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What We’re Following

Curb your anger: For about a decade, Donald Shoup has collected reports of fatal violence that erupts over parking spaces, cataloging what he calls the war over curb parking. That may sound grim, but to Shoup, an urban economist and parking policy expert, this form of road rage reveals a lesson in economics. When people find a commodity that’s in high demand but considered to be free, they find ways to claim and defend it. When it comes to parking, people may try to hold their spot through lawn chairs, idling cars, or even bursts of violence that lead to death.

“You don’t get murders over Coke bottles or t-shirts,” Shoup said. To him, these fatal disputes demonstrate why cities need to pay closer attention to these contested spaces. Sociologists and criminologists have also theorized about why parking provokes violent outbursts, and understanding why these disputes happen could help explain how to fix it. CityLab’s Laura Bliss asks: How Can Cities Curb Parking Spot Rage?

—Andrew Small

More on CityLab

Harvey Milk Day

Today is Harvey Milk Day in California, which commemorates the San Francisco supervisor who became the first openly gay man to hold elected office in the Golden State. Milk, elected in 1977 and assassinated the next year, would have been 89 today.

In an L.A. Times newsletter edition marking the occasion, the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society recalls a poignant story when Pete Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten Buttigieg, recently visited the museum. Terry Beswick recalls sharing an audio recording of Milk’s will:

“In that moment, I was just thinking about giving him a brief look at Harvey Milk,” Beswick remembered. But when he stepped back to allow Buttigieg to listen to the recording, he recalls thinking, “Ah, what did I just do.”

“I could see the tears in his eyes and I was thinking, he’s got to be thinking about the risk that his husband is taking, even by running for president,” Beswick said, explaining that although San Francisco is “a bit of a queer cultural bubble,” that isn’t the case in the rest of the country.

Read the full story here.

What We’re Reading

Privatizing the public city: Oakland’s lopsided boom (Places Journal)

How Stockholm became the city of work-life balance (The Guardian)

Silicon Valley’s shame: Living in a van in Google’s backyard (Bloomberg)

USPS is testing self-driving mail trucks (NPR)

Tell your friends about the CityLab Daily! Forward this newsletter to someone who loves cities and encourage them to subscribe. Send your own comments, feedback, and tips to hello@citylab.com.

The latest entry in Donald Shoup’s collection of fatal parking disputes is particularly grim. In late April, a 57-year old woman named Lourdes Estremera set up a grill on the street in North Philadelphia and got into a physical fight with a neighbor who wanted to park in the spot. Police arrived, and the woman died while being interviewed. The exact cause of death was unclear, according to local news reports. But the source of the inciting conflict was plain to Shoup, a distinguished professor at UCLA’s department of urban planning and a well-known parking policy expert. Estremera was a casualty in what Shoup calls the war over curb parking.

Perhaps that sounds insensitive. To him, it’s basic economics. A commodity in high demand, such as urban curb space, must be priced. “Free” street parking in congested areas invites parking-seekers to stake and defend their claims in other ways, such as putting out lawn chairs, idling the car for hours, or bursts of violence that can sometimes lead to death.

“You don’t get murders over Coke bottles or t-shirts,” Shoup said.

To Shoup, parking disputes that turn deadly demonstrate why cities must pay closer attention to these contested spaces, by setting up meters and enforcing restrictions. In decades of research, Shoup has examined other social costs of free and overabundant parking, including wasted space, time, and gasoline, and lost revenue that local governments could easily use. He hasn’t formally analyzed them, but he’s also been gathering news reports about violent curb conflicts for about a decade.

Consider this gruesome headline from New York City: “Brooklyn dad shot dead on Father’s Day was killed because of a months-old fight about a parking spot.” Or this lede: “A man and a woman from South Los Angeles have been arrested for stabbing a woman to death in front of her children over a parking space at a swap meet.”

A quick Google search of parking spot violence will turn up an alarming quantity of such incidents. Sociologists and criminologists theorize as to why violence can erupt from such seemingly inconsequential concerns. Jeffrey Butts, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, says that the dynamics of parking provocations are sometimes similar to those of gang violence: Individuals who think their territory is threatened feel that they have to respond with violence to protect it.

