The Informal American City

Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor

Edited by Vinit Mukhija and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

$25.00 Paperback
Hardcover

344 pp., 6 x 9 in, 47 figures, 11 tables

Paperback
9780262525787
Published: May 2, 2014
Publisher: The MIT Press

$25.00

Hardcover
9780262027076
Published: May 9, 2014
Publisher: The MIT Press

$53.00

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million

Other Retailers:

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million
Amazon.co.uk
Blackwells
Bookshop.org
Foyles
Hive
Waterstones

Request permissions

Description
Author(s)
Praise

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

Vinit Mukhija is Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. He is the author of Remaking the American Dream: The Informal and Formal Transformation of Single-Family Housing Cities and coeditor of The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor and Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City, all from the MIT Press.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. She is the author of ten books, including The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor (MIT Press).

This distinguished collection is the new benchmark volume on informal urbanism. It provides a thorough and penetrating interpretation that challenges basic assumptions and will reorient scholarship for years to come.
Mitchell Duneier, Princeton University, author of Sidewalk

Covering the myriad manifestations of informal urbanism in US cities today, from garage sales to outlawed garage conversions, and spanning street vending, sidewalk life, day laborers, and community gardens, this valuable volume prompts us to think about how urban informality permeates life in cities. Neither romantic nor neoliberal, this important collection moves us toward recognition of creative urban life lived in the margins of regulations and offers concrete planning and policy suggestions for how to support it.
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens

Through a global comparative analysis of the spatial origins and contributions of urban informal activities, this book challenges a fundamental bias in modernist notions of what constitutes a good city. A must-read for urban designers, policy planners, and critical urban theorists who dare to question conventional imagery of urbanism.
Bish Sanyal, Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies/Humphrey Fellows Program, MIT

In The Informal American City, Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris bring together in one accessible volume a highly recommended set of essays that create a wonderful platform for more studies of informality, and its relationship to formality. I strongly encourage you to read them.
Journal of the American Planning Association