thus, “coordination” as a mission is problematic because as an output it is 00

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

largely unobservable, and therefore it is difficult to know how much its “coordination” activities contributed to the final outcomes.” Indeed, when you look at the report of FEMA post-Sandy, their performance is expressed a lot in amounts of money allocated to various agencies, as if the amount of money was a signal of effectiveness. Glimpse of publicness As companies get stronger and are now counted on to deliver relief, we need to remember that they are not designed to work for the public good. If Wal-Mart, the biggest corporation in United States, really cared about helping people in need, perhaps it would start by giving its own employees the annual salary of $25 000 they have been asking for as well as the “chance” to work full-time. Their Walton’s family has a fortune bigger than nearly half of all citizens in United States. On top of that, a congressional report proved that the public cost of low wages was enormous. Taxpayers are therefore subsidizing Wal-Mart’s underpaid workers in public assistance programs that cost from $900,000 to $1.75m a year. Why are private companies doing so good when comes the time to support citizens in times of acute crisis and do so poorly in addressing chronic crisis? Because they see acute crisis as a marketing stunt that can increase customers loyalty, and because chronic crises unfortunately do not get as much attention in the medias and the general public consciousness, it is mostly seen as a lost of money, wrapped in public relations as a way to make sure that they don’t automate their operations and consequently cut jobs. From disaster capitalism to disaster activism?

Title

Description

Could precarious citizens use crisis as a clean(er) state on which to build a new political strength. After all, crisis show many glimpses of commoning. Could those moments be used to push a philosophy against capitalism as we know it today? People in a state of shock reevaluate, at least temporarily what they value. They can often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect, or embrace other things that they would normally reject. When Bloomberg failed to answer to the snowstorm of 200?, he got criticized to the point that the New York Times called it Bloomberg’s Katrina (too casually perhaps given that the 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

death rate of both natural disasters are incomparable). Some long-time residents said that they had never been such a poor response to a snowstorm in 45 years. Did the sock of this event, combined with the shock of Sandy pushed Bloomberg to embrace organisations that he would otherwise fiercely harass because their essence go against his vision for the city and the interests of the people he represents the most? Similarly, the press almost unanimously praised Wal-Mart’s response to Katrina, while they usually accuse the company of every evil. As we have seen with neoliberalism, could crisis opportunism also successfully become the guiding logic of alternative economic options? Gentrification of Disaster Relief

Who has the right to help rebuild the city? When people rebuild for themselves, they are just not repairing the built environment but also their moral. Going through a shock can make you feel powerless, especially if you felt that way already. “The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping— having the right to be part of a communal recovery”. As it is the case in Latin America, many of the leaders involved in the rebuilding efforts are the people most affected by the devastation. In some way, the localized emergency response that Wal-Mart gave during Katrina by empowering store managers and employees made the relief effort closer to the community than professionals from FEMA based in Washington or disaster gypsies sent from the outside would have been able to provide. They certainly served the community during this hard period, even though it was partly legitimized as a way to profit the company in the long run, but what about when the acute crisis is over? How are they serving the community then? Because while they empower their employees during time of acute crisis, they are certainly not empowering them on the long haul by giving them starving wages. Wal Mart might be good in some specific moments, but not as a movement.

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

THE INFORMALITY OF EMERGENCY RESPONSE AND WHAT IT TEACHES US ABOUT EVERYDAY URBANITIES Techne, the germ of formality The city is constantly produced both formally and informally. If we take a step back and start from the production of knowledge, the high modernist tradition of regimented design in planning urban spaces has prioritized one specific type of knowledge, techne, over another, métis. In brief, techne is a more technical thinking process which believes in a predictable world that can be approached from a distance according to a set of rules and abstract principles. So-call topdown planning often largely rely on that type of knowledge. Métis, on the other hand, is a thinking process that recognizes the unpredictability of complex urban environments, for instance, and rely more on experience and situated knowledges. Both have their uses and strengths, but when a crisis occurs, the state of emergency we find ourselves into pushes us to improvise according to a certain common sense rather than through a formal plan. In the face of unpredictability, practical knowledge, informal processes and improvisation are indispensable. Informality in FEMA Accordingly to …., there are four ways in which to explore the informal-spatial category: as a spatial category, as a government tool, as a negotiable value and as an organizational form. Similarly as techne, formality tries to fix value, while informality, metis, tries to negotiate it. The specialists who deal with the unpredictability of emergency response following disasters are therefore exemplary of metis. FEMA, while it might be considered the most formal response to disaster in the United States, necessarily operates to a very large extent informally given the nature of disaster relief. Before going any further, something has to be said about the very specific context post-disaster: Context

Title

Description

“Generally, “normal social divisions break down, conflicts temporarily dissolve and the community exists for a period of time within an abundance of personal warmth and direct help (Barton, 1970-207). The post-disaster transformation has been noted by many disaster researchers over the years (wolfenstein, 1957; Fritz, 1961, Barton, 1970; Zurcher et al., framework within which people act and make judgments (Fritz, 1961:683). Barton (1970) labeled this transformation as

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

the emergence of an “altruistic community.” Besides this sense of community, three other factors are observed: organizational demand, physical setting and a sense of mission. Shadow organization This is not to say that the context is free of conflict, but this “altruistic community”, which I will contest slightly later on, is the context within which the relief efforts are being deployed, whether from FEMA, the private sector or directly from the community affected. In a study made about reservists (also called disaster gypsies) from FEMA in 19XX, …. found that this context allows for the “suppression of traditional bureaucratic procedures and encourages timely decision-making, rapid resource mobilization and greater interorganizational cooperation.” This creates an “informal structure” to the organization that is not formally planned, but that evolves somewhat spontaneously. “Because this informal structure is loosely organized, flexible, ill-defined and not easily identifiable, it tends to be a shadow of the formal organization whose importance is often overlooked.” In other words, when disaster gypsies are being assigned a disaster site, there is the emergence of two types of organizational structure: one pre-planned, rational (formal) and another, while the other one, the informal’ is a “synthesis of past disaster relationships and newly acquired friendships which form to meet basic needs for affiliation.” Legibility for control The perceived tensions between techne and metis and between formal and informal are, I think, very similar. Both techne and formal speak to the desire to make the world more simple and legible in order to reduce it to a more manageable size and to control it, or at least have that impression. Given the prevalence of high modernism and the implications of its positivism, we perceive an inherent power dynamic in between the two. This applies whether we think of informal as simply “unofficial” or as the “production and sale of goods and services that are licit but produced and-or sold outside the regulatory apparatus covering zoning, taxes, health and safety, minimum wage laws, and other standards”, as defined by Saskia Sassen. The problem is, in order to simplify planning, urban populations have often been approached historically as simple aggregates of unmarked, generic, standardized and interchangeable citizens. When Heinsenberg distanced himself from high modernism, positivism he mentioned: The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. What happens when we approach a challenge, the type of knowledge we prioritize, how we organize ourselves around it and the type of city that is produced as a result are, all part of the continuum which parts relate to each other in a fractal manner. From a knowledge perspective, there is as much informality in formal practices than there is formality in informal practices, at the difference that some forms of knowledge and practice are privileged over others because of cultural reasons. There is not a formal and an informal city; both are simultaneously omnipresent. Their interactions aren’t manichean, they are complex, multiple and contingent and can be expressed as a practice as forms of speculation, composition and bricolage. The interconnections between techne and métis on a personal level are analog in many ways to the tensions between top-down and bottom-up on a managerial level as well as between formal and informal on a collective level. But the reason why they might resonate with the hierarchy between legitimate and illegitimate and authorized and unauthorized are cultural, rather than functional. None of these categories are mutually exclusive, nor are they fixed. Rather, they happen in everyday urban life “within its unfolding”. If we are to use both formal and informal as a terminology, we have to use it as a meshwork inherent in everything around us. Is the state blind, or is it turning a blind eye?

Title

Description

Why is it that the state has always seemed to be the enemy of “people who move around”, has asked crudely James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State. Street vendors in New York are, in that way, guilty twice: mobile and migrants. “Nomads and pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, run away slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states.” Scott explains that the more he examined the efforts of sedentarization directed at these people, the more he saw this process as the attempt of the state to “make a society legible and to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion”. In other words, he perceives legibility as one of the main problems in statecraft, which explains as well the obsession of government, Bloomberg in particular, with the promise that “big data” has to make our cities smarter, more legible, and therefore easier to control.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

PHOTO

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

The silos, symbol of the segregated culture of expertise in our culture, is a symptom of our obsession with techne and efficiency. The processes are not focused on the people that the state is suppose to serve, but on the top management level, making things easy and efficient for for people who are at the top of the pyramid, instead of designing everything for the people at the bottom. ***Service Design The limits of the formal If we are to live in a world where crises are to become perpetual and common, and not only for the most precarious parts of our society, what disaster response is teaching us is that we should reevaluate those terminologies in order to better recognize the meshwork between techne and mĂŠtis in a way that is more systemic and strategic. The more we complexify the dynamic between formal and informal, the more it loses it significance and the more obvious its limits become. While the formal and informal paradigm can inform our lecture of how the city functions today, it quickly stops being useful when comes the moment to imagine a different future because the binarity of the formal and informal model limits our understanding of a complex reality by showing us less than what it actually hides. It encapsulates our thinking in a constant and dramatic opposition which fails to give us any nuance other than by using a contortion of their respective logic towards a more representational portrait. Unfortunately, they are ingrained so deeply in the common comprehension of our civilization that my attempt to overcome their limits with a more ambitious nomination failed to a certain level, which forced me to have to rely on it for descriptive purposes. Crises as glimpse of commoning But for aspirational purposes, should we break away from such conventional urban planning concepts and instead talk about co-existence, co-habitation, co-production and co-construction? There are too many people in the extraordinary productive so-call informal sector (two thirds of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worker according to OECD) to refer to them only as something that is not what it is suppose to be; unmarked, unrecognized. Sandy offered an opportunity to shift attention momentarily away from Airbnb, Mobile Vendors and Occupy Sandy, for instance, as unofficial, informal structures. The geography of time after the hurricane hit shifted to a more present oriented dimension where the everyday urbanites became dominant. Everyone was hit psychologically to a different degree. The crisis was common. Food trucks did not care if their license was expired, nor would the police, nor even their new big corporate partners, who for once cared a little bit more about their fellow citizens. Formal and informal lost its mean-

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

ing, and informality took over. Perhaps we need an alternative regime of formal and informal towards urban social justice that redistribute power in a way that emphasizes “the value of genuine critical dialogue between different urban constituencies and works towards socially just urbanism.” The example of how different New Yorkers worked together to cope with the aftermath of the hurricane should ground a new emphasis on urban collaboration in the planning of the city, “where marginalised and vulnerable groups of workers enter into both disaster planning and the planning of the city more generally, in a genuinely dialogic and critical way”. Considering how contested of a terrain public realm is, could we approach informality as a “democratic process working to become a public realm, co-creative and co-producing missing middle systems of la cité”. Through politics of exclusion aimed at branding the metropolis as a luxury product, we.... + Conclusion of the section to come

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

I was at a conference at the United Nations and one of the speakers compared how some cities were less resilient than others and said that New York reacted like a rock. A rock? If only he had said almost like a rock. Even then, in the almost lays deaths, broken families, displacement of thousands of people, and thousands of them who still do not have a home more than a year later, all of which happened to a different intensity across space, class and race. This is partly why the idea of a resilient city is always incomplete and reductive. Disasters narrative do not speak universally, but in a very situated way. While food truck vendors were described as heroes, no one asked more precarious types of vendors such as the members of Vamos Unidos how they coped with the disaster. In his essay on disaster narratives, Kevyn Rozario describes reconstruction as a dual process: remaking bricks and mortars, and retelling cultural environments with words and images. According to Rozario, capitalistic and narrative logics are very similar. “Narrative theorists have a tendency to argue that narratives impose on us certain ways of seeing the world. But what is remarkable is how well suited classical narrative forms were to describing the world that industrial capitalism made, and in ways that suited the interests of its commercial and professional elites”. Disasters need narrative as much as narrative need disasters in Western culture ever since Aristotle. Central to the plot structure, the peripeteia, the turning point, it is what moves the story forward. It is in most movie made in United States and it has also been for the advancement of neoliberal economy worldwide if how Naomi Klein traces history in the Shock Doctrine is accurate enough. “The configuration of narrative tends to pull disaster toward the middle of a story, encoding it as a principle transformation”. But the tendency of wanting to get to the happy ending as quickly as possible without considering those for whom the crisis is not over yet is denying their existence and their part in the story.

Title

Description

Besides the countless technical problems, another urgent task is to make sense of the disaster and to establish meanings. Disaster narratives inspire “a faith in betterment that generated the energy and will - not to mention the capital commitment - that made material reconstruction viable, encouraging the actions that ensured that catastrophes would become blessing.” Everything should happen for a reason. Partly because of Sandy, Bloomberg gave his vote to Obama the following election in a letter that he titled: A Vote For a President to Lead on Climate Change. But what about vendors? Was their contribution was officially

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

recognized and helped them legitimize their everyday existence? While the efforts of food trucks were recognized widely in different sorts of publications and communication platforms during and after the response, the more official reports of the emergency response almost had no mention of them. No mention either of the major contribution of Occupy Sandy nor of Airbnb. It is as if a whole chapter, more informal, was missing. As we can assume by this collage of quotes from Michael Bloomberg before and after Sandy, either he is for supporting a specific type of street vendors, food trucks of a certain genre, or he clearly instrumentalized them because he needed them at a specific point, only to start harassing them once again once the situation was back to normal for some. If we are to learn from these disaster narratives and build on them to better answer the next crisis that will come up, the story has to be complete. “The more schematic, thin, and simplified the formal order, the less resilient and the more vulnerable it is to disturbances outside its narrow parameters. This analysis of high modernism, then, may appear to be a case for the invisible hand of market coordinatin as opposed to centralized economies. An important caution, however, is in order. The market is itself an instituted, formal system of coordination, despite the elbow room that it provides to its participants, and it is therefore similarly dependent on a larger system of social relations which its own calculus does not acknowledge and which it can neither create nor maintain.” Furthermore, it is in the interest of government to recognized the role that everyone has to play. If the resilience of the most precarious part of the population was put the test, the resilience of the government was also. The very legitimacy of Bloomberg’s administration was at stake, especially at the end of his 12 year reign and following the colossal failure of his administration response to disaster, which was partly due to him firing thousands of city employees the previous month (TO CONFIRM). Following the epic fail of the snowstorm response, did he finally also recognized the importance of… What will the end be for diffused architecture… shared experience of everyone to some degree in acute crisis… in more chronic crises, the cases are more isolated… the struggles can be justified on personal responsibilities But for some, , it’s a constant sequence of crises. impoverishment process

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

CHRONIC CRISIS: The not so Global Village The concept of Global Village popularized by Marshall McLuhan might make sense when we consider new global communication technologies for the ones who have access to it, or even the hypermobile lifestyle that modernity has allowed to the richest among us, but mobility remains extremely restrained for many. Space and distance have not been neutralized. This uneven interconnectivity creates many injustices. Vicky, one of the members of Vamos Unidos, says that ever since some some international free trade arguments were passed, it weakened the economy of her country, changing the worth of the products she used to sell. Since she could not make a living in her country anymore, she was forced, she says, to come to the United States as an ultimate alternative to creating a better future for her children. Forced? Perhaps by the promise of upward mobility of the american dream that has unfortunately been fulfill only by a few exceptions. And while she envisions a better future in New York, driven by this unrealistic meritocratic ideal, the reality is that even the French are now better at upward mobility. The French! As Arianna Huffington mentioned in a debate on NPR, it is as if United States became better at “croissants and afternoon sex”. And most of the formal job lost in the past economic crisis has been in the advanced capitalist countries, and each of the three major recessions since the 1990s has been followed by a jobless recovery in the United States, which might partly explains the protectionist policies that lead to the most massive vague of deportations in the country’s history.