Curbside horror stories are often dispatched from poorer neighborhoods, but that may just reflect the nature of sensational crime reporting; the affluent are just as guilty of getting upset over a lost spot or a dinged door. (Case in point: celebrity parking assailant Alec Baldwin.) “Everyone is capable of violence,” Butts said. “This is not just about cities, or poor people, or congested neighborhoods. It’s a general human thing.”

Roberta Senechal de la Roche, a Washington and Lee University history professor who studies theories of violence, said that some parking altercations may be also understood as the attacker trying to save face confronted by a grievance. She cites University of Virginia sociologist Donald Black, who wrote in his book Moral Time that “[m]en of honor are known for their ‘touchiness,’ and might construe various incidents short of direct insults as challenges requiring a defense.” (Other genders could conceivably be included.)

One thing that seems to amplify the odds of violence: the presence of automobiles. Butts pointed to taxi drivers who dangerously speed up behind cyclists, or pissed-off motorists who run other cars off the road. A vehicle provides both social insulation and a powerful weapon to use against your tormentor. “Having that box around you protects you from the reprisal of others,” he said. “Anything to do with a car is more likely to provoke a violent response.”

Shoup is less interested in the psychology of road rage; to him, the parking spots themselves are the indirect culprits, and proper metering is the obvious solution. Butts, however, fears that that raising the price of parking could risk punishing lower-income curb users. To end parking violence once and for all, cities must address road violence, too. That means creating transportation networks that allow fewer people to own cars to begin with.

In the end, there’s probably only one clear response to Shoup’s morbid inventory. Said a nine-year-old boy after overhearing the gunshots that killed a man in a curbside dispute in Las Vegas last year: “I just think it’s so sad someone had to shoot someone over a parking spot.”

One of the world’s most recognizable urban spaces is slated to get a dramatic makeover. On Tuesday, Paris City Hall announced that the London-based landscape architects Gustafson, Porter and Bowman had been selected from 43 applicants to lead a major redesign of the space around the Eiffel Tower. According to the plan, the currently car-filled bridge connecting the Eiffel Tower with the Métro subway system will be turned into a pedestrianized garden, stringing together a set of two new public squares and restored parkland that will create an unbroken spine of greenery a mile long across the city.

The plan would slash car traffic in the immediate vicinity of the Eiffel Tower, making the area altogether more inviting to walkers without notably altering the appearance of what could be the most famous urban ensemble in the world.

That Paris needs this overhaul around the Eiffel Tower is not necessarily common knowledge. The tower itself remains as beautiful as ever—indeed, it is one of those monuments that rarely disappoints people when they see it for the first time in real life. Its immediate surroundings, however, are a little careworn and hectic. Many visitors must access the tower via a loud, traffic-filled, and rather unprepossessing riverside, and limited space for pedestrians creates bottlenecks on the sidewalks. The Champs de Mars gardens from which the tower rises are unquestionably grand, but they also betray their origins as a military parade ground: The site can feel austere, dusty, and under-shaded in high summer.

The new plan, due to be entirely funded by ticket sales to the tower and due for completion in 2024, should help burnish the area’s beauty and make it friendlier to pedestrians. Currently, most visitors emerge from the Métro at Trocadéro into a busy carousel of traffic, with an (admittedly pretty) garden marooned behind surging car lanes. The redesign removes these car lanes and replaces them with a stepped amphitheater of lawn, creating a large garden for lounging with stunning views of the tower. From there, visitors will step through the brackets created by the Palais de Chaillot and down the steps to a completely new pedestrian square, Place de Varsovie, created by routing traffic on the right bank quay into a tunnel.

This area won’t just be calmer, it will also be cooler, thanks to an increase in its current number of fountains.

