Citation: Martínez, L.; Short, J.R. The Informal City: Exploring the Variety of the Street Vending Economy. Sustainability 2022, 14, 7213. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su14127213 Academic Editors: Stephan Weiler and Thomas A. Clark Received: 11 March 2022 Accepted: 27 May 2022 Published: 13 June 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). sustainability Article The Informal City: Exploring the Variety of the Street Vending Economy Lina Martínez 1, * and John Rennie Short 2 1 Observatorio de Políticas Públicas (POLIS), Universidad Icesi, Cali 760031, Colombia 2 School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA; jrs@umbc.edu * Correspondence: lmmartinez@icesi.edu.co Abstract: Street vending is one of the most important economic activities of the informal sector. This paper highlights the diversity of street vending. We extend the previous analysis of the informal economy in one city, Cali, Colombia, with data on informal workers in two public spaces: Downtown and Santa Helena, and workers in the mass transit bus system. We show how the informal economy varies greatly within one city. Provided the lack of data in the study of the informal economy, most studies describe the dynamics of the informal sector as uniform across the urban space. In this analysis, we present evidence about the spatial segmentation and diversity of street vendors by their socioeconomic conditions, profits, and earnings. We further explore the spatial segmentation by analyzing the large indebtedness and financial exclusion of street vendors. We report that workers in the mass transit system are the most vulnerable and indebted and how the large indebtedness to illegal payday lenders is a major barrier for street vendors to move out of poverty. We conclude that it is important to understand the granularity of the urban informal economy in order to craft suitable public policies. Keywords: informal economy; global south; street vending; Colombia; financial exclusion 1. Introduction The informal economy is a ubiquitous characteristic of the global south. The Interna- tional Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that over two billion people work in the informal economy, around 60% of the world’s total employed population [1]. The sector provides employment and livelihoods for many of the world’s workers. In many countries in the global south (broadly refers to the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania), at least one out of every two jobs in cities are in the informal sector [1]. The urban infor- mal economy is a broad concept that refers to economic practices excluded from formal structures or regulations [2]. Despite the wide range of concepts that informally may refer to, there is a distinction between the informal sector, formal employment, and the formal economy. The informal sector covers the activity of unregistered enterprises, informal employment refers to employment that is not legally protected or socially regulated, and the informal economy refers to the activities and outputs of all the activities and workers in the sector [3]. In this analysis, we focus on the informal economy. The informal economy is predominantly characteristic of urban settlements [4], par- ticularly in Latin America, where the massive rural–urban migration has resulted in the inability of the formal sector to absorb the newcomers in expanding cities [2]. The urban informal economy takes various forms, including employment arrangements, types, ac- tivities, and outcomes. Amongst the informal activities, street vending is one of the most visible manifestations, and it has significant importance in urban planning and the use of public space. Generally speaking, we know little about street vending dynamics and workers’ characteristics in the global south. Most of the information comes from qualitative studies Sustainability 2022, 14, 7213. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14127213 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability