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, this 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. This 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.

Nastaran Peimani is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Urban Design, the Leader of the Urbanism Research Group, and the Co‑Founding Director of the Public Space Observatory Research Centre at Cardiff University. Since 2021, she has served as the Co‑Director of the MA Urban Design programme at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Her research primarily focuses on the intersections of urban design, the built environment, urban mobilities, and forms of informality. Her current research interests include the spatiality of street vending, public space and urbanity, transit‑oriented urbanism, urban morphology, urban mapping, and urban design education and pedagogy. She is the Associate Editor of International Planning Studies and an editorial board member of Urban Design and Planning and Sage Open. She is the co‑editor of The Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Research Methods (Routledge, 2023) and co‑author of Urban Design Education (Edward Elgar, 2025).

Hesam Kamalipour is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Urban Design and Co‑Founding Director of the Public Space Observatory Research Centre at Cardiff University, where he previously served as Co‑Director of the MA Urban Design programme. His work lies at the intersections of urban design, informal urbanism, public space, urban morphology, and comparative urbanism. He is the lead co‑editor of The Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Research Methods (Routledge, 2023) and lead co‑author of Urban Design Education (Edward Elgar, 2025). He is currently authoring a forthcoming monograph titled Informal Design (Routledge) and a further book titled Framing Urbanism (Palgrave Macmillan). He serves as Associate Editor of Frontiers in Sustainable Cities – Cities in the Global South and is an editorial board member of Cities, Habitat International, Journal of Urban Management, Urban Design and Planning, The Journal of Public Space, Planning Practice & Research, International Journal of Architectural Research, and Urban Planning.