Street vendors often define urban landscape

“The question is, how is public space to be created — by designers, by the state, or by the people who use it?” asks Margaret Crawford, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Crawford believes that “outlaw entrepreneurs” are helping to restructure and revitalize the city, not destroy it. Crawford has based much of her research on street vendors and sidewalk entrepreneurs who are seen as destroying the fabric of modern cities. Crawford used to think that, too, but now she’s changed her mind and opened up a whole new field of inquiry into the function of public spaces.