Title

Description

The immigrants who succeed in crossing the border alive, either through coyotes or other means, arrive clueless in a city they do not know, trying to settle in the most prosperous country on the planet, the one who also lead many of these free trade agreements that damaged their country’s economy, only to find themselves in a city such as New York, with far-from-free trade regulations that criminalizes sometimes the only job they are able to find to provide for their family: street vending. Adding to that the way cities are branding themselves as international products in order to attract investors, the “third-world” look that street vending brings to the sidewalks poses an additional problem. The global city has But thanks to the Global Village, they can count on Western Union to make profit out of the money they transfer to the people they had to leave behind

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

and perhaps on video chat, if they know how to access it, to see their family on a screen once in a while. This semester, I developped a module of a service design class with professor Lara Penin, in partnership with Transparency International in Berlin and Immigrant Movement International in New York, that applied service design to uncover typical risks related to the immigrant journey and allow for systems redesign and policy recommendation. I started by investigating the topics surrounding transparency, corruption and immigration, and sketched various ways service design methods could be used to map the risks, pain points and service areas to improve along immigrant journeys. As the stories gathered through the workshop I organized and planned with with six undocumented migrants from South America showed, the global village can be agonizing. The local contradictions of the globalization of capital This is only part of the contradictions of the globalization of capital, according to Saskia Sassen. Street vending is far from being the only informal work in New York, but it is for sure the most visible. Analyzing this sector in a global city such as New York complexifies the idea of informality as a reality of the global south. Because of that preconceived notion, immigrants are often considered as bringing informality with them, as a preference or something. But as Sassen explains, it is rather that immigrants are well positioned to grasp the opportunity inherent in the informal, or system D, as it is often referred to. Inequality has always existed, but the new global economic conjuncture engenders is another magnitude of inequality whose extremes are visible alongside each other in the most advanced urban economies. “When firms with low or modest profit-making capacities experience an ongoing if not increasing demand for their goods and services from households and other firms in a context where a significant sector of the economy makes super-profits, they often cannot compete even though there is an effective demand for what they produce. Operating informally is often one of the few ways in which such firms can survive”. “the expansion of the high-income work force in conjunction with the emergence of new cultural forms have led to a process of high-income gentrification that rests, in the last analysis, on the availability of a vast supply of low-wage workers.” While Sassen does not refer specifically to street vending in that analysis, we can easily expand it to that type of labor. According to Rafael, the fact that street vending is able to operate at a lower

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

cost, and consequently to provide products at a lower price for the 1.7 million New Yorkers who fell below the official federal poverty threshold, either in Manhattan where many low-paid workers travel from the outer borough to come to work or in their own neighborhood. “One way of conceptualizing informalization in advanced urban economies today is to posit it as the systemic equivalent of what we call deregulation at the top of the economy” “new economic developments and old regulations enter into growing tension. “Regulatory fractures”. Perhaps this is partly why it was not surprising that the biggest corporate interests in United States are pushing for an immigration reform as well in order to align the “nation’s immigration policies with its work force needs at all skill levels to ensure U.S. global competitiveness.” “one component of the informal sector in immigrant communities represents a type of neighborhood subeconomy. It consists of a variety of activities that meet the demand for goods and services inside the community, including immigrants residing in other neighborhoods that may lack commercial facilities. These goods and services may be of a kind not provided by the larger economy, or provided at too high a price, or provided at too high a price, or provided in locations that entails a long or cumbersome trip.” Vending as a last resort solution For Rafael, main organizer of Vamos Unidos, the most urgent structural slowmotion crisis that vending is tackling is unemployment and inequality. Mobile vending is a vehicle for tackling that struggle, literally. When you are an undocumented immigrant with no social security number, the options can be very limited. Can street vending help alleviate the 9,3% unemployment rate in New York? According to some City Council members and community advocacy groups, it can, which is why many are fighting to raise the cap on street vending permits. At Street Vendor Project, “People call because they have lost their jobs; people call because their husbands have lost their jobs; people call in anticipation of being laid off”. This is where the idea of street vending as an anticipatory infrastructure first appears in this essay, which is reminiscent of what happened during the Great Depression (page number).

Title

Description

Raising the cap on permits would allow to handle the surge of people who need to make a living, according to the organization. As of now, the chances of securing a permit are almost non-existent. But the reality is also that many still decide to do it, either by buying a permit on the black market for an astronomic amount of money (which cost represents the price of formality), or by getting hired by someone who has a permit (they are supposedly non-

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

transferable, but people do it anyway, which changes the power dynamic of street vending) or by doing it informally, as many do. Similarly to the informal city areas of the global south that are not recognized officially on the map, the informal workers on the sidewalks of New York are a very visible unrecognized reality. As of now, the cap has mostly served “to criminalize New Yorkers who want to feed their families,” Mr. Wells said. Immigrant Workers and the Right to the Sidewalk On Wednesday October 2nd, we followed Vamos Unidos during a Labor-Community rally during a UN session that started downtown in front of 26 federal Plaza, the headquarter of US Homeland Security, a place where migrants go daily and face criminalization and deportation. There were migrant rights organizations from all over the world uniting for three main objectives: the decriminalization of migrants, their use for temporary labor and profit under neoliberal policies, and for the grassroot creation of transnational networks of migrants with their own voices and demands in order to push government to be more accountable. As Rafael Samanezreminded the crowd with a powerful chant in both Spanish and English: “We’re not one, we’re not a hundred, we’re not a thousand, we’re millions. Count us well.” Building Bridges was the theme of the event. Walking over the Brooklyn bridge, literally built by thousands of migrants, reminded us of how much significant the contribution of migrants to this city is. As they walked over the bridge, they chanted: “migrants rights are human rights”, “the people, united, will never be defeated”, “yes, yes, legalization! No, no, deportation!” and this poem by African-American activist Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom, it is our duty to win, we must love and protect each other, we have nothing to lose but our chains”. Three days later, on October 5th, 150 rallies were held in 40 states aiming at pressuring Congress on passing a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants as part of an immigration reform. Right to the city, yes, but to what purpose? Given their positionality on the most shared urban infrastructure, the sidewalk, throughout almost every borough in New York City (and around the globe), street vendors have an outreach potential that could serve organizational purposes, if only they could succeed in working together across language barriers and develop a strong support in each of the community they represent. The fast food workers protests that took place nationwide in December of 2013 showed that work-based struggles have the potential to

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

unite people as a collectivity across borders. If we consider the informal, as I will explain later, a “democratic process working to become a public realm”, what role can informal workers play in this labor-base debate around basic living wage for the ‘formal workers” and other basic needs. What place is there for the “massive informal sectors characterized by temporary, insecure, and unorganized labor”, now transnational, which have “historically played an important role in urban rebellions and revolts”. As David Harvey explains in the Right to the City: “the concept of work has to shift from a narrow definition attaching to industrial forms of labor to the far broader terrain of the work entailed in the production and reproduction of an increasingly urbanized daily life. Distinctions between work-based and community-based struggles start to fade away…. Those who bring running water to our homes are just as important in the struggle for a better quality of life as those who make the pipes and the faucets in the factory. Those who deliver the food to the city (including the street vendors) are just as significant as those who grow it. Those who cook the food before it is eaten (the roasted-corn or hot-dog vendors on the streets, or those who slave over the stoves in the household kitchens or over open fires) likewise add value to that food before it is digested. Free street market?

Description

When Harvey explains that “the concept of work and of class have to be fundamentally reformulated. The struggle for collective citizen’s rights (such as those of immigrant workers) has to be seen as integral to anti-capitalist class struggle.”, I wonder if street vending, then, gains anything by being approached and considered simply as an undesirable grass-root capitalistic street activity. While the unfair competition argument might be arguable on many levels, since street vendors do not have access to all the advantages of paying a rent, the unfairness sentiment among brick and mortars businesses, especially the smaller ones who are also struggling, remains strong. When 1000 additional permits were allowed to sell fruits and vegetables in designated areas, Street Vendor Project wrote in a press release that what they were asking for was a free market for street food. Perhaps these words were only use to make a point and do not represent what is wished for by the organization ultimately, but it still made me wonder if the Right to the city in this case could be met by “simply” applying neoliberal politics to street vending? After all, if high executives in New York can enjoy the benefit of this model, why not street vendors. But is street vending only an intermediary to

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

something better, such as cab driving, which is considered a form of graduating according to Sean, or is there a potential for street vending to play a role in the city that will increase their visibility, valorization and legitimity? “The global city has emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital, which uses the city as an “organizational commodity”, but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalized a presence in large cities as capital. The de-nationalizing of urban space and the formation of new claims centered in transnational actors and involving contestation constitute the global city as a frontier zone for a new type of engagement.” NOTES SS: “Differentiation of immigration, informalization, and the characteristics of the current phase of advanced industrialized economies” “A central question for theory and policy is whether the formation and expansion of informal and casual labor markets in advanced industrialized countries is the result of conditions created by advanced capitalism. Rather than assume that Third World immigration is causing informalization (...), what we need is a critical examination of the onditions that may be inducing tuese processes. Immigrants, insofar as they tend to form communities, may be in a favorable position to seize the opportunities represented by informalization.” (Saskia Sassen + De Certeau + Bed Stuy) http://urbanology.org/bedstuy/ Immigrants are good at filling up gaps in demand. As Malik puts it, “we see opportunities natives don’t see, and we are willing to do the job.” The hat or incense stalls on Fulton or Nostrand Avenues characteristically fill up little spaces unusable by the bigger shops. Moreover, immigrant vendors, using their community networks, are often good at satisfying specific demands, such as finding the CD of a particular musician or the hat of a particular baseball team. + CONCLUSION

PHOTO

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

Green Carts as an intermediary infrastructure? In order to compensate for the areas of New York City that are underserved with fresh fruits and vegetables options, Mayor Bloomberg, permitted 1 5000 additional vendors to the city streets in 2008. But not any kind. This new crop of vendors was to be restricted to specific precincts and to fruits and vegetables only, something that the general public can agree is good for everyone’s health. The press release of the project back was stating that, at the time, only 3% of the bodegas in Harlem were offering leafy vegetables, as oppose to 20% in the Upper West Side. While the term ‘food desert’ is contested, it is estimated that 750 000 New York residents live in one, while around three million live in areas where businesses who sell fresh produces are few or far. Going against the typical “laissez faire” attitude that would regulate the supply and demand automatically, Bloomberg’s administration recognized that these products were not readily available in some areas and decided to act upon it and tackle indirectly the obesity crisis.

PHOTO DESCRIPTION

Title

Description

An estimated 750,000 New York City residents live in food deserts, [27]while about three million people live in places where stores that sell fresh produce are few or far away. [28] Supermarkets throughout New York City have closed down in recent years due to increasing rents and shrinking profit margins, but the disappearance of urban grocery stores has had the most serious impact on lowincome communities, especially those that are predominantly African-American (such East/Central Harlem and North/Central Brooklyn).[29] To fill this void, the city started its Green Carts program, which has been bringing affordable fresh fruits and vegetables to underserved areas while providing jobs for vendors since 2008. Hundreds of Green Carts are already on the streets in food deserts, and that number is rapidly increasing as prospective vendors obtain training, licenses and permits from the city.[30] Due to its flexibility, street carts were chosen as ideally positioned as an intermediary infrastructure between production and consumption, providing fresh produce at an affordable price throughout the areas of the city that lack 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

CHRONIC CRISIS: FOOD ACCESSIBILITY GREEN CARTS AS AN INTERMEDIARY INFRASTRUCTURE? In order to compensate for the areas of New York City that are underserved with fresh fruits and vegetables options, Mayor Bloomberg, permitted 1 5000 additional vendors to the city streets in 2008. But not any kind. This new crop of vendors was to be restricted to specific precincts and to fruits and vegetables only, something that the general public can agree is good for everyone’s health. The press release of the project back was stating that, at the time, only 3% of the bodegas in Harlem were offering leafy vegetables, as oppose to 20% in the Upper West Side. While the term ‘food desert’ is contested, it is estimated that 750 000 New York residents live in one, while around three million live in areas where businesses who sell fresh produces are few or far. Going against the typical “laissez faire” attitude that would regulate the supply and demand automatically, Bloomberg’s administration recognized that these products were not readily available in some areas and decided to act upon it and tackle indirectly the obesity crisis. An estimated 750,000 New York City residents live in food deserts, [27]while about three million people live in places where stores that sell fresh produce are few or far away. [28] Supermarkets throughout New York City have closed down in recent years due to increasing rents and shrinking profit margins, but the disappearance of urban grocery stores has had the most serious impact on lowincome communities, especially those that are predominantly African-American (such East/Central Harlem and North/Central Brooklyn).[29] To fill this void, the city started its Green Carts program, which has been bringing affordable fresh fruits and vegetables to underserved areas while providing jobs for vendors since 2008. Hundreds of Green Carts are already on the streets in food deserts, and that number is rapidly increasing as prospective vendors obtain training, licenses and permits from the city.[30] Due to its flexibility, street carts were chosen as ideally positioned as an intermediary infrastructure between production and consumption, providing fresh produce at an affordable price throughout the areas of the city that lack fruits and vegetables. Many people were septic, doubting this new offer would 00

+ MAP OF ALL NY AND GREEN CARTS

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

increase demand, or that the new vendors would gather around the existing offer. Street Vendor Project, from the Urban Justice Center, supported the idea behind the Green Carts program since the beginning, but with a few reserve. First, they thought few vendors would sign up to the program, which is what happened. Only 350 permits were requested, on a total of 1000. This is especially surprising when you consider that there is a cap on regular permits since the 1980’s, which created a very successful black market where permits get rented up to 20 000$. Second, there are too few locations for vendors to operate viable business. What they were asking for, in a nutshell, is free market. Additionally, the program was designed with many barriers to entry, such as a specific pushcart, one main inspection station in Queens, etc.

By looking at the location of the green cart at the corner of my street on Fulton in Bed-Stuy, it seems to prove the point of the first criticisms of the program by believer in the market: the cart positioned itself where there’s the most foot traffic, grocery stores and even delis. I will not get into the politics of food too much in this memorandum, nor will I debate the nature and definition of food desert. I haven’t verified, for instance, whether or not the delis had a good offering of fruits and vegetables. What I’m interested in is whether or not a flexible and diffused architectural approach to food provision can be seen as a form of intermediary infrastructure. In many ways, this public-private partnership initiated by the Bloomberg administration is trying to reassert social priorities. At first glance, there seems to be a transformative potential to this form of intermediary, but also obvious limits. If all the green carts decide, inside the vague precincts areas where they are allowed to vend, to positioned themselves in the already existing hubs, are they truly filling the gaps or simply reinforcing the argument used often against them: unfair competition to the bricks and mortar businesses. And even if the program truly worked, in an ideal scenario, would it just constitute a transition period up until bigger corporate interests figure out the potential of a certain area and decide to invest massively in it, displacing thereafter the intermediators who were there in the first place?

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

CONCLUSION TO COME

Diffused Architecture as Anticipatory Infrastructure

CH. 05

FOOD SYSTEMS: NOT JUST ACCESS AN INVESTIGATION OF MISSING [SOCIO-CULTURAL] LINKS

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

HEALTH

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are on the rise across the world. Some chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes, and heart disease are the most common1. Obesity is the largest contributing factor to these NCDs. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “65% of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.”2 The most important thing that we can learn from obesity is that it is a preventable disease. What does it mean to be obese? The WHO defines obesity as having a Body Mass Index (BMI)1 that is greater than or equal to 303. The issue of obesity leads to the discussion of nutrition. Obesity is related to the caloric (energy) intake of an individual. Each person requires specific needs. Just because someone is meeting their caloric intake does not mean that they have access to the proper nutrition required to nourish their body. This means that an individual can be obese and under-nourished simultaneously. The calories that the individual is taking in come from food that lacks nutrients and is high in sugar, fat, and salt. All of these contribute to poor fat accumulation. Coupled with a high caloric intake, individuals also need to expend the calories that they are taking in, without physical activity, those calories because stored and add to the individuals overall BMI. The body functions through thousands of processes that are happening simultaneously. These processes however do not happen on their own. The body requires macronutrients and micronutrients to carry out these processes. Macronutrients are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats2. Each of these provides the foundation for metabolic functions, growth, and energy as well as other processes. Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals that aid in the absorption of macronutrients and assist in bone and brain development, as well as many other processes4. In developed countries, such as the United States, obesity has increased dramatically over the last couple decades. The most recent data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) shows that a combined total of adults and children 1 BMI is defined by the equation kg/m2 (an individual’s weight in kilograms divided by their height squared) 2 Carbohydrates should make up 45-65% of the diet (this includes fiber which because it cannot be digested and aids in waste removal), proteins should make up 10-35% of the diet and fats (unsaturated) should support 20-35% of the diet.

