Final Reflection: A Cairene urbanist in New York City

The identity of a city goes beyond the demographic composition and the built environment. A city is formulated by a multitude of actions, or intangibles, that create a change within the city. These actions include events, community interventions in a neighborhood, and social and economic interactions. Such actions form an intangible network that connect to the city’s institutions, governance, as well as the built environment.  An urbanist’s role is to synthesize the intangibles of a city and present it in tangible forms like stories, maps, images, as well as buildings and spaces. Urban research is a way to make sense of the interwoven characteristics of a place, which are often nonquantifiable.

David Harvey identifies the process of urbanization, and subsequently, the city, in terms of spillover. He explains that a city is formed because of a surplus of characteristics such as density, and consumerism, all of which affect the way a city is governed and shaped. In this essay, I will present the city’s intangible actions as a type of surplus. Furthermore, I will use a specific action, street vending, as an example to explain how the city’s intangible network affects economic and social interactions and shapes the way we, as urbanists, identify the city.

Growing up in Cairo, the city’s identity was often framed with informality. The Lack of regulations resulted in informal practices, which are exacerbated in the form of informal settlements as well as ungoverned economic transactions. Cultural norms and informal agreements often binds economic transactions as well as the spatial structure of the city. Almost all the city’s actions are categorized as informal, as opposed to the formal governing actions. This allowed the city’s intangible network to become more tangible, and hence, the city is easier to understand.

Street Vending on a side walk is illegal in Cairo. As you encrypt the physical scene of a Cairene side walk, you will be able to identify a line between the legal and the illegal, the formal and the informal. A street vendor’s cart is informal, both in terms of how it was purchased and its current location on the sidewalk. The economic transaction between street vendors and the public is informal. In sum, the street vendor comes from an informal settlement to informally occupy a space, in a formal sidewalk.

My experience in Cairo made me realize the city as a host of two opposite actions: the and the, the informal intangible actions and the formal governing actions. When I moved to New York city eight months ago, I applied the same rationale in an attempt to understand the city. One underlying fallacy in this approach, is assuming that stakeholders can always be categorized into two groups. I saw street vendors and immediately called “informality”. However, Street vendors in New York are an example of how complicated and intangible the urban network in the city can be.

Encrypting the physical scene is more complicated in New York city. Street Vending is legal, in most sites. Street Vendors might be licensed; however, their assistants are usually not, because they are often undocumented immigrants. The cart’s location and the economic transaction between the street vendor and the client are bound by multiple stakeholders such as the city, the Department of Consumer Affairs, and the Business Improvement Districts (BID). These stakeholders create conflicting regulations and street vendors end up operating half formally and half informally to maximize their economic benefit. For example, parts of a transaction are formal while others aren’t. Vendors do not record a sale when the customer pays in cash, but the sale is automatically recorded when a customer pays with a debit or credit card. As a result, taxes are not deducted from the informal cash transactions, but a 15% tax is deducted from the formal non-cash transactions.

The change caused by the multitude of actions in a city actions goes beyond creating the city’s intangible identity. Street vending causes a spatial redistribution and offers such groups an opportunity to own a private space in public areas where they might be considered unwelcomed. For example, street vendors often live in low-income areas such as the Bronx and Benson Hurst. However, they are able to operate in high income areas in Manhattan or recently gentrified areas that BIDs have not yet controlled.

Identifying the different stakeholders and their roles was essential in understanding street vending. The position of a stakeholder in the city influences the intangible actions of the residents and consequently their share of the pool of resources in the city. The pool of resources includes economic opportunity, public space and their part in the decision-making process.

One of the underlying roles of an urbanist is to identify the different stakeholders of a city or a neighborhood. This role is the key for participatory urban development, which allows the community to take part in the decision-making process of a development project. The participatory approach is adopted by multiple urbanists, as well as advocacy groups in New York, among which is the Women Housing and Economic Development Corporation in the Bronx. This approach allows WHEDco to identify the community’s intangibles as needs and create development proposals to address them. In other words, they synthesize the intangibles into a tangible output, which is the urbanists main role.