Mexico City and the Labor of Public Space

Season 2
Written By Chip Chip

Street Vending with Veronica Crossa-Niell

Street vending is everywhere in Mexico City. It is part of the city’s economy, its culture, and the everyday experience of its public spaces. But describing that work as simply “informal” misses much of what is actually happening.

Verónica Crossa is a geographer and professor at El Colegio de México whose research examines street vending, public space, and urban life. We met in Mexico City’s Parque Hundido to talk about the complicated systems that allow people to make a living in public space: the relationships between vendors and government, the politics of regulation and enforcement, and why the familiar divide between the “formal” and “informal” city may be a false one.

It’s a conversation rooted in Mexico City, but one that raises a much broader question: Who gets to work in public space, under what conditions, and what do the words we use to describe that work reveal about who—and what—we believe belongs there?

Verónica Crossa Niell
Reading for difference on the street: De-homogenising street vending in Mexico CityResisting the Entrepreneurial City: Street Vendors’ Struggle in Mexico City’s Historic Center

Featured in this Episode

Field Guide
Fighting for space in Mexico City:
Fighting for space in Mexico City:

Verónica Crossa examines street vending and the struggle over public space in Mexico City, asking what happens when efforts to regulate and “improve” the city collide with the livelihoods and everyday practices of the people already using its streets.

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Veronica Crossa
Veronica Crossa

Verónica Crossa is an urban scholar whose work explores public space, street vending, informality, and inequality in Mexico City. Her research asks what happens when efforts to “improve” public space collide with the livelihoods, relationships, and everyday lives of the people already using it.

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Ananya Roy
Ananya Roy

Ananya Roy is a scholar of urban planning, geography, and social welfare at UCLA whose work examines inequality, poverty, displacement, and the politics of urban development. Her influential scholarship on urban informality challenges the idea that “informal” activity simply exists outside formal systems, instead examining how governments and institutions themselves produce and regulate informality.

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Chip Chip
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