Food Systems

who are considered obese is 90.5 million5. The CDC assesses the obesity of the country through a system called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). According to this system, in 1990 only 10 states showed a prevalence of obesity, and it was only 10% of the population, maxing out at 15%. In 2010, every state had a minimum prevalence of 20% obesity, with more than have with a minimum of 25% and one-third of those states had a prevalence in excess of 30% of their population6. New York City (NYC) (all five boroughs) is following very similar trends to the rest of the country. Half of all New Yorkers are either overweight3 or obese, with almost one out of four being obese. The City also uses the BRFSS to measure these statistics and has the annual Community Health Survey to gather data and analyze the results. As the obesity epidemic grows, so do NCDs. Most recently, since Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002, obesity in New York has increased 25%7. New York is a unique case because there is a large part of the population that is underserved. What this means is that there is limited access to fresh, healthy and nutrient rich foods. Limited access is also referred to as a food desert which in an urban setting is defined as 500 people and/or 33% of the population of a census tract having to walk in excess of 1 mile8. In an urban setting this happens to also be communities that are considered low-income and tend to be of color or minority. In the city, examples of this would be East Harlem in Manhattan, Mott Haven in the Bronx, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, or Flushing Meadows in Queens. Because Staten Island is not as dense as the aforementioned boroughs, qualifying a food desert would be in excess of 10 miles with a vehicle.

BMI greater than or equal to 25

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

FOOD JUSTICE/EQUITY/SOVEREIGNTY

The concept of â&#x20AC;&#x153;lack of accessâ&#x20AC;? seems like a third worldification of a modern sub/urban problem. As suburbia developed post World War II, farmland was taken for space for new neighborhoods. General stores and local farming, butchers, grocers, etc. became a piece of the past and grocery stores began to come into the picture. Grocery stores acted as an aggregate for all of the above. Products came pre-packaged in a warehouse style building where families went to gather all they needed for the following week in one place at one time. When grocery stores began providing for the masses in terms of food, mass production of that food needed to happen as well. What used to be artisanal, such as cheeses, curing meats, fresh cows milk, became mass produced products by companies such as Boarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Head and Nestle. The food system began to change dramatically. Processed foods started to enter the market such as the Twinkie, boasting preserved freshness, and flavored potato chips. As the freezer developed, so did frozen foods, including vegetables and television (TV) dinners. In an effort to compensate for the corporations developing the food to keep up, corporate farms began to pop up as did Concentrated Animal Feeding Operaions (CAFOs). From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Green Revolution happened and the food system began to change, agribusiness started to shape what would be grown and consumed. The Green Revolution was a time of research and development of crops in an effort to find an end to hunger in the world at the time. A large portion of this research was in chemical technology such as pesticides and fertilizers, farm management practices, and seed modification. Food was now being produced en masse and not just in the US. These farms required a large workforce to maintain production and in turn had a large migrant workforce which has led to many controversial issues surrounding working conditions, child labor, abuse, etc. The Organic4, Non-Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)5, and sustainability6 movements have been some responses to the food growing methodologies that the Green Revolution spurred.

4 No chemical pest control or fertilizers are used in the growing of the crops. Most countries require a certification to be considered organic. Example: USDA Certified Organic 5 A GMO refers to transgenic seeds where a gene from other organisms can only be inserted into the seed in laboratory conditions. GMOs are not naturally occurring. 6

Supports protection of the environment through resource conservation, biodynamic

growth, biodiversity, etc.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

As global food production took off another movement began to form to bring all of the above mentioned issues to light; La Via Campesina. La Via Campesina is also known as the International Peasants Movement. This community is spread across many countries and focuses mostly on small-holder farms which are generally either self-subsistence, or who provide to their immediate communities. Some small-holder farms also harvest what are considered functional foods9, such as the acai or green coffee beans which are then used for mass distribution. La Via Campesina brings together women, landless workers, rural youth and peasants (small-holder farmers). They work towards a decentralized system where corporations will no longer have such a strong hold over farming and where the market is not flooded by their products at their prices.

SOURCE: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/b719.jpg

La Via Campesina created and defined the concept of food sovereignty at the 1996 World Food Summit: “…the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It develops a model of small scale sustainable production benefiting communities and their environment. It puts the aspirations, needs and livelihoods of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations... prioritizes local food production and consumption. It gives a country the right to protect its local producers from cheap imports and to control production. It ensures that the rights to use and manage lands, territories, water, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those who produce food and not of the corporate sector. Therefore the implementation of genuine agrarian reform is one of the top priorities of the farmer’s movement.”10 This concept can be applied to a variety of situations, and even though it is to support small-holder farms in mostly developing countries, many of the concepts that have been mentioned are applicable in the urban when we see the issues with lack of access to food. In the urban setting, sovereignty is usually referred to as food justice or equity. Ultimately, organizations that are working to resolve this issue are working towards the same goals as La Via Campesina.

Food Systems

For example, in New York, we can look multiple organizations working on very similar missions:

The development of urban agriculture is growing as access to fresh food in the city dwindles. Urban agriculture is the cultivation of crops in the city setting. Several years ago Dickson Despommier came up with the vertical garden concept. The idea is that one building in the city could grow food for the city. The vertical garden would house crops that would be grown hydroponically, with a waste water system, etc., similar to how greenhouses function, just on a larger scale. On a small scale, some individuals grow food in their window boxes, small tomatoes, herbs, etc. But, community gardens have been the most common form of urban agriculture. The community garden allows for the development of a small plot of land to grow crops. Often these gardens feature a raised bed method which means that the crop is not actually rooted in the ground, but in soil that is being supported by a box or crate like structure. This has a host of

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

benefits, including keeping nutrients in a small space, as well as easy access to harvesting, and fewer concerns about possible ground soil contamination. A community garden empowers a local group of people to grow their own food, work together, gain a unique skill set, and encourages communication. Most community gardens however only support the immediate community members. The food is often not for sale and just for use between those who grow it. This creates a limitation of what a community garden can do. Other difficulties include the knowledge required to begin a community garden and the time and effort that is required to make it a success, which some people do not always have time for. Aside from crops, some cities even allow apiaries and chicken coops. Greenhouses within the city are also a form of urban agriculture. Greenhouses are considered Controlled Environment Agriculure (CEA). Greenhouses provide additional opportunity on the urban agriculture front because they provide an extended growing season. Greenhouses can even grow crops that would not be able to grow in the uncontrolled city climate. Greenhouses can usually be found on top of roofs in the city because in a dense urban setting, finding ample sunlight on the ground can be difficult11. However, they are very costly and are unfortunately more uncommon that most other types of urban agriculture. Greenhouses are generally best suited for roofs that are atop industrial buildings because they can harness the excess heat the building produces. Similar to the greenhouse on the roof, there is the concept of the rooftop garden. A community garden generally faces the same issues as a greenhouse in a city environment, lack of sunlight, etc. , so a rooftop can be an ideal place to host a garden, particularly when the building is full of apartments, and those who live there can directly benefit from the produce on the roof. There are a lot of regulations that make rooftop gardening particularly difficult, the structural capacity of the roof/building, the height of the building, the square footage of the roof are just a few issues. However, the vast square footage available on multiple roofs is a benefit to creating multiple gardens. Often times, gardens do not sell to public either. This limits the access that a garden provides and it can occasionally become a difficult self-sustaining entity. While the terms garden and farm have a blurred line of definition, particularly in the urban setting, most farms reproduce and sell to the public, some are forprofit models and some are non-profit. Farms have multiple ways of distributing their harvests to individuals and generally try to provide produce to other people than the immediate community. This distribution can be done through

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s markets, and open houses. Some farms and CSAs even have online markets and delivery. Some farms use restaurants to subsidize their costs of goods, they generally provide the restaurants with herbs and salad mixes/greens12. A farm in the urban setting is generally for semi-mass distribution. These farms also have help from volunteers, a stable support of labor, and a demand. Urban agriculture is a modern response to current agrarian practices. There is a demand for the most fresh, nutrient rich produce

GREEN CARTS

There are a limited number of grocery stores in New York City at least according to the spatial requirements that exist. Grocery stores are developed with the idea in mind that they will serve a certain population (generally suburban). Because of this, the national ratio (50,000-100,000ft2 per 10,000 people within an eight to ten minute drive13) in a City setting is hardly appropriate or accurate enough accommodate the density of a metropolitan area. Several reasons why this is so difficult is because most of the large retail spaces in the City only reach a maximum of 30,000ft2 and because there are populations of 10,000 in neighborhoods, which in a dense city could be within walking distance of a potential store14. This would mean far more stores to supply the populations that exist. It is not only the size of the store that is an issue, but grocery stores (as well as big box stores) find it difficult to thrive in a city because the population generally uses public transit to and from the stores. This means that their ability to transport groceries is far less efficient than a suburban population that uses cars. Due to the lack of space for supermarkets, bodegas, drug stores (CVS, Duane Reade), and convenience stores have attempted to fill the void. While they provide an array of products, what they carry is mostly at convenience to the consumer, and lacks nutritive value necessary for bodily processes. The communities where these stores are the primary source for groceries in the community also have a lack of fruit and vegetable consumption and a strong correlation between diet-related health issues and diseases (high cholesterol and diabetes). While there have been several initiatives to decrease these food access issues, such as Healthy Bodegas and Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) Zoning, the most popular and supported is the Green Cart initiative.

Food Systems

In 2008, the Bloomberg Administration set forth a new initiative called Green Carts which was a part of Local Law 9. The mission of the program was to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to underserved communities in the city. The Green Carts were an addition to the street vendors already supplying communities, neighborhoods, and tourists with additional food access (Halal, hot dogs, ice cream, etc.). The program was brought to fruition through a $1.5 million grant provided by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund. The collaboration between the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Illumination Fund allowed for an additional 1,000 mobile food vending permits (For More information on vending permits see Jessica or Bonnie) over a two year period. Another for-profit agency, Karp Resources, also provided monetary funding (loans) and technical support to the vendors interested in owning a Green Cart. Because the Green Cart will sell produce, it has to undergo inspections by the department of health before it is approved to sell. These inspections take place at a designated facility and can create a lag time from the permit approval, the time it takes to develop the cart, and the time it takes for the cart to be inspected, the vendor could wait for a long period of time to first get out on the streets and then could even only be vending for a year before they have to renew their permit again. Once the cart is approved by the Health Department, the vendor will then However, there were additional caveats that potential vendors had to face if they were interested in investing in the Green Carts. Because the Green Cart program was created to address diet-related health issues that were reaching near epidemic proportions in some neighborhoods, the vendors could not choose to sell anywhere they saw fit. The Green Carts are only allowed in specific police precincts in the areas that were defined through various Community Health Surveys (CHS), for example East/Central Harlem, nearly all of the Bronx and Central Brooklyn, and Eastern Queens. Another limitation is that while there are 1,000 permits available for the Green Carts, this does not mean that once you obtain a permit you can vend in any of these specified areas. Each borough has been designated a certain number of permits based on the population within the police precincts selected157.

Green Cart Goodies

Some paraphernalia that was provided to Green Cart Vendors to give to their customers

The Green Cart is considered a non-processing cart, which means that there are less regulations when it comes to inspection from the Department of Health (For More information on types of food carts see Bonnie) and ultimately makes 7 At the time â&#x20AC;&#x153;How Far can the City Push the Green Cart Initiativeâ&#x20AC;? the permit increase was thought to be 1500, however it was decided that there would be 1,000 and the current distribution by borough is 350 in the Bronx and Brooklyn, 150 in Manhattan, 100 in Queens and 50 in Staten Island.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

it the most convenient to operate. This also means that because the physical cart requires less equipment than a processing cart, the cost to buy one would be less. Each of these points is to make the concept of vending from the Green Cart more appealing. While the program has been active for five years, the 1,000 permit cap still has not been met and the max remains at 501 permits as of 201116. The most important question is why have the 1,000 permits not been fulfilled when the combined number of permit applications submitted and the number of people on the waitlist is nearly 5000 individuals17. That is enough to fill the Green Cart program five times over. The fact that the permits that are available have not yet been fulfilled is just one issue with the program. According to the CHS, the amount of fruit and vegetable consumption has not changed enough in these new areas to be considered significant18 (INSERT CHART). On a consumer basis, the green carts have been able to provide individuals with support (INSERT ABOUT SABRINAS FRIEND). But the overall change in consumption is not clear enough to support that the green carts are fulfilling their mission. JONATHAN Another issue is that while the green carts have been designed to operate in designated areas, ironically enough those areas on not where the green carts are most fruitful. While there is a demand, due to a lack of food infrastructure, outside factors such as crime, have deterred the vendors from adhering to these locations. The street vendors are very vulnerable. The business is all cash, unless some of the vendors operate Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) Machines. It also happens that a large majority of the vendors are immigrants who lack English skills. All of these conditions make the vendor a target for robbery.19 Aside from social factors that can inhibit the capacity for vendors to vend, vendors also follow the spatial economics of their commodity. The communities that they are supposed to provide, according to their definition, should not have any competition for produce. This leads the vendor to move towards an area that shows a demand for fruits and vegetables. When many different entities come together in one place with the same product, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s called an agglomeration. The most common examples are fast food retailers, car dealerships, and big box stores. The green carts moving to areas where produce already exists has lead them to become direct competition with brick and mortar stores and has lead them to be disliked and seen as a hindrance rather than a benefit. For example, the New York Association for Grocery Stores (NYAGS) believes that the Green Carts

Food Systems

will contribute to the downfall of mom and pop stores that still exist in the city. Green Carts have been able to provide produce to communities at lower prices than grocery stores. For example, in a cafĂŠ on 5th Avenue, a banana was 65 cents, but the Green Cart nearly across the street was selling three bananas for $18. The grocers also find it difficult to compare to the hours that the green carts are open, most being open for a minimum of 12 hours/day and feel that this also takes away from their business. But what the grocers do not realize is that they have the ability to remain open through the cold winter months because they are indoors. People will need to shop no matter what, so while foot traffic may be more sporadic, the grocers will still make money. Now if we look at the vendor, they are subject to the weather surrounding them. What this means is that when the winter months come, there is a decrease in revenue for the vendor, if any revenue at all. The cold conditions prevent them from their long hours and result in limited foot traffic. Even when the weather is warmer, the vendors still have to contest with rain, which also causes a decrease in profits. According to an article by City Limits it was unveiled that based on a small interview with 35 vendors , they generally took home an annual salary of $7,500. This put them far below the poverty line in the United States and marked them as the bottom 7% in income.20 The more evident this information becomes, the more likely grocers and other individuals against the program will be able to accept it. The vendors are struggling to do their job, and this is reflected in their revenue. Another reason why their revenue is so small is that they do pay taxes, contrary to popular belief. This is one of the arguments of grocers, that the green carts do not pay taxes, however, you cannot operate a green cart without a Tax ID Number (TIN) which requires you to pay quarterly taxes like every other business. The mission of the Green Carts was to provide underserved communities with better access to fresh produce in an effort to decrease diet related health issues and stimulate an overall healthier neighborhood. But just putting the fruits and vegetables closer to home does not mean that the residents will chose it. There are many factors that influence how a person purchases food.

