Food fight! Immigrant Street Vendors, Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago NINA MARTIN Abstract Immigrant street vendors in Chicago have fought for decades without success to change the restrictive and punitive city ordinance governing their work. The failure of the immigrant street vendors stands in marked contrast to the successful efforts of gourmet food truck entrepreneurs, who within only two years convinced the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance permitting their work. The differential regulation of street vending reveals how local politicians use the rhetoric of the ‘creative’ city to justify building a city that appeals to young urban professionals, while simultaneously marginalizing the possibilities of working-class immigrants to shape the city to their desires. This article aims to add to the literature on the politics of the creative class by demonstrating how discourses of creativity and entrepreneurialism get mobilized by competing interests, and how racial-ethnic attitudes become integral to these discourses. The contrasting experiences of the vendors force us to ask: Why is the creativity of food truck entrepreneurs valued over the creativity of street vendors when, according to Richard Florida, creative class cities are supposed to be tolerant and immigrant-friendly? Whose ‘creativity’ gets to be part of the ‘creative’ city? I draw on interviews with street vendors and a discourse analysis of media coverage of vending debates. Introduction Conflicts resulting from the neoliberalization of urban policy permeate the political landscape of cities around the world. The privatization of public assets, the regulation of public spaces, and the withdrawal of social welfare services are only a few examples of policy venues where neoliberal approaches have generated political contention between competing social groups (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Mayer, 2007; Purcell, 2008). ‘Creative class’(Florida, 2002a) strategies of urban development have emerged as part of the urban neoliberal toolkit, promoting arts, culture and the interests of the creative workforce as a route to economic growth and global prestige (Peck, 2005). The practice of street vending is a lens on these broader issues, as it raises fundamental questions of who has the right to use urban space, for what purposes, and under what conditions. Street vending is a contentious issue in a wide of range of cities, from Dhaka to Caracas, Many thanks to Nik Theodore, Sandra Morales-Mirque, Chirag Mehta and staff at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, without whom this article would not have been possible. I am also grateful for the comments of three anonymous IJURR reviewers, whose careful attention greatly helped in revising this article. And lastly, thanks to my colleagues in the junior faculty writing group at the University of North Carolina for kindly reading and commenting on an earlier version of this work. Volume 38.5 September 2014 1867–83 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12169 © 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA