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An examination of informal urban activities-including street vending, garage sales, and unpermitted housing-that explores their complexity and addresses related planning and regulatory issues.

Every day in American cities street vendors spread out their wares on sidewalks, food trucks serve lunch from the curb, and homeowners hold sales in their front yards-examples of the wide range of informal activities that take place largely beyond the reach of government regulation. This book examines the "informal revolution" in American urban life, exploring a proliferating phenomenon often associated with developing countries rather than industrialized ones and often dismissed by planners and policy makers as marginal or even criminal. The case studies and analysis in The Informal City challenge this narrow conception of informal urbanism.

The chapters look at informal urbanism across the country, empirically and theoretically, in cities that include Los Angeles, Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Kansas City, Atlantic City, and New York City. They cover activities that range from unpermitted in-law apartments and ad hoc support for homeless citizens to urban agriculture, street vending and day labor. The contributors consider the nature and underlying logic of these activities, argue for a spatial understanding of informality and its varied settings, and discuss regulatory, planning, and community responses.

Contributors
Jacob Avery, Ginny Browne, Matt Covert, Margaret Crawford, Will Dominie, Renia Ehrenfeucht, Jeffrey Hou, Nabil Kamel, Gregg Kettles, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Kate Mayerson, Alfonso Morales, Vinit Mukhija, Michael Rios, Donald Shoup, Abel Valenzuela Jr. Mark Vallianatos, Peter M. Ward

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments(p. ix)
• Introduction(p. 1)
• Part I Settings
• 1 The Garage Sale as Informal Economy and Transformative Urbanism(p. 21)
• 2 Outlaw In-Laws: Informal Second Units and the Stealth Reinvention of Single-Family Housing(p. 39)
• 3 The Reproduction of Informality in Low-Income Self-Help Housing Communities(p. 59)
• 4 Making and Supporting Community Gardens as Informal Urban Landscapes(p. 79)
• 5 "This Is My Front Yard!" Claims and Informal Property Rights on Sidewalks(p. 97)
• 6 Learning from the Margin: Placemaking Tactics(p. 119)
• 7 Surviving in America's Playground: Informal Sustenance Strategies among the Chronically Unhoused(p. 137)
• Part II Responses
• 8 The Irreconcilable Tension between Dwelling in Public and the Regulatory State(p. 155)
• 9 Learning from Informal Practices: Implications for Urban Design(p. 173)
• 10 Formalizing City Farms: Conflict and Conciliation(p. 193)
• 11 A More Delicious City: How to Legalize Street Food(p. 209)
• 12 Crystals, Mud, and Space: Street Vending Informality(p. 227)
• 13 "Keep Your Wheels On": Mediating Informality in the Food Cart Industry(p. 243)
• 14 Regulating Day Labor: Worker Centers and Organizing in the Informal Economy(p. 261)
• 15 Informal Parking Markets: Turning Problems into Solutions(p. 277)
• Conclusion: Deepening the Understanding of Informal Urbanism(p. 295)
• Contributors(p. 305)
• Index(p. 311)
• Series List

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This important collection of essays, part of the "Urban and Industrial Environments" series, departs from the general character of urban studies by exploring informal social structures in US cities. Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris (both, UCLA) aim to provide an alternative, perhaps fuller picture of urban life that highlights the many unplanned uses of the city, uses that go beyond the legally sanctioned, formally shaped environment to encompass so many aspects of urban life. The chapters cover topics as wide ranging as holding garage sales, vending, demonstrating, loitering, panhandling, parking, walking, gardening, and recycling. An underlying theme is the sometimes-explicit assertion that studying these informal urban phenomena can lead people to uncover social inequities as well as unexpected patterns of human resiliency. This reviewer would have liked to see articles that pushed further into the informal creases in city life, perhaps exploring the roles of art and artists, nightlife in the city, and trends in youth culture. By studying what one author calls the "uncanny spaces of marginality," readers see how opportunity, conflict, and conciliation may operate within and outside a human landscape bound by ordinances, control, and convention. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic and professional library collections. --Samuel Hammer, Boston University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Vinit Mukhija is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA and the author of Squatters as Developers? Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Associate Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. Her books include Urban Design Downtown, Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space (MIT Press), and Companion to Urban Design.