8 The location of this experience is kept nearly anonymous at risk of exposing the Green Cart and the vendor for vending outside of their designated area.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD CHOICE

Increasing food access in underserved communities is not the sole solution to combating diet-related health issues. Food access is not the only issue that needs to be assessed in this situation, but affordability and convenience are also key reasons as to why individuals make certain choices when it comes to food. T. Furst has a multi-faceted way of looking at how individuals and how they make their food choices. There are three main points in a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daily life that affected the food choices they make; life course, influences, and personal system. Life Course describes events that formulate who they are and what they have become. This is a result of physical environments, culture, and society. Situations that have transpired in these three environments lend themselves to the influences that help to shape

the decisions that a person makes throughout their day and life. While these concepts can be related to any type of choices that are made (monetary, relationships, etc.) they are particularly related to food choice. Personal factors, social framework, food context, resources, and ideals are all factors that influence food choice. Personal factors include but are not limited to emotions, likes/dislikes, and characteristics of the person (gender, age, etc.). Families and relationships contribute to the social framework of an individual in their food choice. Food context considers social aspects, availability, physical environment, etc. Resources are what people use to acquire food. These resources include money, time, and even equipment such as a refrigerator which would create choice between perishable vs. non-perishable food items. Ideals are the methods that people use to evaluate their decisions about the food they purchase.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Food Systems

BROOKLYN GRANGE

Source: http://brooklyngrangefarm.com/flagship-farm/

Source: http://brooklyngrangefarm.com/navy-yard-farm/

The Brooklyn Grange

The Brooklyn Grange is a combination of a couple rooftop farms in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. The combination of the two farms creates the world’s largest rooftop soil farm. It all began in May 2010. The first farm was built in Long Island City, Queens, located at 37-18 Northern Boulevard. The Brooklyn Grange team hoisted 3,000 pounds of soil onto the roof and began transplanting 10,000 tomato seedlings. The second farm is located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Building #3. Between these two spaces, the farms are a combined 108,000 square feet and grow around 40,000 pounds of produce. The farm uses several methods to distribute their wide array of produce, honey (they will soon have the largest apiary in the city), and a specialty hot sauce made from fresh ingredients on the farm. They attend several farmer’s markets, have a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program that anyone can join, there is an open day in the lobby of the building they reside on, which is open to the public, and of course they sell to some local restaurants whom they have partnered with. The Brooklyn Grange has garnered outstanding support from developers of other city buildings, the local community, and other environmental and food groups, totaling 39 partners. According to their website, they have several parts to their mission: “We believe that this city can be more sustainable; that our air can be cooler and waterways can be cleaner. We believe that the 14% of our landfills comprised of food scraps should be converted into organic energy for our plants, and plants around the city via active compost programs. We believe that food should be fresh, not sitting on the back of a flatbed for two weeks. We believe that food should taste fresh. Because at the end of the day, it’s about sitting down with our farmily, admiring that sunset over the city skyline, snacking on a perfectly ripe, sweet tomato and remembering: this is what real food is.”21 What makes the Brooklyn Grange different than a community garden is that the farm is for profit. Their goal is to show others that farming is attainable, especially in an urban setting. The Grange also practices organic farming methods, however in an effort to keep their produce at a low cost to the consumer, they refuse to become certified organic. Because of their success, the Grange has also developed several non-profit programs:

Brooklyn Grange flagship farm in Long Island City and their new farm at “Building 13” in the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

City Growers City Growers works with urban youth developing skills about their environment, food, and agriculture. This program works with schools and camps and creates a program that crosses from the farm to the classroom.22

Training Program The Grange also offers a training program where they will provide sessions teaching organic farming practices and skills to anyone interested, similar to an internship, with the opportunity to move forward with more intense training.

Refugee Program The Brooklyn Grange also partners with the Refugee and Immigration Fund (RIF) to develop a program for Asylum-Seekers to learn from farming and to work with horticultural therapy. 23 The Grange is currently looking into developing additional farms on more buildings as developers begin to approach them. There are also working with a structural engineer to put an end to the question about the ability of a roof to house a farm. The Grange also now books events on their farm and even hosts yoga.

Source: @BrooklynGrange on Instagram

Food Systems

GREENSGROW

Greensgrow is an urban farm in Philadelphia and is part of the Philadelphia Project9. It all began in 1997 with a vision and plot of land in New Jersey to get operations started. In the meantime, the founders Mary Seton Corboy and Tom Sereduk were on the hunt for some urban land. They found a Superfund Site and in 1998 took out a loan and began grow some field greens hydroponically. Another year and Corboy and Sereduk registered the farm as the non-profit Greensgrow Philadelphia Project. In 2001 Greensgrow built greenhouses and opened a seasonal nursery. With their produce poundage increasing, a farmstand was built and a CSA was developed. In 2007 CSA for the off season (winter) was started. There have been even more initiatives that have come to fruition with Greensgrow outside of farming:

Community Kitchen

Located in a church, the community kitchen can be rented out to hold cooking classes. It is also used by Greensgrow to make their own products that come from the farm. They make their own pesto, eggplant dip, jams, and pies.

LIFE Program: Local Initiative for Food Education

Source: http://www.greensgrow.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/greensfactories-700x933.jpg

The community that surrounds Greensgrow suffers from diet-related illnesses such as obesity. Food insecurity is very real for their community members, and in an effort to combat this, Greensgrow aims to make their produce affordable to these members, increase their access and changing their diet to fresher food and produce. Coupled with the LIFE program, the SNAP Box Program was created. Similar to a CSA, a SNAP Box is a share from the farm and is for recipients of SNAP benefits and provides fresh produce to these community members at a small price of $6.50/week. The individual must pay for each month up front, totaling $26, but the member immediately receives a $10 coupon called a Philly Food Buck to use on fruits and vegetables at the farm stand. Food prep techniques and affordable produce for recipients of SNAP benefits.

Mobile Markets Greensgrow Farm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Raised beds at GreensGrow Farms

Greensgrow uses a truck to provide fresh produce to Camden, New Jersey and more recently West Philadelphia. They provide produce to underserved communities, and have even brought produce from outside of their farm.

9 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

The mission of Greensgrow is like many urban farms: â&#x20AC;&#x153;By 2020, people in Philadelphia and communities all across America will see urban agriculture as a useful tool in creating and sustaining regional food economies. The multifaceted urban agriculture work of Greensgrow will be seen as a model for creating livable, sustainable, connected communities.â&#x20AC;?24 Greensgrow is a non-profit farm, and in 2012 reached $1 million in sales. Aside from growing produce in raised beds and using hydroponics, there is an apiary, chickens, a pig named Milkshake, and several other animals that frequent the farm. Similar to other farms, Greensgrow has a plethora of community partners and restaurants who support their work and food as well.

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities (Endnotes) 1 Noncommunicable diseases. (2013, March). Retrieved from http://www.who.int/ mediacentre/factsheets/fs355/en/index.html 2 Obesity and overweight. (2013, March). Retrieved from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/ factsheets/fs311/en/index.html 3 ibid 4 Macronutrients: the importance of carbohydrate, protein, and fat. (2008, March 26). Retrieved from http://www.mckinley.illinois.edu/handouts/macronutrients.htm 5 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db82.pdf 6 Obesity Trends 2010 CDC powerpoint (reference maps) 7 Campanile, C. (2013, September 30). Obesity up 25 percent in nyc. Retrieved from http:// nypost.com/2013/09/30/obesity-up-25-percent-in-nyc/ 8 Gallagher, M. (2010). Usda defines food deserts. Retrieved from http:// americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defines-food-deserts 9 Paper from Acai Case on Functional Foods 10 Defending food sovereignty. (2011, February 09). Retrieved from http://viacampesina.org/ en/index.php/organisation-mainmenu-44 11 Urban Agriculture in NYC Columbia Report 12 Top 5 Urban Farms in NYC 13 http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/supermarket_access/presentation_2008_10_29.pdf 14 ibid 15 â&#x20AC;&#x153;How Far Can the City Push the Green Cart Initiativeâ&#x20AC;? Elana Behar 16 Report to the New York City Council on Green Carts FY 2011 17 ibid 18 ibid 19 Green Cart Vendors Face Diet of Challenges Maris Jahn and Marc Shavitz. http://www. citylimits.org/news/article_print.cfm?article_id=4509 20 ibid 21 About the farm. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/ aboutthegrange/ 22 City Growers. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/city-growers/ 23 Refugee Program. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/refugeeand-immigrant-fund/ 24 Mission. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.greensgrow.org/about-us/mission/

CH. 06

CHINATOWN, MANHATTAN: MIGRATION AND THE END OF ENCLAVE

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Introduction

This study seeks to create a forensic analysis of the macro, meso, and micro forces that are currently intersecting around the space of Manhattan’s Chinatown. This analysis will address the politicaleconomic, socio-structural, and cultural-spatial forces that occur in conjunction generating necessary forces for the production of space. Our interest in Manhattan’s Chinatown district is centered around three things: the initial and current migratory forces that caused many Chinese nationals into a type of forced displacement in search for work, safety, and new economic possibilities; the protected and export sectors that have allowed for the economic flourishing of the ethnic enclave by creating a strong financial multiplier for Chinatown; and finally, the enclave society and its ‘Upper & Lower’ circuit of capital, that currently starting to rapidly disaggregate this ethnic enclave society. This study will focus heavily, and primarily on the macro and meso level of analysis as these are necessary first steps to understanding the creation and flourishing of the ethnic enclave. This study will also take a brief look at what is commonly known as the informal sector, as this set of processes occurs in a very particular way in New York Cities Chinatown.

Chinatown, Manhattan: Migration and the End of Enclave

Methodology

Chinatown, Manhattan: Migration and the End of Enclave

A dialectical methodology is often as clarifying a tool of analysis as it is a mysterious messenger in what the meaning of the information revealed to us (and seemingly suggests to us) what we ‘ought to do’ about what we learn. Perhaps what is at issue is that the results of dialectical investigations never suggest that we ‘ought to do’ anything; whether this is part of a larger revelation relating to ‘can do’ remains unanswered. What is clear is that through this dialectic our realization of the multitude of processes, second natures, strategies, and tactics, utilized and engaged in, by individuals, groupings, and institutions, leaves us not only wide eyed with surprise about the width and depth of the ‘issues’, but also aghast at the implications of what it would take to intervene, (dis)interrupt, and/or change any one of these multifaceted interactions. This endeavor will utilize a dialectical method as a tool for investigation of how space is produced, through the macro, meso, and micro intersections of the forces, strategies, and tactics of everyday life and its actors. Our strategy is to investigate how these interactions, at whatever level, help to shape our physical world. Whenever possible we will attempt to make as many of the opposing forces that shape this site of spatial creation as transparent as possible. Towards this end, we have actioned a design as research tactic. This will entail the use of process diagrams (both still photos and drawings) that aim to illustrate clearly the interactions, as well as the players in these moments of interaction. Furthermore, we will utilize a minimal amount of language to explain these processes. We feel that the exact role of design is in fact to remove unnecessary specialized language, used to obfuscate meaning, and professionalize knowledge. Where language is used we will strive to be clear and concise so as to increase the transparency and utility of this work. This tactic has been applied when analyzing our site, Chinatown in New York City. We believe that this type of visual process will produce not only a more accessible forensic analysis of the myriad systems which apply pressures to this site from both the macro and micro levels while simultaneously allowing us to retain a level of complexity without 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

complication.1 A process that will allow us a far different approach than most contemporary urban analysis which unfortunately seem to be in this day and age a race to answer the question, “which city is it like?” or “How can we understand it in X framework?” These attempts to ‘formalize’ or order the complex processes of different ecosystems in the ecology of a broader city system are troubling at best, and a commodification of urban analysis at their worst.

New York City’s Chinatown has been popularly conceived of in a number of different ways; most often through the idea of the ‘ethnic enclave’, popularly conceptualized in the ways best explained by Alejandro Portes in his introduction to Min Zhou’s work on Chinatown: “The first portrays them as dark recesses of capitalism where poor newcomers, ignorant of the language and their labor rights, are mercilessly exploited by fellow nationals for the ultimate benefit of large concerns in the mainstream economy.”2

or “...a typical immigrant neighborhood sheltering newcomers prior to their certain assimilation into the American mainstream.”3

Portes and Zhou disagree with both of these assessments are are much more in favor of expressing the ‘American uniqueness’ of NYC’s Chinatown (now towns). Zhou argues that the ethnic enclave actually “works to channel its group members into the larger society instead of setting barriers to immigrant incorporation.”4 Zhou’s work is centered around the idea of first dispelling the myth of the ethnic enclave as a

Urban studies and analysis shouldn’t seek to be mysterious. Unfortunately, much academic work is created to obfuscate rather than illuminate the processes of the city. One wonders what is at stake for institutions of higher education and professionals such that this has become the norm. Truly, the infrastructure of education is in need of a forensic investigation all its own. 2 Portes, Alejandro. Forward to Min Zhou’s, Chinatown, Temple University Press, 1992. Pg. xiii 3 Ibid, pg. xiv 4 Ibid, pg. 219 00

Title

Description

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

BOX Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

space of labor oppression only, and to explore its ability to address issues of poverty for those living within its borders. Peter Kwong’s work explores Chinatown as a site of conflict between traditional and new ‘associations’ of the people living there. He gives amazing insights into the traditional associations that have formalized space, served as governing bodies of business and culture, and even acted as legal arbiter for disputes between private citizens.5 Kwong’s analysis argues that New York’s Chinatown isn’t special as far as ethnic enclaves go, but he does spend a significant amount of time showing that there are deep cleavages between the ethnically similar population of Chinatown. Kwong’s analysis around the ‘new’ associations in Chinatown, labor unions, and community groups, helps us develop a more dialectical understanding of the current situation in Chinatown. Then there are books that spend a great deal of energy exoticising specific parts of Chinatowns past. These works focus almost exclusively on the black market, Tong’s (traditional business associations often the front for gangs), and drug smuggling. While these are all actual parts of the puzzle in Chinatown, they often become center pieces blotting out many of the other important (and often much more scandalous) forces acting in that space. This body of work will forego an investigation of these processes as they have been explored almost into exhaustion in other places.6 Jan Lin offers a broad account of the various social agencies, political institutions, and economic industries that have shaped New Yorks Chinatown. Her work functions as a survey of the forces both global and local that have collided in this space. Her work is most similar to this body in that both seek to paint a clearer picture about the social formation of place in the ethnic enclave, and strive to abolish some of the myths and misunderstandings of what takes place there. Finally, the work of Bernard P. Wong is an amazing source on of anthropological data on Chinatown. Wong uses some visuals to illuminate one of the most important traditional associations in Chinatown, the Title Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. This association is

5 6

Kwong, The New Chinatown, Collins Publishers Toronto, 1987, pg. 83 For more info of the ‘illegal’ economy of Chinatown see Gwen Kinkead’s work, Chinatown: A portrait of a closed Society. 00

Description

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

incredibly important to understanding how Chinatown is able to navigate as an enclave without too much interference from the city administration of New York City. Forced Migration/Immigration The history of NYC’s Chinatown is as fascinating as it is multi-faceted. This work will utilize, as stated above, a methodology that analysis’s Chinatowns history as the outcome of a set of dialectical forces, interacting over time and space to necessitate both a physical and conceptual movement within a collection of people in a geographical region. Given the constraints on time and space for this work, our investigation will focus primarily on the macro and mezo forces implicated in this dialectic; and a further work will follow on the micro processes present in that space. Utilizing a dialectic methodology to understand the multi-level forces that pressured Chinese migrants to leave their country can best be understood by breaking those forces into three different areas of pressure. These areas are best seen as collections of intersecting societal forces that applied differing levels of pressure towards Chinese individuals, communities, and institutions resulting in a pattern of migration for a variety of reasons from China to the U.S. There forces occurred at each level (Macro, Mezo, Micro) often simultaneously, and almost always as reactions to each other. Each ‘category’ applied varying levels of force and generated various levels of results from those affected. Our interest will be to approach these forces, both in application and result, in a more general approach given the confines of this space. Through a short analysis of the history of the spaces involved (China, Britain, and the U.S.), we will get a quick but telling picture of how these forces intersected one another and helped to shape the movements of Chinese citizens, and their production of space.

