Detecting the city-scale spatial pattern of the

urban informal sector by using the street

view images: A street vendor massive
investigation case
Author links open overlay panelYilun Liu , Yuchen Liu
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Highlights
 •
An AI-based methodology, namely SIPSI, is presented to automatically investigate the
informal practitioners.
 •
Abundant open-access street view images provide a unique opportunity to map the
informality of employment at the city-scale.
 •
The YOLOv4 deep neural network is effective in analyzing street view images for street
vendors detection.
 •
The street vendors' agglomeration is a compromise of their location preference, the
official regulating force, and the NIMBY syndrome.
 •
The city-scale street vendors agglomerated pattern is vital for improving
spatial governance policy.

Abstract
Automatically obtaining information on informal practitioners, especially their spatial
distribution, has proven challenging when using traditional methods. This study
addresses this issue by presenting a street view deep learning method, called the Street
Informal Practitioners Spatial Investigation (SIPSI) methodology. This paper's
application of this technology focuses on the study case of the street vendor, which is
one of the most visible occupations in the informal economy. There were 3907 street
vendors that were detected using this method; as well, the kernel density estimation
indicated that they agglomerated in a multi-core cluster pattern in the city. Further
analysis of the factors that influence agglomeration shows that the street vendors prefer
premises that are near the lower level of the road and the higher density population
sites, whereas the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome keeps these vendors away
from the central City Business Districts and high-rent regions. The presented
methodology and the study results contribute to high-efficiency investigations of informal
economy employment, and it further assists in advising for the
spatial governance policies improvement and implementation in any cities whose street
view images are abundant and open-access.

Introduction
The informal economy (or informal sector) has been stigmatized as troublesome and
unmanageable in modern cities due to its negative externalities; the sector inevitably
affects the city's appearance, as it causes traffic congestion, disturbs security, and
pollutes the environment (Bromley, 2000; Garcia-Bolivar, 2006; Hanser, 2016). Lacking
a comprehensive understanding of informal employment and effective management
measures has led to an informal economy eviction policy having been adopted in many
cities in the world. The informal sector practitioners, such as unauthorized street
vendors, scroungers, buskers, and sex workers, are sought to be excluded from urban
spaces (Huang et al., 2014). For survival, practitioners are playing a game of cat-and-
mouse with the city enforcers to avoid being expelled (Sung, 2011; Turner &
Schoenberger, 2012). However, the informal economy is an indispensable component
of the urban social-ecological system. On the one hand, the informal economy helps
ease the unemployment of a large number of low-income or newly-immigrant groups; it
allows them to escape extreme poverty and earn an income that is satisfactory for
survival (Deore & Lathia, 2019; Garcia-Bolivar, 2006; Lemessa et al., 2021). On the
other hand, the needs of the city, the informal economy meets the low-end consumption
demand, boosts the vitality of urban communities, and even increases solid waste
recycling (Linzner & Lange, 2013; Wilson et al., 2006). Therefore, how to get rid of the
illegal and marginal part of the informal economy has relied on scientific or evidence-
based governance, policy-making, and efficient management measures.
Aiming to remedy the problems of eviction policy, the Formalization strategy has been
proposed and becomes mainstream policy to regulate the informal economy in modern
cities. Such policy attempts to formalize and legalize the informal economy business by
relocating the practitioners to officially permitted places (Kamete, 2013; Kamete, 2018).
Within the relocation places, though the business is legal and protected, the time and
type of business are strictly confined, while outside the relocation places, the
modernists believe that practitioners still should be eviction (Kamete, 2013). For
example, Guangzhou, which is megacities with over ten million population in China,
issued 250 forbidden street vending zones and 120 permitted vending zones in 2010
(Huang et al., 2014).
The formalization strategy has immense benefit to ease the conflict between the living
space of practitioners and the open space of citizens. Some of the practitioners
welcome the relocation because they no longer worry about governmental harassment
despite the imposition of some constraints. However, due to the lack of city-scale
knowledge of informality employment, the spatial formalization policy fails to respect the
naturalness of economic processes, especially the spatial extent of formalization
ignored the heterogeneous geographical links between the practitioners and their
potential consumers. Thus, the policy has been criticized by some scholars as a kind of
“concentration camp” spatial governance strategy for disciplinary purposes inhibiting the
practitioners' advantage of flexibility and bringing undesirable consequences to informal
economic benefits (Bromley & Mackie, 2009; Kamete, 2018). The combination of the
Formalization policy and Eviction policy can potentially guide the informal economy to
develop in a harmless way if the geographical governance boundaries of both policies
can be properly delineated. But the precondition is that the locations and spatial
patterns of the informal economy employment on a city scale are precisely investigated.

Section snippets
Literature review
There are two main methods to investigate informal economy employment: the
individual survey and the city-scale official survey. The first category of research
involves conducting an active investigation based on a manually administered survey or
individual interview. Study cases were selected from typical regions, informal sectors, or
practitioner groups. Then, data collection was conducted case-by-case via field
observations, questionnaires, or interviews with practitioners, consumers,

Basic idea
To conduct a massive investigation on employment in the informal sector, we took
street vendors as the respondent in order to build a Street Informal Practitioners Spatial
Investigation (SIPSI) method based on the SVIs and deep learning technique. First, the
road network and SVIs of the study area were collected. Then, a sample set was
extracted from the SVIs and several types of street vendors were labeled manually
according to their characteristics. Second, a deep learning detection model was

Study area
This study picked Shenzhen as the study area to validate the feasibility of the SIPSI
method. Shenzhen is situated north of Hong Kong (Fig. 3) and is the earliest example of
an experimental district known as a “socialist's market economy” in the country. It is also
a migrant city where the immigrant population largely outweighs the aborigines. In 1979,
Shenzhen's population was 0.31 million, but as of 2020, it has risen to 13.44 million.
Thus, Shenzhen is one of the most rapidly urbanizing
 The contributions for street vending regulatory
policies
The presented SIPSI method in this study, which is driven by open-access SVIs and
easily reapplied to other cities and other informality sectors, provides a high-effective
methodology for detecting and measuring the practitioners' locations and their spatial
agglomerated patterns on a city-scale. This derived vital information could strengthen
the understanding of the naturalness of urban informal economy, which have the
potential to fill the research gaps in existing empirical studies of

Conclusions
The informal economy has been regarded as troublesome and unmanageable despite it
being an indispensable sector in modern cities. Aiming to investigate the spatial pattern
of informal employment at the city-scale and to further assist in implementing
regulations and policies, this study addresses this aim in two ways.
First, this study both underscores the need for and offers a new methodology to
automatically detect the informal economic practitioners and their spatial agglomerated
pattern. The

Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant
Nos. 42071356) and the Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangzhou,
China (Grant No. 202102020583).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yilun Liu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources,
Writing – original draft, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding
acquisition. Yuchen Liu: Software, Validation, Data curation, Writing – review & editing,
Visualization.

Declaration of competing interest

No conflict of interest to declare.

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