Visitors will then step onto the Pont D’Iena, the main bridge access to the tower, where traffic will be replaced by a double avenue of trees. Cobbled sidewalks will allow access for emergency vehicles. Tunneling for traffic on the right bank will create another pedestrian square, called Place Branly, while a riverside garden promenade will continue up river to the elevated Bir Hakeim Métro station, the other main access point for the tower.

Under the tower itself, visitors will get more ticket offices and kiosks and even somewhere they can leave bulky baggage before visiting. To prevent cluttering the area and ruining sight lines, however, many of these new facilities will be sunk into the ground, with the surrounding lawns at the sides raised to low humps to cover them. Garden restoration and new tree plantings will thicken out the surrounding space’s greenery and provide much-needed shade.

This is, broadly speaking, a softly-softly approach, at least visually. But the plan’s many modest steps add up to something highly significant. When all the new green spaces are created and threaded together, they will become what co-designer Kathryn Gustavson described in a press release as “Paris’s largest garden,” a unified mile-long green corridor across the city. The new garden bridge also offers Paris an opportunity to succeed where London failed (with good reason) in creating a new cross-river park, realizing the dream of trees throwing shade over the waterway.

But perhaps the most striking element of the tower makeover is how it fits into a bigger story: the ongoing campaign to reclaim Paris from private motor vehicles. That politically contentious process, which began decades ago but picked up real momentum after the city agreed to permanently pedestrianize a key stretch of the Seine riverfront in 2016, is now spreading out into the wider metropolis as Paris’s staggered ban on more polluting cars is being picked up by municipalities in the suburbs. Now, that car-removing transformation promises to extend to the borders of the city’s most iconic attraction. That the new plan appears to manage this in a way that won’t notably tinker with the appearance of the Eiffel Tower’s surroundings actually makes it more impressive.

Netflix’s hit new series “Street Food” is more than a glimpse at the world’s finest street-side chefs. While other shows, most notably, Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown,” have featured the down-home goodness of street cuisine, “Street Food” may be the first to acknowledge the threat street-food vendors face in increasingly exclusionary cities.

Take Bangkok: It’s no surprise that the city’s globally beloved roadside vendors are the first featured in “Street Food.” But since 2014, Thailand’s military government has waged an open battle on the city’s street vendors, forcing workers to abandon their businesses or work in the shadows.  

The government’s push to clear the sidewalks is not a long-term solution. It has left a trail of social and economic hardship and, with few alternatives, many vendors return to sell in the areas where they started anyway, dodging police fines and confiscations to make ends meet.

Even as Bangkok’s approach demonstrates that forced eviction is not a workable strategy, eviction of street vendors is a common tactic around the world. At Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), we analyzed news on vendors from six continents for 18 months and the results show an alarming portrait of widespread hostility toward these workers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America; in cities from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, Lima to Lusaka. These national and local governments enact policies that ban or criminalize these jobs that workers need and services consumers demand. That’s why Netflix’s “Street Food” is timely. It reminds us why cities around the world need to embrace, not ban, street vending. And, as we explain, two very different cities—Los Angeles in the United States, and Monrovia, Liberia—have proven there is a way to make city streets and squares work for all.

Who has a right to the city?

The question of vending in public spaces has become a global debate. It has brought with it an important question about who has a right to work in cities. Sixty-one percent of the world’s workers (90 percent of workers in developing countries) are informal, and a significant number work in cities. Many of these workers—street vendors, waste pickers, motorcycle taxi drivers and food delivery workers—make their living in public space. The United Nations’s 2016 Sustainable Development Agenda directs governments to respect and support their livelihoods.

But many city governments are failing to implement these frameworks. What we are witnessing instead is a growing hostility to informal workers in urban public space and to vendors, in particular, as cities governments cave to elite interests by clearing the streets.

Street food is not just for tourists

Vendors are in public spaces not only to earn a living but as a response to an on-the-ground need. As food writer Chawadee Nualkhair says in the show’s first episode: “The vendors are there because the people want them there.”  

People in cities depend on street food. Global research shows that vending keeps city residents, especially the poorest, nourished and fed. In Sub-Saharan Africa, informal outlets like these vendors are a major source of food for urban poor families because of their convenient locations, affordable products, and their willingness to provide credit for loyal customers short on cash.  