Title

Description

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Opium Wars and First Migration to U.S. There are many interesting places to begin a short exploration of the dialectic of migration (forced or not), but one that captures an important intersection between the macro processes of economics, war, and political policy is the outcome of the Opium Wars (1839-1842) between China and Britain. This war drained China’s treasury, entailed the forfeiture of Hong Kong to British interests, opened trade with the West, decimated the economy, led to large scale peasant riots, and eventually, the Taiping Rebellion (1854-1864). Two highly affected Provinces of these socio-political processes were Kwangtun and Fukien; both suffered increased poverty and overpopulation due to the outcomes of these historical events, with little hope of recovery. These two regions, located in coastal areas, had exposure to America through earlier migration and trade. This exposure created some opportunity (albeit problematic) for migration to places that offered better options around economic generation for families. Many residents of these two regions took this opportunity to seek economic stability and gain. In many instances already immigrated family and labor interests paid in advance for this labor force migration. Zhou explains this economic draw to the west through the Chinese metaphor of the “Gold Mountain.”7 This reference for America is a double entendre for Chinese immigrants simultaneously acknowledging the seemingly opportunistic possibilities of acquiring wealth in the America, and as a derisive way to speak about someone who is obsessed with chasing luxury. This dialectic does a much better job explaining the psychological forces at work in creating the paradigm change necessary for the migration of a people who traditionally found such a practice shameful. Ultimately, it took both a set of macro political economic forces as well as an individual drive to attain economic and spatial security that led many Chinese to immigrate to the U.S. Second Migration//Seeking Opportunity (1870-1900) Migration, both ‘chosen’8 and forced is a recurring theme within the

7 8

Zhou, Min. Chinatown. Pg. 19 While it is in many cases ultimately true that many Chinese laborers ‘chose’ to migrate to the U.S. for work, family, and/or political-economic pressures, we maintain that there isn’t much empowering by locating that choice solely under a rhetoric of agency. We maintain that an acceptance of individual agency is base for any 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

history of Chinese laborers who came to the U.S. By 1880, around thirty years after the Chinese first began migrating in numbers to the U.S. seeing economic opportunity, and political security, about 106,000 Chinese immigrants had arrived, constructed cross country rail roads, and mined large amounts of gold from the surrounding environment of the United States; 83% of these immigrants were spread across 9 states (Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and California); 80% were employed by The Central Pacific Railroad Company (13 thousand individuals); and within two years their opportunity would come to an end. From 1870-1882, as employment waned, white Americans and Chinese immigrants came into competition for the same pool of decreasing work opportunities. This competition, put into motion through the pitting of one against the other by corporations and employers, was generated almost solely by the ease in which newly immigrated Chinese workers could be exploited. Siloed, due to a lack of access to language, and a need to fill whatever position was available, Chinese workers were easy targets for the exploitative practices of any corporate entity with an agenda for cheap labor, and dangerous work conditions. This competition led to an explosion of anti-Chinese sentiment campaigns and eventually legislation. In 1870, San Francisco enacted a Sidewalk ordinance outlawing the Chinese method of Pole peddling of goods; eerily reminiscent of the anti-food vending ordinances by Business Improvement Districts (BIDS) in New York City, this law was specifically created to stifle necessary processes of self sufficiency and economic opportunity for immigrant workers unable to access the larger, traditional economy due to lack of language skills or citizenship protections/rights. This ordinance was a very clear precursor to many new, urban based discriminatory practices that flow from a desire to control urban spaces through stringent, economic focused regulations.9 This was followed in 1875 by an Anti-Queue law. This law made it illegal for Chinese immigrants to wear their hair in a traditional manner; and finally inc. This Act outlawed the immigration of Chinese nationals to the U.S. This law precipitated a series of riots, looting, and massacres against Chinese real or interesting understanding of how a peoples history occurs, but that a systemic investigation of the of the macro forces that precipitate the environment in which those choices occur is far more empowering. 9 A quick look at many of the outcomes of the current devotion to the practices of New Urbanism will reveal similar Neoliberal comparisons. 00

Title

Description

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

immigrants. Third Migration//Seeking Security (1924-1980) China experienced a third immigration of citizens to the U.S. during the period between 1924-1980. This migration occurred due to the intersecting events of the U.S. government 1924 immigration law, which allowed many wealthy Chinese national leaders to send their children to school in the U.S. A 1939 ‘Who’s who’ of China showed that 56% of Chinese National government officials were educated in the U.S.; the 1943 repealing of the Chinese exclusion act of 1882; the passage of the War Bride act of December 28th, 1945, and the G.I. Fiancee’s act of June 29th, 1946; both constructed to allow a number of Chinese women, brides and children of United States service men, to emigrate to the United States; Communist takeover of China in 1949, which precipitated an exodus of the Chinese wealthy class to the U.S. where they were able to hide their family wealth from the perceived radical political changes occurring in their homeland;10 Finally, in the 80’s China began to experience a severe case of ‘brain drain’, Zhou makes the point that “according to a study by Survey Research of Hong Kong in 1988, 38 percent of the financial center’s managers and professionals said that they were prepared to leave in the coming nine years. Banks and other industries have found it difficult to plan programs because of the high turnover rate among emigrating staff members.”11

The Enclave Chinatown in New York City is often referred to as an ethnic enclave. The enclave argument, put forward by many academics looking to dispel the stereotype of Chinatown as an ethnic ghetto, has been made by economist, anthropologist, and historians in a number of ways. Most prevalent in these writings are descriptions that speak about Chinatown as a space that is “a consolidated community based on an increasingly strong ethnic economy,”12 and, as an enclave that has “derived a

10 11 12

Wong, 1982. Zhou, pg. 72 Zhou, pg. 91 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

growing sense of its political power from the emergence of contemporary workplace and community organizations.”13 These two statements can be understood as an introduction to some of the major forces, dialectical in nature, currently shaping not only the physical space of Chinatown, but the multiple relations between its residents, organizations, and institutions. An attempt to understand Chinatown as a series of intersecting systeme14 is valuable in that it avoids treating that space as static15, and instead attempts to recognize its dynamic character. This allows us to talk about a series of intersecting forces (and the systems they engender) without moralizing, characterizing any particular group as the ‘victim’, and ultimately gives us a more nuanced look at current power structures at the macro, meso, and micro level. Peter Kwong’s work on Chinatown offers us a very candid look at the tensions between the Traditional and ‘New’ associations replicated and generated by the residents of Chinatown. Kwong explains how traditional forms of ‘informal’ government were imported from China to address the lack of protection by immigrant Chinese to U.S. formal governmental structure. He states that this “informal political structure developed around clans, trade guilds, secret societies, and a variety of benevolent local associations.”16 Being historically unprotected, and more often targeted by unjust laws and regulations, Chinese Americans were pressured to rely on other forms of governmental service delivery, and regulation by turning to more traditional forms of institutional management. Kwong argues that this reliance on traditional associations meant “a de facto rule of the community by a traditional Chinatown elite.”17 Bernard Wong explains that these associations took a couple of forms, but most famously in New York’s Chinatown is the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association (CCBA). In Chinatown the “community structure is a hierarchy with the

13 14

Lin, pg. 147 See William Morrish’s forthcoming work on a Systeme analysis of Infrastructure as the New Social Compact (2014). 15 Static analysis of the urban are incredibly problematic for practitioners since they require a type of claim, namely a commitment to what the city ‘is’ presently, with no room to talk about change, contradiction or dynamism; each one an integral and almost inherent quality of any urban space. 16 Kwong, pg. 83 17 Ibid, pg. 81 00

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association at the top as an overall organization,” in New York City it coordinates, “59 trade, recreational, tong, regional, dialect, political, family name associations, [and] is still the highest authority in Chinatown’s traditional social structure.”18 The CCBA served as force of cultural stability through the provision of language, education, and dispute settlement services. This organization functioned in the capacity of a third party arbitrator for most community issues, and between family disputes. It’s mandate included the protection of Chinese business interests; and “until 50 years ago, the CCBA had specific regulations about business locations for Chinese laundries and restaurants and performed mediation services to solve the disputes arising from these businesses.”19 The CCBA functioned almost exactly as a government would, it even took on filling its coffers by taxing its members, and associated area businesses. This association began to decline in power as it became increasingly unable to address new issues facing the Chinese population around housing, medicare, employment, and youth problems.20

Title

Description

18 19 20

Wong, pg. 15 Ibid, pg. 17 Ibid, pg. 17 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Other traditional associations were organized around kinship, regional and linguistic similarities, occupation and trade, and the Tongs21. These ‘other’ organizations, while usually located under the CCBA, held substantial influence in the Chinese community. They were able to create localized hubs of power through mandating that business in the areas they controlled only be done with their members; through buying as much physical property as possible as this was a sign of power; often, only those belonging to these groups were able to find employment in a given area. As the CCBA lost power due to of changing socio-economic pressures faced by immigrant Chinese residents, new associations began to pop up to address many of the new issues facing residents of Chinatown. These ‘New’ organizations consisted of labor unions22, commercial, regional23,religious, alumni, and socio-political organizations24. These organizations differ from traditional organizations in two important aspects, “First, the new associations have been organized recently, and are not included within the umbrella of the CCBA. Second, the new organizations recruited members from different social, economic, and educational backgrounds. 25 These new associations are founded to

This work will avoid a lengthy discussion around the Tongs (originally a political organization in opposition to the Manchu Dynasty. There are already far too many books that over emphasis this group to the point of exoticisation due to their eventual Triad and gang related activities. While this is of course an important part of the history of Chinatown, it is not a process that can be covered here due to the needed attention to first dispelling so much myth, and infatuatory work around its criminal element. 22 I unfortunately must gloss over the significant contribution of these groups due to limited room and their very unfortunate dwindling influence over the last twenty or so years. Peter Kwong does these groups justice in his work The New Chinatown which I recommend highly. 23 Due to Chinese immigrants continual arrival from different parts of China, new organizations were needed to address the increasingly intra-ethnic group concerns. 24 CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, formerly known as Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence is a primary example here that I hope to be able to investigate more closely at a later date. 25 Wong, pg. 23 00

Title

Description

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

address the ever compounding social frictions faced by members of the Chinatown enclave. These issues, as time goes by, become more complex as the circumstances of clashing upper circuit and lower circuit pressures, international trade and finance flows, and local political/social frictions become more and more intersectional. Today’s Chinese migrants are arriving to an almost completely unraveled enclave. This transition is revealing of the changing nature of the Chinatown enclave. These changes within organizational composition and structure can be seen as reflective of the changing economic, political, and social pressures facing Chinese Americans, and more generally the ethnic enclave of Chinatown. The driving forces that are creating these changes will be brought to light in the next section as we investigate another powerful dialectic in Chinatown; economics.

Upper Circuit The quick economic growth and continued expansion of Chinatown is mobilized by two polarized forces according to Jan Lin. Lin argues that there are two circuits of development occurring simultaneously, and comparable to the development of many ‘World Cities’ and third world cities. For Lin it is important here to point out that, “rather than unity of extreme heterogeneity, there is a pronounced polarity in the Chinatown enclave economy. Socioeconomic differentiation is further articulated through the built environment in the form of spatial differentiation.”26 Both types of development demand differing types of land use, and this creates a competition for urban planning policies or preservation and redevelopment.

Lin, Jan. Polarized Development & Urban Change in New Yorks Chinatown; Urban Affairs Review, vol 30, No 3, January 1995, pg. 332-354 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Lin identifies New York as a burgeoning ‘World City’27, a place where the search for foreign investment opportunities to replace ever decreasing federal support, has led certain cities to become global hubs of international finance and investment, often in competition with localized, smaller labor interests. She argues that this ‘upper circuit’ of ‘Grand Capital Investment’ in the form of both finance and development often motivates city agencies, directors, and leaders to actively side with large scale zoning changes, usually upscaling in the case of areas considered ‘blighted’28. This redevelopment, in many cases is a zero sum game with preservation; lends itself to the displacement of lower income residents through the side effect of significant rent increase, cost of living due to neighborhood change, forced displacement as areas are deemed ‘unsuitable’ to inhabit, and finally, in some cases current residents choose to move due to the significant change in neighborhood character. Foreign capital is a major player in the narrative of Chinatown’s construction, expansion, and current change. The current influx of foreign capital into Chinatown and the United States more generally was not just happenstance. With the fall of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, and the increase of cross border flows of capital, an increasing circumstance of the growing capacity in telecommunications and wire transmissions technologies, the Western world began to experience the advanced stages of Globalization. Another element that drove this type of chance was the increase in bonds to the international community due to the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. This war also created a level of increased political uncertainty in East Asia. These pressures led to the movement of capital into national banks in Chinatown. Jan Lin writes that in 1972 the first full service Chinese American Bank appeared.29 In 1981, the Reagan administration began to exacerbate national debt levels which accelerated foreign investment through reduced tariffs, increased trade deficits, tax cuts, increased interest rates to attract foreign investment, and bolstered defense spending in the face of significant decreases in social spending and money to cities. This financial abandonment by the federal government forced cities to court international monies through lobbying foreign investors.30

Title

Description

Sassen, Saska. The Global City: Introducing a Concept; Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XI, Issue 2, Winter/Spring 2005. 28 Read: disinvested, white flight, targeted for gentrification. 29 Lin, 1995. 30 Ibid, pg. 83-87. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

This money filtered into National banks across Chinatown, increasing the amount of available capital for investment (although not necessarily for locals), and opportunities to develop the surrounding areas. Lin argues that banks arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just Rentier Capitalists, but developers in their own right31, continuing the primary circuit of capital through the development of converting Chinatown facilities into office buildings, facilitating local economic activity and bilateral trade.32 The city also plays a role in this upper circuit of change. Through aggressive use of zoning, the Bloomberg administration has reshaped the city in an attempt to make it more friendly to development. CAAAV reports that the Bloomberg administration has initiated more than 100 rezoning plans, covering 20% of city land during its tenure.33 In these scenarios it is the investment of foreign capital into a neighborhood, through international banks, leveraged by developers to buy large residential and commercial properties from landlords that initiates a process of gentrification in an area. Landlords, due to increased taxes on land, and an ever inflating price per square foot on New York City34 land, externalize their cost, and sometimes inflate their profit, by increasing rents on their tenants. The degree of severity of these rent increases can fluctuate greatly if the building is in an area that is in the midst or even the beginning of a general change to the areas economic/ ethnic makeup. The Chinese American Association Against Violence, in their 2008 report Converting Chinatown, reports that the community boards attempts to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;brandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; areas as Nightlife Destination status, as they did Chinatown, along with the upswing in liqouer licenses (400 in one year), contributed greatly to that areas drastic change in composition.35 These Upper Circuit forces create one half of a dialectic that generates

31 32 33 34

Ibid, 1998. Ibid, 1998. CAAAV 2011, pg. 1. This price is perpetuated by a process of mythologizing the lack of land available, and through local policies/investment to create cities as playgrounds for the wealthy. Recently Michael Bloomberg argued that New York City would be a far better place if ever millionaire in the world would move there (http://blogs. wsj.com/metropolis/2013/09/20/mayor-bloomberg-wants-every-billionaire-onearth-to-live-in-new-york-city/.

35 00

CAAAV, Converting Chinatown 2008, pg. 9

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

increased neighborhood change in Chinatown, the other is the Lower Circuit.

