Street life

A healthy urban environment involves green areas and people pursuing a diversity of activities. Food vendors, musicians, street performers, and different types of artists earn a living on the street, and in the process, make a city centre more colourful.

In New York City, Mexico City, Sydney and other cities around the world authorities have been preventing these activities and arresting and fining the people involved. They have been trying to stamp out the informal economy and replace it with the much more financially lucrative and taxable formal economy. In New York the streets where these activities are performed have been closed and later franchised to larger corporations. One of the first sites went to a corporate food vendor for $500,000.