Spatiality of Street Vending: Informal Places and Gendered Public Spaces in Tehran

This book reframes street vending beyond depictions of marginality or disorder, exploring how informal street vending works as a situated, negotiated, diverse, relational, and gendered practice within contested public spaces. Bringing together a critical review of scholarship with an assemblage-informed methodological framework, it positions informality as relational and spatially embedded, emerging through interactions among mobility, public space edges, pedestrian flows, governance, street life, and everyday survival. Focusing on Tehran as a critical case, the book presents two detailed case studies. Through field observation, photographic survey, urban mapping, and archival research, it investigates how different types of street vending unfold in relation to mixed-use corridors and transit nodes. A typology grounded in mobility and proximity to public/private interfaces shows how certain forms of street vending enable economic resilience while contributing to street-level sociability and urban intensity. The concluding discussion situates these findings within broader governance, political economy, and gender dynamics, addressing selective enforcement, institutional opacity, and women’s uneven access to public space and the informal economy. The book will appeal to scholars and practitioners in urban design, planning, geography, and Middle Eastern studies seeking empirically grounded, critically reflexive insights into informality, public space, and the everyday politics of the city.