Date posted: April 4, 2008

Street Vendors: The Informal City (1)

As you may have noticed if you browse through my photo archive, I have a fascination for street vendors and street food. I don’t really know why, but wherever I go I end up taking photos of food stalls, street vendors and markets.

When I was in Hanoi I found it fascinating to see the service industry that has emerged around the premier form of transport in Vietnam: motorbikes. At nearly every street corner you can find repairmen. Street vendors sell pieces of cloth with which drivers cover their mouth and nose against the exhaust fumes. I was equally fascinated by the makeshift roadside grills, which were actually quite innovative.

Government officials tend to have a negative attitude towards street food vendors as do tourists, or at least, travel guides. They are concerned about health and safety. But street food vendors have everything to gain by appealing to passers-by. Unlike restaurants, street stalls let you see how the food is prepared. The business of selling street food is extremely competitive. Of course vendors are mobile, but there is a limit to the amount of times and the distance they can move around. So it pays to invest in quality and hygiene so as to build a loyal local customer base.

Another reason city officials tend to dislike street vendors is that they take up road space and clutter pedestrian zones. However street vendors only set up shop where there is demand for their products and services. The bicycle and motorbike repairmen in Hanoi fulfill an essential service, as do the men and women selling food near busstops and traffic junctions in India and Vietnam and the women selling bento boxes around lunch time outside office towers in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka.

The bible in terms of research into street food vendors is Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries (Oxford University Press, 1997) by Irene Tinker. And what a joy that Google books now makes it possible to browse through this and many other books. For more than fifteen years Irene Tinker studied food vendors in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, and Senegal. She analyses the economics of the street food trade, the typical workday of a food vendor and the types of food sold in different cities. She found that most street food is actually equally or less contaminated than food from restaurants (p. 189 and further). She also shows that government crackdowns on street vendors are counterproductive, because they deter vendors from investing in better equipment.

Street vendors are here to stay. What’s more, they will only grow in number. Government policy should be based on an understanding of the economics and dynamics of street vendors. Irene Tinker’s findings, for instance, led the FAO to recognize the role street food vendors play within the urban economy.