Lower Circuit Since Chinatown’s inception two sectors have been responsible for keeping the enclave employed by providing two major options for new immigrants as far as entry into the job market. Unable to communicate in English, often with little formal education, and more often than not unhirable due to the lack of access to either, many newly immigrated Chinese had very few options for gainful employment. These two sectors, made up of Petty Bourgeois tenement36 owners and immigrant small business owners37 (many who ran sweatshops) offered both opportunity and exploitation38 to an increasingly co-ethnic immigrant proletariat.39 Part of what makes Chinatown an enclave is this intra-ethnic economic system that allows easy transition into low skilled jobs where new immigrants are able to speak a common language, live within their traditional cultural norms, and are offered some level of protection from the outside world. This paired with, affordable housing options generates what we understand as the ethnic enclave; a space where newly arrived migrants can find familiarity, work, and an a cultural continuity, all equally important to survival. Chinatowns growth, both economically and physically is often attributed to its enclave nature40. This assumption/stereotype is challenged by Kwong, Lin, and expanded upon in the case of Zhou. Kwong explains that, “the

Title

Description

80% of households are located in tenements in Chinatown, while 20% are public housing, middle income, or subsidized housing. 37 Mostly men making up an ‘Urban Village’ of grocers and resteraunters; women were more relegated to the garment trade. 38 In 1980, 3% of these tenements lacked plumbing, and had on average 2.99 persons per unit; 49% had more than one person per room. 39 Lin, pg. 40 This isn’t just about ethnicity but the assumption that people of the same ethnicity just happen to be able to work together perfectly without any qualms. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

transformation of New York’s Chinatown came as a result of a complex of reasons. No single factor was the prime cause; expansion occurred in a step-by-step process.”41 The first step of this process was the movement of the garment industry into Chinatown. Upwards of 75% of women in Chinatown, in the 1960’s, worked in this industry. Their 12 plus hour days left them very little time to accomplish house care work that was also expected of them. Realizing a solution to this required a second step in the enclave economy, the increase in small locally owned restaurants that catered to Chinese families. Garments factories boomed quickly with the available access to cheap labor, and the enclave allowed for the exploitation of this labor without much outside union influence until the 1980’s42. This inter-ethnic exploitation was also bolstered by a combination of community distrust of a brutal and punitive police force43, and a system of internal (traditional) local governance as far as dealing with governance, especially labor issues. This is the second half of the dialectic of the enclave. Although many protections from the outside world are offered to incoming residents, their inability to muster enough social power to maneuver outside the enclave puts them at risk of intra-ethnic labor exploitation, and at the will of the traditional (elite) local governance body (in this case the CCBA). By the late 1980’s the garments industry was suffering. Globalized flows of labor and capital made it possible for many factories to move production elsewhere where a more precarious labor force could be found, and their labor exploited more easily. It was during this time that most of the international banks and finance industries came to bear on Chinatown. Min Zhou discusses the economic enclave of Chinatown as a set of two sectors. The protected sector arises within the community, and is a completely captive market. This market deals with specific ethnic

41 42

Title

Kwong, pg. 28 Description By 1982, Chinese women were fully enmeshed in the union system. They also participated in demonstrations, some of them 20,000 people strong, against factory owners who refused to raise minimum wage. 43 in 1978, there was a massive Chinatown demonstration against police brutality. Over 20,000 residents participated. Kwong, 1987. 00

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

goods that are valued by internal community members. This market is not accessible from the outside. The CCBA and its ability to regulate where businesses go, as well as the Tongs, which determine who can do business in what part of town. The protected sector is less affected by large scale structural changes in the broader New York and global economy, this security comes from a set of three captured markets: capital, labor, and consumer. These markets form a type of self sufficient micro economy that keeps a steady circulation of resources, goods, and capital flowing through the economic enclave of Chinatown. The two major economic activities in this field, production and trade, are targeted and supported by the ethnic consumer market.44 The second part of this structure is the export sector. This sector is non-ethnic, and a part of the larger secondary economy. There is still a provision of exotic goods, mostly sold to those outside the enclave of Chinatown, and requires a low economy of scale for its existence. This sector does not enjoy the three part ethnic market capture of its counterpart, and exerts a more limited control over production and business operations. This sector is much more sensitive to the fluctuations in larger economic systems. This sector is best explained through the example of the garment worker; their production is exported out of the enclave and they utilize the capital gained externally to make purchases within the protected sector of the enclave thus creating some level of growth, and bolsters the buying power of the ethnic members of that space; also, this generates some savings for later investment. UNFINISHED DRAFT: Processes of Informality How informality is understood nowâ&#x20AC;Ś Ilich quote!!! Social Practice as tactics to shape space? In an attempt to begin a work that encapsulates the complete circuit of how Chinatowns social and political economy takes place it is necessary to recognize one final element. This final piece of the forensic investigation we have undertaken is quite tricky. Since the 1950â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, with what began as mass migrations (often forced by government backed policies or the lack the ability of those governments to defend its citizens)

44 00

Zhou, pg. 110-112.

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Title

Description

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

of laborers from the hinterlands into cities, the dominant narrative around (in)formality has always been one of discursively naming, ordering, and developing. Our hope is to find a new way to talk about these forces, systems, and the people and spaces that experience them. Chinatown, given its experience around immigration and its dual circuits and sectors of economic flow provides us with a very rich site in which to investigate (in)formality, critique its past and current usage, and move towards a more robust understanding of what it is, does, and how it is currently interacting with a specific space. The terms initial conception was during the 1970’s as the Chicago school of urbanism championed looking at cities as a set of relationships between community and individual, the nature of meaning and progress, and the relationships between patterns and processes of urban life (AlSayyed, 2004). Realized through a series of conversations around the movement of laborers to cities in the 1950’s and 60’s, this trend was codified by W. Charles Lewis as a set of two opposite sectors: the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. As multiple theorists visited these spaces and engaged with prior theories, two primary schools of thought emerged: the Structuralists and the the Legalists. Structuralists, composed of the International Labor Organization and advocates for the ‘informal’ economy, argue that it is the role of the state to work to mitigate the cleavages between the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economy in the realm of social and economic composition. This was contrasted by the Legalists who pointed towards state intervention in a free market economy as a barrier to inclusion by those utilizing the ‘informal’ sector as a survival mechanism. This line of thought emphasized what Legalists saw as the inherent entrepreneurialism occurring within the ‘informal’ sector. This theories leading proponent, Hernando de Soto, is still considered by some to have created the driving theory around the ‘informal’ sector, and much of the development happening in third world cities is driven by strict adherence to this type of theorization as it has been easy to co-opt into Neoliberal political-economic strategies. The work of Michele S. Laguere offers us an initial insight into why the term (in)formality is so problematic. For Laguere, (in)formality is socially constructed and is actualized as 1) a way of life (Individual, group or institution); 2) a sector (grouping of common fields); or 3) a system (a set of linked practices). Laguere’s work points to (in)formality as structural, with no empirical basis for an essentialist definition.

CHANGE THIS TO YOUR TITLE The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Informality as a ‘way of life’ of an individual, group or institution. Problem: becomes seen as an inherent quality located within a person, group or institution. ex. Informality as a ‘sector. Problem: becomes seen as an inherent property of a space. ex. Informality as a ‘system’, a series of linked practices. Problem: becomes seen as a part of a social practice of a people in a space. Focuses on the individual actions of groups rather than as an investigation of a series of processes. But what is the difference between the ‘way of life’, ‘sector’, or ‘system’ in the figures X-XX? Where is the informality located within these people, spaces, systems? There seems to be something much more interesting here. Colin McFarlane provides an answer in the form of locating ‘informality’ in a series of processes occurring not internally but externally and parallel to these people and spaces. Use these to tell story of ‘informality’ as it occrres in Chinatown (Illustrate theory) POPULAR EXPLANATION OF INFORMALITY Comparison of formal and informal vending Seeing informality as a set of interacting processes instead. End of the enclave?Gentrification, Housing, and Migration.

Title

Description

The ethnic enclave of Chinatown has provided both a space in which new immigrant Chinese could migrate towards, in search of better security and opportunity, as well as a site of labor exploitation, and anti-democratic rule of law. Since the 1980’s the introduction of neoliberal roll out roll back policies by state and local governments, alongside a vast influx in global capital, has started to change the physical makeup and identity of Manhattan’s Chinatown. This massive scale change, often referred to as gentrification, is best understood from a dialectical approach. The forces of capital development, honing in around areas of massive redlining and disinvestment by the federal government, which spurred large areas of concentrated poverty, and the liberal expansionist ideology that pervades

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

most local and state governments develop strategies45, are the culprits of this large scale geographical change. The forced dispersal of residents, through government relocation programs, like HOPE VI, and/or the displacement caused by ‘rebranding’ city districts and neighborhoods to attract capital reinvestment, both contribute relocation of those who traditionally reside in these spaces. Chinatown is no exception; as stated earlier New York city, and the Bloomberg administration, has sought to ‘revitalize’ much of the city of Manhattan through attracting foreign investment, upscale rezoning measures to allow for more infill and development of business districts, and utilized branding campaigns to encourage restaurant and destination nightspots. This influx of capital development in Chinatown is well documented. CAAAV has issued two stunning reports (Reimaging Rezoning and Converting Chinatown) to help raise awareness within the area, and bring attention to local lawmakers about the consequences of their actions in the rezoning processes. CAAAV reports that “the number of new building permits in Chinatown and the lower east side increased dramatically over the past 15 years from only 40 in 1990 to 970 in 2006.”46 Simultaneously, the number of affordable housing units dropped by over 1000 units between 2003 and 2006. This loss of affordable housing and high scale condominium development47 go hand in hand. Residents traditionally protected from absorbanent rent prices are increasingly finding themselves harassed out of their apartments by landlords through direct and indirect tactics. Lin explains that “tenement owners push residents to vacate through skimping on maintenance.”48 Complicity for this type of hyper gentrification lies at the feet of multiple parties. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, along with city planners, used recovery money from 9/11 to develop high end real estate. Oddly enough this was completely legal since that money, $10 billion dollars, was earmarked in Community Development Block Grants from HUD; and another $150 million was earmarked for the City Economic Development Corp. for work on the East

Imbroscio, David. Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy; Cornell University, 2010. 46 CAAAV, 2008. 47 Condominium prices went up 19% between 2005-2006; and sales rose 80% between 2004-2007, CAAAV 2008. 48 Lin, 1998. 00

The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

River Waterfront.49 This type of development can only be a part of a massive effort to create a new cultural space in Chinatown. The local residents there have an average annual income of $36,899.00, with 27% of them making below $16,556.00. This revitalization cannot be for the current occupants of Chinatown as they simply cannot afford to partake in its benefits. A report by the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), reports that as of 1990, Asians made up more than half the population in New Yorks Chinatown; By 2010 Asians were the majority group, yet made up less than half of all residents. They also reported that the absolute number of Asians decreased in NYC Chinatown in this period.50 The consequences of this rapid class shift in Chinatown is that many low income Chinese American’s are relocating to more distant satellite ethnic enclaves outside Manhattan. Lin tells us that this movement, once about congestion and upward mobility, is now about population density, scarcity of housing, and land values.51 She argues, the “outer boroughs [are] becoming the primary settlement for new immigrants to the metropolis.”52 Manhattan’s Chinatown population has been dropping since 1960 when 35% of the residents in that area were Chinese, by 1990, only 18% remained. Meanwhile the Chinese population in Brooklyn rose from 1428%, and in Queens from 14-36%. What is clear is that the enclave is changing. Chinese immigrants are following the subway lines out of Manhattan into new ethnic enclaves in the other boroughs. Conclusion The purpose of this body of work was to create a forensic investigation of the macro, meso, and micro forces that helped shape the physical and social space of New York City’s Chinatown. We have shown there that the production of space in Manhattan’s Chinatown is very much caught up in the intersection of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ circuit competition around both the physical shaping of the space within the boundaries of Chinatown, and the systems that make up its economy, politics, and social situations.

Title

Description

49 50 51 52

CAAAV, 2008. AALDEF, Chinatown Then and Now, 2011. Lin, pg. 107. Ibid, pg. 107. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

We have shown that due to an increased friction between these forces, Manhattanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chinatown and its traditional ethnic enclave is beginning to dissipate. Many Chinese Americans, and new immigrants are simply moving out to the other satellite Chinatowns in Flushing Queens and Sunset Park Brooklyn (currently undergoing a waterfront redevelopment). These new sites will likely experience and create very different sets of opportunities and challenges for its residents than those faced in Chinatown in Manhattan. Flushingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chinatown is already very much established, and enmeshed in the Upper and Lower capital circuit identified by Lin.

The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Title

Description

CH. 07

SOCIAL + SPATIAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

INTRODUCTION ”In the beginning, people’s limited market resources and ethnically bound cultural and social capital are mutually reinforcing; they work in tandem to sustain ethnic neighborhoods. But these are transitional neighborhoods-they represent a practical and temporary phase in the incorporation of new groups into American society. Their residents search for areas with more amenities as soon as their economic situations improve, their outlooks broaden, and they learn to navigate daily life in a more mainstream setting. People with more financial resources and mainstream jobs avoid ethnic zones, and these areas are left behind by immigrants with more experience and by the second generation in search of the “Promised Land.” 1

Many people move to New York City with a dream of success. New York is home to a large immigrant population. They venture from their “home country” determined to find a better life. Their voices echo throughout the city. The trouble with reality is that “better” isn’t always available. The lived reality is one that rests on circumstance, social realities and pre-constructed factors embedded in the urban fabric that comprises the city. You may have chosen to live here but for better or worse you are here now. Each day you are challenged with hardships that come almost like second nature. Built within the infrastructure are scales of reinforced injustices. You are part of a collective body of people who share an identity with you, similar fears or common aspirations; success, dignity, and the right to fight for that better life they seek. Bound by ethnic origin, subjected to economic inequality.

Logan, J. R., Zhang, W., & Alba, R. D. (2002). Immigrant enclaves and ethnic communities in New York and Los Angeles. American Sociological Review, 67(2), pp. 299-322.

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Thesis Process

DIagram of thesis development

Thesis Process Under the group umbrella topics I had believed my focus would be around consumption patterns or the interface between the user and producer. This interface was important to be considered as current state of transactions are realized with massive disconnect between those consuming and those producing. I wanted to uncover the value in understanding the system in which you are partaking in, even if you are intervening at a particular area void of explicit process. The clothing industry and the food industry still exist in this mysterious manner. Traveling backward in our supply chains is quite the task given the general complexity of our current globalized world. Although this may have been an interesting focal point what struck me ever so strongly was the focus on the emotions that would exist within these systematic transactions. 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

I have personally been rooted in my interests about the way in which we interact with each other, objects, and environments. At the core of this broad base are the tangential experiences and emotions attached to those experiences. In the context of the urban I then wanted to discover the emotional landscape of the city itself. I wanted to understand how we navigated our spaces while recognizing our attachments or detachments. I even employed my curiosity in asking several community organizers how they navigate their groups with the natural politics of inescapable human emotion. I could not imagine emotions being separated from any context. How then could it be detached from the city? My previous work focused on the positive affirmation and the dynamics of social psychology to bring forth the power of our emotions and the scale of impact once they are shared. All of this to say that there is a sense of importance to recognizing the presence of those emotions. While seemingly assumed unreliable emotions are tied to the landscape of the city as constant morphing variables directly connected to the social and the physical. The actions of living and producing in the city are not void emotions. There are constraints to living and producing in the city. Living represents eating, playing, and housing (this is a oversimplified list) while producing is tied to education and job opportunities. Here I found myself connecting to street food vending in recognition for the act of producing. Vamos Unidos employed education as a tactic reminding vendors to â&#x20AC;&#x153;Think beyond immediate needsâ&#x20AC;? and to recognize that the fight for economic justice, racial justice, and immigrant rights and police accountability was not an individual fight. In order to address these injustices migrant workers would need to organize in solidarity, civic advocacy and receive political education. The focus was study and practice a praxis upon which employs education as a tactic and reinforces the value of history, politics and social negotiation in the matters of the everyday. The constraints I began to unearth were those of transnational identities, space, citizenship, and at some scale, the economic system. My vision of solidarity asked for a study of collective identities.

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

5 1

AGENCY

6 7 Thesis Process

DIagram of thesis development

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

CONTEXT

POLICY + PLANNING

COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES

EMBODIED SPACE

EMPOWERMENT ZONE

ETHNIC ENCLAVES

THE STREET

How do planning processes (such as Empowerment Zone, EZ’s) affect the agency of communities to make decisions? -Discourse between the collective and the self. -The construction of identity around place, culture and food -Understanding the potential impact of policy regarding cultural commodification and perpetuated self-fragmentation of “communities” -Ethnic enclaves and the production of site-specific food resources -Social class vs. ethnic enclaves -Displacement or Transience? -Physical indicators of power dynamics that affect food infrastructure + vending practices

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES “We take refuge in what we have, our collective identities and look at them to resolve our individual fears.” 2 This notion of resolving our individual fears through the act of assuming our collective identities speaks to the emotional landscape but even more so to the benefits of solidarity. The search for solidarity is a complex one and even understanding the identity you hold can be almost as difficult. I believe that collective identities are constructed over time. They have deep connections to societal values, cultural qualifiers, political values and so forth. Collective identities are the way we view ourselves in juxtaposition to others. It is how we feel we connect to those around us. I believe they are tied to space the built environment and the cultural practices. “–Every collectivity seeks recognition for itself as a community of moral value creation and as a community of moral worth. 3 When this is denied or questioned, collectivities will respond with a redoubling of effort to make their identity accepted. In this process, they may well take over values, ideas and modes of expression from other, possibly antagonistic communities and undergo a subtle metamorphosis, in which they end up resembling what they contest. Similarity of this kind does not mean, however, the end of difference. On the contrary, similarity when recognized can be deeply threatening as raising a question over the legitimacy of collective distinctiveness.” 4 This quote embodies my conceptual ideas of collective identities functioning in changing urban environment. Identity in other words is a community of moral value creation or worth. It is shaped around where we are, where we came from, what we see and so much more. The collective is realized through a commonality. The acceptance of these identities may be idealistic but difficult to achieve. I do however add to this understanding of the word to recognize 2 Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in fragments: Essays in postmodern morality (1st ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 3 Schöpflin, G. (2010). The construction of identity. 4 Wuthnow, R. (1987). Meaning and moral order: Explorations in cultural analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

the multiplicity of the levels in which we engage with these identities but also exploring who constructs them. Who dictates our identities and how much of it do we decide upon for ourselves? The collective is realized through a commonality and in order recognize the multiplicity of the levels we must explore where they are manifested in the everyday.

