As an urban geographer interested in people's relationship to space in their everyday lives, I feel a great appreciation (admittedly, with a well-meaning hint of jealousy) for anthropologists. There is something about the anthropological eye, capable of grappling with the most complex scenarios of everyday life, eloquently translating the chaotic nature of the quotidian into a captivating story. Not every anthropologist has this skill, or even this desire, as Goldstein himself acknowledges. The fact that anthropology, like any other social science, is charged with linguistic jargon is what motivates Goldstein to write the way he does. Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City is an attactively written book which deals with the intricacies of life on the streets of Cochabamba, Bolivia, specifically the political–economic geographies of vending on the streets centred around the La Cancha market. The freshness of the book stems largely (but not solely) from the originality of its makeup: 37 short chapters that weave theoretical and empirical material in a very comfortable and accessible manner; a structure which incentivises curiosity and attentiveness for the reader, because, as the author himself claims, making an analogy with Twain's opinion about the weather in New England, if you get fed up ‘wait five minutes and it will change’ (p. 14). The format is non-linear in its historical account of La Cancha. Linear time, in the lives of vendors, is marginal, as much as their lives are marginal to the city. It is the socio-historical conditions of this marginality that figures largely in Goldstein's analysis.

Owners of the Sidewalk confronts a critical subject for urban scholars and Latin Americanists: namely, the governance of the street in Latin America cities. Given the value of the street as a space of production and survival for large sectors of the urban population, research on the street entails engaging with the notion of informality, a concept which has seen growing concern among post-colonial scholars interested in the relationship between neoliberalisation and the gallant struggles of the urban poor in the so-called global South. Consistently with these authors, Goldstein argues that informality is not socially or geographically confined. Rather, it is a system of order that involves a wide range of actors, including the state, the private sector, vendors, customers. It is a system of compliance in which each player is complicit in the arrangement of deals, negotiations, understandings, and agreements that help alleviate certain conflicts, albeit creating new tensions. For Goldstein, La Cancha market represents an area of ‘disregulation’, in which the state ‘administers its own preferred forms of regulation while ignoring others, privileging a system of discretionary surveillance and enforcement’ (p. 7). Owners of the Sidewalk provides extremely rich empirical data gathered from many months of ethnographic work and framed with a nuanced theoretical body combining literature on the political economy of cities, the cultural politics of representation and post-colonial analyses on historical patterns of exploitation and inequality.

The insecurity faced by vendors in Latin America today is certainly produced by political–economic processes which are historically contingent (Chapter 35). There is, however, an added layer of complexity founded on a profound yet subtle moral discourse which has been internalised among Latin America's middle classes regarding who should be (in)visible on the streets of the city: a desirable citizen versus an undesirable one. Such a moral preamble is based on the one hand on a normative and idealised notion of urban life, in which public space has become central – particularly over the last decade with gentrification policies aimed at attracting investment – and, on the other, a definite social order that shapes socio-spatial relations along racial and class lines. Goldstein makes allusive references to this moral discourse (Chapters 13, 17 and 35). But it would have been stimulating to learn more about the sometimes vulgar imaginaries constructed around street vendors, whom this reviewer has on occasion heard referred to as ‘cockroaches’, an ‘urban cancer’, and ‘ignorant indians’.

One of the many contributions of the book is to broaden our understanding of the politics of informality in cities by carefully drawing out the multiple conflicts which exist between two groups of vendors in La Cancha: fixed vendors, fijos, and itinerant vendors, ambulantes. Moreover, the author highlights existing tensions among ambulantes themselves, who not only have to deal with the injustices of the municipal authorities, but on occasions also with the hierarchical nature of the ambulantes’ own organisation which supposedly provides them with protection and support. Chapter 33 describes how ambulantes are forced to participate in marches against displacement policies, even though many disagree with some of the other demands made by the organisation, such as, for instance, those for fixed stalls. (Some ambulantes prefer the flexibility that comes from not being fixed in space, being able to move with a certain degree of freedom.) There are endless accounts of these sorts of tensions. Many are discussed through the personal trajectories of Don Rafo, the leader of the fijos, and Don Silvio, president of the ambulantes. It is through the lives of these two individuals that the reader is given a detailed understanding of the importance of thinking through the heterogeneity of the so-called informal street economy. We find out, for example, that Don Rafo enjoys the benefit of having the attention of the local press and even has direct access to the mayor. Don Silvio has no such privileges. This places him and his association in a much weaker position relative to processes of negotiation when policies of displacement are put in place, or when they experience violence at the hands of delinquents, the police, private security agents, or the like. Fijos and ambulantes face different working conditions, different regulations, different forms of violence, different concerns and different vulnerabilities. These differences are, furthermore, racialised (Chapter 25). Fijos judge ambulantes using racialised categories, and view themselves as mestizos or blancos, contrary to the indio bruto (‘uncivilised Indian’).

The emphasis on conflict and tensions as a way of underscoring the value of de-homogenising street vending or the informal economy of the street is certainly important. However, there are moments, perhaps fleeting and possibly almost invisible, of cooperation and cohesion between and among different vendors. I wonder whether Goldstein never experienced moments of solidarity, translated into practices such as sharing access to the toilets, watching the kids, keeping products safe in the market stall, selling for the vendors, watching out for the police, and so on: relations that are economic, political, and fundamentally human.

The substantive issue at hand is not something to dismiss, but neither should one dismiss transparency and honesty in one's methodological approach. The book takes you through memorable moments of anxiety, of not knowing where your fieldwork is going, where your informants are going, the relevance of what you are experiencing. Goldstein does not hide those concerns. He very eloquently reminds us of those instants where mistakes are made, or those occasions when your identity as a white ‘gringo’ makes you the source of laughter and relative manipulation. The book is a great read for scholars interested in Latin American cities, in issues of the street, in the informal economy, but also for scholars conducting original ethnographic work in diverse urban settings.