These contributions are by no means confined to the Global South. “Green cart” programs, like in New York and Chicago, leverage vending to serve fresh fruits and vegetables in food deserts—neighborhoods that are underserved by the big grocery store chains.

Street vending fills urban unemployment gaps, especially for women

While street vendors provide quick eats near homes and offices, their work is also essential to keeping their families afloat. This is evident with the story of Michelin-starred chef Raan Jay Fai in “Street Foods’” episode on Bangkok. Jay Fai’s mother supported her children as a vendor, and Jay Fai herself started cooking on the street as a last resort after losing all of her possessions in a fire. Vending gave her the chance to get back on her feet, eventually opening a small restaurant which now has lines extending out the door.

In the episode on Vietnam, restaurateur Nikki Tran reminds us that “almost one million of Ho Chi Minh City’s 10 million people make a living by selling on the street.” Indeed, vendors comprise between 9 and 24 percent of urban employment in cities where the data is available.

It’s no coincidence, either, that many of the vendors featured on the show are women. Available data shows the importance of vending and informal trade for women workers, who rely on these livelihoods to care for families. And likewise, having convenient access to produce or prepared foods helps alleviate the unequal burden of domestic labor. This means that bans and evictions directly conflict with goals to tackle poverty and reduce gender inequalities.

Some of the hostility toward street vendors comes from a perception that vendors compete with brick-and-mortar businesses. Yet evidence (including from New York and Los Angeles) suggests that vendors and small businesses often have symbiotic relationships, since vendors attract pedestrians to the street for shopping. Vendors also directly support these formal businesses through their own spending. In L.A., the Economic Roundtable estimated that direct spending by street vendors and their households creates more than 4,000 full-time employees in retail stores, groceries, and supermarkets.

In Bangkok, the recent disappearance of street markets badly hurt local storefronts, as well as wholesalers from whom vendors had previously purchased their goods. Businesses in some neighborhoods reported declines of well over half, with many shops relocating and the neighborhoods turning dark, quiet, and more dangerous. In an episode of “Street Food,” Nualkhair says about the effects of these crackdowns, “This is rupturing an eco-system that’s been in place for decades.”

Street vendors, as we have seen, are not the source of urban problems: they are often part of the solution. And vending policies for 21st-century cities need to reimagine how to include these workers as vibrant social and economic forces, as we outline in our toolkit for public authorities.

Indeed, some prominent cities are leading the way, with policies that improve neighborhoods by incorporating vending.

Recently, Los Angeles’s City Council voted to decriminalize, and subsequently, to fully legalize and regulate vending. Under a new permit system still being finalized, all street vendors will be eligible to purchase permits, requiring them to pay taxes and abide by agreed rules: for instance, related to health and hygiene, sidewalk placement, and prevention of pedestrian or traffic obstruction.

City council members were responding directly to demands from the community. Throughout their decade-long struggle for this policy in L.A., vendors emphasized the need for “active streets:” places where vendors make things safer, more prosperous, and healthier by bringing people and nutritious foods to the streets.

Thousands of miles away, officials in the city of Monrovia, Liberia, signed a groundbreaking Memorandum of Understanding with the country’s street trader union, on September 27, 2018. The agreement provides licenses and registration fees for vendors, creates collaborative systems for waste management and enforcement, and imposes penalties when either party (including the police) break the agreement. Most important, it requires monthly meetings for city agencies to meet with the union to work out any kinks in implementation.

L.A. and Monrovia are extremely different in many ways, but they have both made a common, affirmative decision to capitalize on the valuable services that vending provides: creating jobs, increasing access to affordable foods and goods, activating isolated city streets, and stimulating local economies.

By making vendors legitimate business owners, these cities increase the urban tax base and reduce the need for costly evictions and enforcement. These two cities on opposite sides of the globe have worked closely with representative organizations of vendors to formulate and innovate. Their success proves that with will and collaboration locations across the world can move street-vending policy into the 21st century.