“–EVERY COLLECTIVITY SEEKS RECOGNITION FOR ITSELF AS A COMMUNITY OF MORAL VALUE CREATION AND AS A COMMUNITY OF MORAL WORTH. WHEN THIS IS DENIED OR QUESTIONED, COLLECTIVITIES WILL RESPOND WITH A REDOUBLING OF EFFORT TO MAKE THEIR IDENTITY ACCEPTED. IN THIS PROCESS, THEY MAY WELL TAKE OVER VALUES, IDEAS AND MODES OF EXPRESSION FROM OTHER, POSSIBLY ANTAGONISTIC COMMUNITIES AND UNDERGO A SUBTLE METAMORPHOSIS, IN WHICH THEY END UP RESEMBLING WHAT THEY CONTEST. SIMILARITY OF THIS KIND DOES NOT MEAN, HOWEVER, THE END OF DIFFERENCE. ON THE CONTRARY, SIMILARITY WHEN RECOGNISED CAN BE DEEPLY THREATENING AS RAISING A QUESTION OVER THE LEGITIMACY OF COLLECTIVE DISTINCTIVENESS.” Beitrag Shopflin, The Construction of Identity

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

THE IMPORTANCE OF GEOGRAPHY I have been driven me to really consider the impact of history and infrastructure on the individual and the everyday life. What do we bring to the already existent realities in this city? How do those things ultimately impact the way we live our lives and our personal identities? How do we see ourselves in society and where the rest of society situates us? Looking at identity through the compilation of spatial narratives, personal narrative and collective narratives has been instrumental in reinforcing an interest in our capacity to negotiate beyond just space and just the social. I believe that infrastructure and geography have a role in that identity. But beyond knowing or uncovering this info how can we create change together using what we bring to a space. Embedded within the urban fabric are the histories of that space. The policy, the social injustices, and overall decisions are also embedded. This embedded nature of some of the historically problematic decisions is a key point to remember. I ask if infrastructure can be neutral. On the premise that it currently still lives in a conditioned and biased way, can be alter its bias. Â How can food infrastructure be an indicator of the relationship of history & social constructs, geography & housing, policy & everyday life and places based cultural barriers. The idea of identity seeps through the focus of a spatial area, a personal narrative and a collective narrative. As clarification I must admit that these narratives are subjective. The experience of identifying with a place and knowing it means something to you but not just only you. Those experiences hold in them the understanding that you are part of something bigger. The web of existence is woven in a historical context, and communal narrative and a personal understanding. These three layers to me embody our identities. Â Â I have been driven in the past by communal processes, spaces of hope and the social value in sharing positive and negative experiences. I am interested in the emotional infrastructure of the city. How do the products we interact with and the activities we take part in affect us? What can the store I shop in tell me about me? These deeply introspective questions are the ones I often ask myself.

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Areal View of Site Location CD 1 0 + 11, Central Harlem and East Harlem

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

What about the past? What decisions have been made before my arrival to a place that contributes to the way I live my life? History seems like a subjective mechanism that holds on to the imaginaries of the dominant narrative. History as Andrea Geyer gathers, teeters between “what is possible and what did happen, what is known and what is imagined, what is truth and what is thought.” Geyer spoke of imperialistic practices on disenfranchised Native American communities. I believe Geyer’s views can be held true for looking at the grand effects of colonization, urbanization and globalization on communities of color. These three are packed within one another as constructs of our developing sameness. History aims to unfold a finite floor plan for the identity of a place. The development of ethnic enclaves challenge ideas of sameness but they are also are impacted by the forces that aim to promote ethnic cultural ties but fail to maintain authenticity. In some cases this promotion reinforces cultural commoditization by the people who inhabit the space. This reinforcement creates the window of opportunity for displacement of long time residents while attracting tourists and transient newcomers. I was instantly drawn to the South Bronx, Queens and Harlem. Each locations reasoning was similar to the next in my search for ethnic enclaves and dynamic food infrastructure. Harlem was an interesting location in the realm of population income generation, historical value, food accessibility, mobility and dynamic spatial construction. In choosing Harlem I began to diagram the spatial relationships that have been created by invisible lines of architecture. I was always so fascinated by the change in architecture and resource maintenance as I made my way from 86th Street on the East Side of Manhattan to 103rd Street. Further uptown continued to shift and change. In terms of resource management and availability, the subway and fresh food availability was always interesting to me. The train station at 103rd would leak so terribly that I would question why from 96th to there the train infrastructure was neglected. This area seems to have been forgotten. My naïve analysis of the physical truly was compelling to me. My curiosities took me to a place of investigating the way in which places shift so quickly. Why did we think we knew what poverty looked like? Why did we 00

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

know we were in a wealthy area of the city? I wanted to unearth the physical cues that played a part in maintaining the identity of a space and how that reflected the people in said space.

CAN INFRASTRUCTURE BE NEUTRAL? I am asking whether or not infrastructure can be neutral through the lens of street food vending, access to healthy food and the construction of food related identities through the embedded context of racial and class based inequality in Harlem. When thinking last time about this statement, by Brett Frishmann, I was intrigued: “Infrastructure as a means to an end. It enables different systems to function. The provider doesn’t determine use user does. (It’s) Not for special purposes.” I found myself in sudden need to adjust that statement. I see infrastructure working with different systems in the reflexive relationship that governs the way in which culture is produced and reproduced. Yes it enables, but the use is an effort on the user, producer, and conditions of the past and current state of society, nature, and economy. How can food infrastructure be an indicator of the relationship of history & social constructs, geography & housing, policy & everyday life and places based cultural barriers. 5As Alexis Obermauer gathered from Edwards, “Infrastructure can also be a set of interrelated elements that provide the structural framework underlying all of societal activity.”

Neutrality Necessary? A big conclusion I had come to throughout this semester was the realization that infrastructure was a tool. Simple deduction but I felt as though the emphasis was needed. Infrastructure can be considered the products of society working in tandem with the continual reproduction of society itself.

Food Infrastructure

Block level diagram of food infrastructure in Harlem

5 Infrastructure for a New Social Compact, Course by William Morrish. Student Alexis Obermauer’s reference to Edwards, Paul, Infrastructure and Modernity, Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Socio-Technical Systems 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

This includes the retention, evolution or embedded in practices of exclusion and inclusion. An example of my line of thought in the realm of exclusion could come from feminist theory in which highlights the construction of the subway not being conducive for women, children or those outside the dominant male profile. What we see is infrastructure as a medium that converges the past and the present and serves and as a form of culture and creates a base or a platform for access in complex systems. This convergence of the past and the present is seen on the reality of the physical retaining the story of its origin and the nature of our behavior retells those stories as well. Gender inequality imposed on transportation services is a close to home reality. Infrastructure also holds the effects of historical decisions on the current state of being. Therefore infrastructure is society. Infrastructure constitutes society and both the provider and the consumer determine its neutrality. If neutrality is what society so desires. With Harlem as a case study my investigation of our relationship to different levels of food infrastructure show the back and forth between the physical infrastructure and soft infrastructure working to maintain a level of comfort for some, accommodation for others and the underlying exclusion of even more. For this particular course I looked at the entire length of 125th street beyond the boundaries of my thesis. I looked also at 116th Street and offshoot from 116th, 3rd Ave beginning at 103rd Ave.

â&#x20AC;?In the beginning, peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s limited market resources and ethnically bound cultural and social capital are mutually reinforcing; they work in tandem to sustain ethnic neighborhoods. But these are transitional neighborhoodsthey represent a practical and temporary phase in the incorporation of new groups into American so -Logan, J. R., Zhang, W., & Alba, R. D.

This image shows the dynamic nature of this area. The top aims to depict the character of the two streets I am focusing on. Whether from migration from inside the USA or outside the USA cultures are created and reinforced in the physical body depiction of Infrastructure seen through the readings of the city. Through efforts of graffiti or street food vendors this collective identity is reinforced. It is also widely in a battle of authenticity in these particular areas where the dominant narrative seems to be one on the ethnic enclaves. Through an investigation of the built commercial districts I began to abstract food resources and outlined what to me seemed like a reoccurring theme of the areas food resources. Amidst the pawn shops and 99 Cent stores were 2-3 fast food restaurants on many blocks. Piled high seemed to be the bodegas with the limited availability of fresh food resources. 00

Harlem Analysis

Diagram of East Harlem and Centraal Harlem

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

LEVEL 1 Both emigration and immigration bridge the ethnic enclaves to their homelands through the streets. Street vending, markets, parades, grafitti and storefronts are just some of the numerous ways in which a collective identity is recreated in the urban.

LEVEL 2 Impact of factors such as red lining, mortgage discrimination, policy, new development, higher education, real estate development, and racial politics as well as cultural production lay a base for the urban narrative.

LEVEL 3 The street is being sold and lot my lot through political ambition and economic focal points. It is thus loosing the connection it once had to the passions and dreams of the residents.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

I aimed to disregard the notion of a food desert driving my investigation but I did in fact take into account the ideas of access being that of habit. My findings have pushed me to believe that it is deeper than a body of people having a habit that leads them toward what some consider unhealthy food. There are multi dimensional layers of historical food access limitations, food diet construction and so forth developed around politics of space, economics, and culture that spans far to the reach of colonialism itself. Whether out of circumstance or oppositional and constructed, the future, like now, will be reinforced by new and old necessities and an embedded historical context. Food itself responds to cultural and societal needs. In considering what a safety net for Harlem both Central and East, we will have to consider the makeup of the current and past populations. I believe that we seem to naturalize inequality and injustices. Through that naturalization there seem to be some sense sorting of society. I question what is our identity and how much of it do we create ourselves? History itself seems like an act of storytelling. Whose perspective are we living in?â&#x20AC;? I argue that historically biased methods of placing/providing infrastructure heavily impacts out current resource availability. Therefore the thriving nature of fast food relies on the poverty level of the people in which it services. Mortgage discrimination, redlining, and even urban renewal efforts are a part of the food ecosystem. It is a battle between demand and habit. Tax incentives, zoning, housing, transportation, and safety provide steam to a system of habitual culture. The constructions of man create a space in which these resources are delineated. As the movement of students and upper class resident make their way into Harlem what we call gentrification brings forth displacement of people, their liveliness and capabilities to afford this space. It will also displace memories, extend the force of cultural commodificaton and produce a battle of authenticity in cultural food resource attributed to the memory of many migrants. Manhattan is a economic scheme lending itself to those wit deep pockets and slowly masking ethnic enclaves as touristic home bases. In its transience we will have to wonder what its future makeup will be and what will become of ethnic 00

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

food resources. *In the now we see Red Lobster aiming to imitate picture of Harlem culture characteristics one can only wonder what Whole Foods will look like. From farm to restaurant, farm to grocery store, grocery store to bodega, bodega to home and home to fast food and maybe the farmers market there is more than meets the eye. The placement of certain food resources on one block is a curated occurrence with widespread effects. Even if the argument was that it was by chance the effects of proximity have a role in the stereotyped and actualized identity of the residents and the space itself. It also directly effects what goes into their bellies. Working class may not be able to spend much time trekking to the closet grocery store with good fresh food access therefore the close proximity to the “low income” working class neighborhood seems to be a bit opportunistic. Political ambitions and the transformation of an important memory embodied in space. How can policy or planning take into consideration the people and their all-encompassing conditions in order to make far more just decisions about policies that will impact food resources? When looking at the empowerment zone designation I tried to force a connection with food. However forcing it wasn’t needed as political ambitions of people of color in office was matched up with the growth of big box businesses and the displacement of vendors and authenticity. That is not to say that there are not remnants but in consideration for the future we must analyze these changes that have brought forth heavy artillery on the side of fast food.

ETHNIC ENCLAVES “The sorting process is not a once-and-for-all process, but rather a repetitive process that continually relocates people, making finer and finer distinctions” among them” 6

The focus on areas in Central and East Harlem, primarily the conditions surrounding 125th Street and 116th Streets evolution begins the dialogue of the 6

Dr. Mindy Fullilove, Urban Alchemy 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

effects of monopolized amenities and mainstream job development’s effect the natural reinforcement of ethnicity and culture in an ethnic zone. These areas create a level of comfort and belonging for migrants or people of color within areas with constraints to successfully living and producing in an American city. “Politics of multiculturalism have arguably helped erode the borders that once maintained these communities as ethnic enclaves, rendering their once despised differences into potential ethnic or historical attractions.” 7

The theme of change played out through displacement has a complex picture in ethnic enclaves. Whether we are looking at Chinatown, “Harlem”, Little Italy, or El Barrio there has seemed to be an omnipresent narrator of these areas identity. In Manhattan, the lines are drawn and seen as we walk the streets and at first glance the only crossing of these barriers was the permeating reach of Chinatown to Little Italy and the reach of Central Harlem into East Harlem. These lines are shifting now and the presence of tourism has heightened the awareness of the thin line between cultural production and culture as a commodity. I am brought to moments of wondering whether or not enclaves were meant to be withstanding against the test of time. Trying to understand the conditions of the underlying theme of displacement may be difficult to consider without a stance on who has the right to the city. Historically and our contemporary state show the narrative of Manhattan as filled with decisions based on primarily economic interests. 8The foundation of land as property and the city framed to be sold under the mask of public health benefits. This “Promise Land” asks for heterogeneous lifestyles while selling a resilient cultural identity. As New York maintains a tourist destination locations such as Harlem begin to loose authenticity with there root ethnic origins. This can be seen through food and commercial development. 7 Dávila, Arlene, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City, 2004 8 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/arts/design/manhattan-streetgrid-at-museum-of-city-of-new-york.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 “The grid was big government in action, a commercially minded boon to private development and, almost despite itself, a creative template.”

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Then we must ask what the life expectancy of ethnic enclaves could be? There is a making and remaking but also designing of space by the people. Collective embodied identities with historical ties depend on symbols and nostalgia. YuvalDavis considers belonging as the place in which “the sociology of emotions interfaces with the sociology of power, where identification and participation collude.” The sense of belonging is as Yuval-Davis, is invisible and the reflexivity of a collective ethnic identity is only brought to life when threatened.9 Otherwise these ethnic identities are performative. I believe we can see from the street. At the street level even the vendors’ act as indicators of an ethnic collective. Where do we see the cultural negotiation of public space (Jessica’s Research)? There is an appropriation of space and the merging of cultures. Chinese food places selling Mexican food. Homogenization, exotification and full circle to the homogenization again. Implementation is deconstructing the physical through the social investigation. When economic development zones are proposed on ‘low income’ areas it is commonly associated with ‘helping’ the people. Many arguments about the movement of people are built on the sea of some danger. Just as we saw for Manhattans foundation grid called to help airflow but creates a nature of land as a commodity, the mask of public health leaves no consideration to resident’s abilities to maintain a place in the city. I refer to Peter D. Salin’s The Ecology of Housing Destruction in really thinking about the ways in which we people due to past development of disinvestment and redlining are compartmentalized. These enclaves are built on the necessity of memory, food, cultural production and collective ethnic histories but they are deeply connected to practices of injustice. I think about how the traces of past ways of working, thinking, and doing affect the present both implicitly and explicitly.

The Ecology of Housing Destruction Illustration by Sabrina Dorsainvil, Outline by April DeSimone based on Peter D. Salin’s Ecology of Housing Destruction

9 Yuval-Davis, Nira. Human Security and the Gendered Politics of Belonging 2007. Web. 15 Feb. 2011 <http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/rsw/ research_centres/gender/news/pastevents/symposium/yuval/> 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

HARLEM Location Analysis My focus is community district 10 and 11, Central Harlem and East Harlem. I have distinguished my site boundaries by the Empowerment Zone designation. This almost arbitrary guideline was aimed to juxtapose new commercial development with perceived low-income communities. I sat down with my roommate and we discussed the development of new green carts along our 10-minute walk toward the train. She urged the difference in quality of food was apparent. She highlighted the difference in purchasing fruit downtown versus close to home in East Harlem as an example. This example was to illustrate the top to bottom realization of a lower standard of accessibility to food, transportation, and other resources. I thought that was the reason to look at these places but I then looked closer. I began to see more than just a topic of food. What could food infrastructure reveal about the identity of the people in a particular area. How then can we understand the power structure of these areas and discover to what extent residents of a particular area control the making of a place. In this investigation there are layers of trying to understand to sorting of society. I am more closely looking at 125th Street from 1st Ave to St. Nicholas, 116th Street from 2nd Ave to Morningside Ave and between 102nd Street to 116th Street. Each of these areas are commercial and part of the EZ designation. While walking down 125th Street you can see a wall of articles and images reminding us that what is happening (changes and targeting of ‘communities of color’) is what’s always been happening but with a different face. On this note as a black woman I can usually hear the arguments about how the media perpetuates this mode of thinking and the tone of my everyday perception of self. What has escaped this perception of self is the ability to assert a selfidentity because of the systematic targeting of common characteristics based

Site Location Development Use of subway system to outline preliminary boundaries

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Site Location

1st Ave

2nd Ave

3rd Ave

Lexington Ave

Park Ave

Madison Ave

Fifth Ave

Lenox Ave

Adam Clayton Powell

Fredrick Douglass

Manhattan Ave

Morningside Ave

Focal points of research within Harlem are 125th + 116th Business Hubs and “Cultural Hotspots” with a changing population + points of tension or activity as well as 3rd Avenue fro 102nd to 116th’s comercial area.

125th BID ends in East Harlem

5th

East Harlem meets West Harlem w/ clear cultural shift

125th Little Senegal meets Spanish Harlem

End of 125th BID and heavy commercial spaces into NYCHA housing

116th

LEGEND 116th Street in Central Harlem is interrupted by Morningside Ave/ Columbia University

Primary Focal Point

Public transit creates vendor hubs

Secondary Focal Point Shift Points/Moments of Interest EZ’s BID’s

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

125th Street Corridor fast food local food chain pawn shop general merchandise mart 125 “125th Street is like the 34th street or 42nd street of Harlem. It has definitely changed. We have a lot more shops and restaurants now.” female, resident

“Now, Harlem has turned into a War Zone. The streets are dangerous and just to think they are remaking Harlem.”

abandon buildings vendors storefront churches Dollar Stores

female, resident

116th Street fast food local food chain pawn shop general merchandise “Not as much stealing, Not as dangerous,, its safer. Harlem has changed, 125th and 116th are pretty similar except that there is more spanish people.” male, general vendor, Mexican, Harlem since 1989

“They call me ‘lazy man’ around here” Been vending since the age of 13 years old, 41 years old now.” male, general vendor

“”‘Everybodies hustlin’, everybody. The politicians are taking over, they control it all.” male, resident, Harlem since the 60’s

la marqueta abandon buildings vendors Cellphone and electronics stores Dollar Stores Independent clothing Stores

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Photos from Fieldwork 125th Street, 116th Steet and 3rd Ave

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

or race, class and gender used to define people. In reading about fashion and the effect of Western colonization in areas creating an ambiguous state of understanding the value of ones culture in terms of race, imitation, gender and fashion. In the Re-Orienting Fashion: Globalization of the Asian Dress the author says, “ By assuming meaning of gendered activities, we not only miss the opportunity to interrogate how globalization processes construct gender, but risk further reproducing and naturalizing stereotypes that priori dismiss certain types of people, activities, and positions and insignificant”10 Beyond the gendering of activities is the compartmentalizing our society is reproduced on. In this text globalization is said to be “as productive a difference as similarity”. It is almost as though we have maintained our colonial context. The aim to create equality fails to create positive change as much as it reinforces the segregation. This example is focused on fashion but it is an example of a pervasive reality of our lives in a compartmentalized society. What makes us think that the globalization of people and the way we have structured society hasn’t trickled down to the now? Fashion, housing, gender, etc is all relative to the history of a place. So I press on and believe that place matters. Place is the foothold for the structure of our perception of each other and our conceiving of cultural identities.

East Harlem Barrio Dreams by Arlene Dávila paints a concise image of the changing spatial and cultural dynamic of East Harlem as the effects of policy affect it. In this analysis she touches upon an integral realization of the contradiction culture plays in the defining identity of a space. 10 : Jones, C, Leshkowich, A.M., and Niessen, S. eds. Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress. Oxford: Berg, 2003. pp. 1-48. 00

Food Access

Diagram of contradictions in the food system and the importance of healthy food to be accompanied with access to education, realization of time, and other modes of healthy living

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

La Marqueta IN PROGRESS

Central Harlem IN PROGRESS

Mart 125 IN PROGRESS

MART 125

Over the years

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

EMPOWERMENT ZONE I have been interested in first understanding certain policies of a place. I want to know the decisions of the past that construct the processes that take place in the urban. I have stressed to myself the importance of a place. Once that place was decided upon I used the friction points of that space to help dictate the structure of my investigation. In order to unravel the ephemeral yet important pieces of places emotional landscape or collective identity juxtaposed to the history or policies of a place I needed a method of looking at the city. By chance I stumbled upon city data by the name, Empowerment Zone. I was instantly excited and curious about what a space considered to be an area of empowerment would be. My assumptions base on the name was this map showed areas where the focus was to foster a sense of autonomy in citizens. However, the definition did not align so cohesively with my idea of it. A Federal Empowerment Zone was a designation targeted at areas considered to be “distressed” or “improvised” but had the potential of economic development through public private partnerships. The designation areas for New York City were In Harlem and the South Bronx. Naming an area low income seemed problematic to me but the illusion of empowerment strike me as just as bad. “Low income” focuses on the economic value of people. In my opinion there needed to be more focus on something beyond that economic value of individuals. The problematic nature of this designation for me began with the identification of these migrant enclaves as being perpetually associated with “low income”. African American and Latin American communities are commonly associated with these ideas of poverty, low income and “dangerous” and this demographic is connected to the designation. Race may not have been a key factor in choosing this space but I now became interested in ways the effects of that designation had on the already societal warped yet embedded views of communities of color and also will later asked residents what they believed empowerment zones were and their responses made me question the effect loaded words had on the expectations communities place on planning practices.

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

[EMPOWERMENT ZONE DIAGRAM 1, EZ DESIGNATION PROCESS)- DESCRIPTION Widespread knowledge of the designation may not be publicly known but the effects are lasting. I have been interested in first understanding certain policies of a place. I want to know the decisions of the past that construct the processes that take place in the urban. I have stressed to myself the importance of a place for the necessity in understanding the social, racial and economic injustices that are characteristic to an area and a population. Harlem was the site of people impacted by this designation that further perpetuated the struggle of a body of people whose identities are defined by both race and economic. With commercial development as the focus of the empowerment zone local businesses became a key way in connecting change to the characteristics of collective space. [INSERT RESPONSES ABOUT EMPOWERMENT ZONES) Dávila, in her analysis cultural and spatial politics, the EZ’s impact in East Harlem stating that 11“even the EZ become implicated with people’s ethnic and class identities in multiple and contradictory ways. As such, they prompt questions about the intersection of culture, ethnicity, class, and consumption in development debates, while underscoring that so-called race-neutral policies are never devoid of racial and ethnic considerations.” She further more state that the presence of places like Home Depot, Starbucks, and what she calls Soho-like museums brings about contestation between the residents dreams and the city agenda for the future of El Barrio. She echoes the displacement of local businesses and residents as the effect of the policy set in place to empower economic development rather then residents. The reality is that these policies although aimed at economic development heavily impact real estate, housing, education, and the social fabric of East Harlem.

11 Dávila, Arlene, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City, 2004 00

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

POLICY + PLANNING EMPOWERMENT ZONES

Use public funds + tax incentives as catalyst for private investment to provide jobs, business tax savings, job training, childcare services, education for LOCAL BUSINESSES AND RESIDENTS

Empowerment zones (EZs) are economically distressed communities designated by government for aid—but this aid is intended primarily to lift the communities out of poverty by stimulating business enterprise and creating jobs.

+ employment credits + increased tax deductions on equipment + 0� t ax on capital gains

FEDERAL

To be considered you must: demonstrate economic distress: high levels of unemployment, a poverty rate of at least 20 percent, a declining population, and a pattern of disinvestment by businesses.

Benefit - Wage tax credit; increase depreciation allowance; tax-exempt bond financing.

1999

$3.8 billion in federal

grants and tax-exempt bonding authority to finance economic revitalization efforts.

EMPOWERMENT ZONE 1993

Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities Act of 1993

“Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decisionmaking in autonomous ways. It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one’s own destiny.”

1994

Clinton Administration Establishes 9 EZ’s 10 Year Designation

URBAN Atlanta Baltimore Chicago Detroit New York City Philadelphia/Camden, New Jersey RURAL The Kentucky highlands The mid-delta region, Mississippi The Rio Grande valley, Texas Cleveland and Los Angeles were designated supplemental EZ’s

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities Make it more historical, protect the people, not have people afraid to go certain places, give our youth a chance to be them. More resources for any kind of HELP.

An empowerment zone gives hope and positive ways to view your situation, But to ask what it has or hasn’t done for the people I don’t

IT SHOULD BE MAKING THE COMMUNITY WAY BETTER. It seems like it has definitely put some money into the community to make it better. However, I still don’t feel like it is enough. There is still a lot of poverty in Harlem.

RESIDENT RESPONSES

think is a good question. I don’t think it’s fair to put all the pressure on an empowerment zone. I think it comes from the individual. As human beings we are raised to always wait for someone or something to do something for us and often are let down when the results are not what we expect. If the people of Harlem wants things to be different for the better no place is needed to do that.

All it takes is a shift in awareness from that person.

We have all the resources we need. No more or less than any other borough. It’s up to that person to take full advantage of the resources we have available.

URBAN Boston, Massachusetts Bridgeton and Vineland, New Jersey Cincinnati, Ohio Columbia and Sumter, South Carolina Columbus, Ohio El Paso, Texas Gary and East Chicago, Indiana Huntington, West Virginia Ironton, Ohio Knoxville, Tennessee Miami, Florida Minneapolis, Minnesota New Haven, Connecticut Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia Santa Ana, California St. Louis, Missouri East St. Louis, Illinois. RURAL Cordele, Georgia Fargo, North Dakota Riverside County, California Ullin, Illinois Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota

*Take this to your Tax Preparer *

T A X T I P S

FOR ACCOUNTANTS AND BUSINESSES IN EMPOWERMENT ZONES (EZs) INCENTIVE

MAX/ YEAR

OTHER INFORMATION

I. Wage Credits Businesses can take an annual tax credit of up to $3,000 for each employee who lives and works for the employer in an Empowerment Zone (EZ). Employers may verify their business location and employees address as being inside the EZ on HUD’s Address Locator at www.hud.gov/crlocator. Available through December 31, 2009

$3000 per yr per employee

Work Opportunity Tax Credits (WOTC)

Businesses can take a tax credit of up to $2,400 for each 18-to-39 year-old new employee who lives in an EZ. WOTC is available for employees who

$2400 for first year of employment

New WOTC category for Hurricane Katrina Area

Businesses can take the WOTC for each employee who lived in the Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone on August 28, 2005, and is hired through August 27, 2007, to work in the GO Zone.

EZ Employment Credit

begin work before September 1, 2011.

$2400 for the first year of employment

Certain related individuals are ineligible.

Certain related individuals are ineligible. State certifies eligibility by a simple process using: www.hud.gov/crlocator. See Form 8850. See IRS Publication 4492 and Form 8850 (revised June 2007); Katrina employee certifies address to employer – no state certification.

II. Deductions

LOCAL DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS

Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone UMEZ (Harlem) NYEZ- New York Empowerment Zones Upper Manhattan (Harlem) + South Bronx Federal grant of $100 Million + matching grants NY State ($100 mil) + NY City ($100 mil) = Grant investment of

$300 Million

Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation BOEDC (South Bronx)

Increased 179 Deduction

EZ businesses can take an increase in deduction up to $35,000 of the cost of eligible equipment purchases, subject to certain limitations, in the placed-inservice year of the equipment in an EZ. Available for equipment placed in service after December 31, 2001, and before January 1, 2010.

$35,000 per business

Full benefit if $160k-$1 mil of eligible equipment is purchased and placed in service in 2007. See IRS Pub 946 for what equipment is eligible. Must be eligible “EZ business.” See IRS Pub. 954 for requirements for qualifying as an “EZ business.”

III. Investment Incentives Investors other than corporations that hold qualified small business stock in a qualified EZ business for more than 5 years can sell the stock and exclude New “EZ business” stock held for more than 5 from gross income 60% of the capital gains from that sale. Available for years. Must be eligible “EZ business.” See IRS Pub. Varies qualified small business stock acquired after December 31, 2000. Gains 954 for requirements for qualifying as an “EZ attributable to periods after 2014 will not qualify for the 60% exclusion. business.” District of Columbia is not treated as an EZ for this purpose. Must be eligible “EZ business.” See IRS Pub. 954 for State or local governments are able to issue bonds in EZs at lower interest Aggregate of Enterprise Zone requirements for qualifying as an “EZ business.” $230 million rates to finance constructions costs. Available through December 31, Facility Bonds per zone 2009 State or local governments are able to issue bonds in EZs at no interest to Qualified Zone finance public school programs. Private businesses must contribute money, $400 million Available for public or chartered school projects in equipment or services equal to 10 percent of the bond proceeds. The bond US allocation EZs. Academy Bonds purchasers receive interest payments in the form of tax credits. through 2007 * Tax preparers review IRS Publication 954 to find tax benefits for your clients. The information contained in this summary should not be relied upon for Federal government tax purposes. Please consult your tax preparer or the IRS for official guidance. US Department of Housing & Urban Development, Office of Community Renewal, website: www.hud.gov/cr

Partial Gross Income Exclusion of Capital Gains

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD

Administered by:

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Green Cart Vendor

Commercial Zones: What Do They Say?

Fast Food Chains

Stripping these spaces of their store fronts and abstracting the marketing of these places in order to understand the clientele they are serving and what these places say about the peple who live around there?

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities

Observation 1: East 102 + 3rd Ave to East 105 + 3rd Ave

EMBODIED STREETS “One primary effect of globalization, however, is the creation of a common world, a world for that, for better or worse, we all share, a world that has no “outside.” 12

The storefronts of a neighborhood depict an image of the residents in a particular area. Through my investigation of commercial districts and through general observations of surrounding areas in comparison I have seen these cultural connotations. The street as a whole embodies the characteristics of the dominant values of an areas identity. The shift and change of that image will begin to show a shift in the urban narrative.

Cultural Commercial Embodiement ”In the beginning, people’s limited market resources and ethnically bound cultural and social capital are mutually reinforcing; they work in tandem to sustain ethnic neighborhoods. But these are transitional neighborhoods-they represent a practical and temporary phase in the incorporation of new groups into American society. “ 13

Thought once to be the temporary homes to those destined to assimilate ethnic enclaves have lived as homes away from home. They have given birth to new generations of citizens with transnational identities. The question now if whether or not their inner working are seen as a valuable consideration in the push for the betterment of a neighborhood.

Food Vendor Fast Food Vacant Space

12 Commonwealth, Preface: Becoming the Prince of the Multitude, Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri. 13 Logan, J. R., Zhang, W., & Alba, R. D.

Everyday Urbanities: The Ecology of Street Food

Embodied Streets: The Social + Spatial Infrastructure of Collective Identities