Whose sidewalk is it? Street vendors and the battle for San Diego’s foodscape

Urban governments have become increasingly involved in gastrodevelopment, managing and monitoring foodscapes to stimulate growth. In that context, sidewalk vendors' access to urban space has been fiercely debated in many cities. Stressing their informality, some argue that vendors activate public space, provide valuable services, and encourage entrepreneurship, while others emphasize the threats they pose to public safety, health, and competing businesses. This paper examines the motives behind San Diego's restrictive sidewalk vending ordinance and assesses its impact on different types of vendors and neighborhoods across the city. Using mixed methods, including analyses of city records, census and online data, stakeholder interviews, and a 2022 survey of sidewalk and food truck vendors, we map the social geographies of street vending in San Diego and analyze their unevenness in the context of neoliberal urbanism, manifested in state-sanctioned gentrification, gastrodevelopment, increased policing of public space, and racial exclusion. Our findings show that instead of improving community food security and supporting immigrant microentrepreneurs, San Diego's sidewalk vending ordinance privileges the demands of affluent and primarily white residents, resulting in an uneven street foodscape in which vending is mostly prohibited in exclusive areas, heavily managed in gentrifying areas, and merely tolerated in low-income areas.