Cities 131 (2022) 103959

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Cities
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities

Detecting the city-scale spatial pattern of the urban informal sector by using
the street view images: A street vendor massive investigation case
Yilun Liu a, b, *, Yuchen Liu c
a
School of Public Administration, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, PR China
b
Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Natural Resources for Natural Resources Monitoring in Tropical Subtropics of South China, Ministry of Natural Resources, Guangzhou
510700, PR China
c
College of Natural Resources and Environment, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, PR China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Automatically obtaining information on informal practitioners, especially their spatial distribution, has proven
Informal economy challenging when using traditional methods. This study addresses this issue by presenting a street view deep
Street vendor learning method, called the Street Informal Practitioners Spatial Investigation (SIPSI) methodology. This paper's
Street view image
application of this technology focuses on the study case of the street vendor, which is one of the most visible
Deep learning
Shenzhen
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 imple­
mentation in any cities whose street view images are abundant and open-access.

1. 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 environ­
ment (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

* Corresponding author at: School of Public Administration, South China Agricultural University, 483 Wushan Rd., Guangzhou, PR China.
E-mail address: liuyilun@scau.edu.cn (Y. Liu).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103959
Received 27 June 2021; Received in revised form 12 August 2022; Accepted 21 August 2022
Available online 2 September 2022
0264-2751/© 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
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 infor­
mality 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 practi­
tioners' 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.
2. 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 investiga­
tion 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, pedestrians, and city management officers (Boonjubun,
2017; Huang et al., 2014). For instance, Boonjubun (2017) studied
conflicts among street vendors, city authorities, and gangsters in
Bangkok, Thailand based on manually collected survey data. The data
used in this study were collected via interviews with street vendors,
pedestrians, and city management officers over nine months. Huang
et al. (2018) revealed heterogeneity in people's motivations for partic­
ipation in street vending in Guangzhou, China. The practitioner data
used in this study was a 200-sample dataset collected from face-to-face
interviews with unauthorized street vendors.
The method of providing an individual survey may obtain detailed
information on the surveyed practitioners. However, due to the high cost
of the case-by-case data collection process, the collected data could not
be updated periodically and also could not cover a wide range of prac­
titioners in the city. Hence, these studies contribute to the investigation
of employment in the informal economy in a limited way: the actual
situation of employment in the informal economy in most of the regions
of the city remains unknown, which leads to the regulation policies
failing with high degrees of probability.
To tackle the problem of inadequate data, the second category of
studies attempted to use the official censuses to study the city's informal
economy employment. In most countries of the world, there has been no
specialized survey for employment in the informal economy (Charmes,
2012). However, the comprehensive demographic censuses, like
household surveys or labor force surveys, contain valuable information
about informal economy employment (Devey et al., 2003). In some
modern cities, that benefitted from the smart city and service-oriented
governance system construction, the complaint or enforcement data
for urban problems would also have valuable information about
informal economic activities (Li et al., 2022). For example, Charmes
(2012) adopted census data from the Bureau of Statistics of the Inter­
national Labor Organization and the National Accounts Section of the
United Nations Statistics Division in order to assess worldwide trends of
informal sector employment over the past four decades.
Relying on the official survey, an overview of the informal sector
employment at the city-scale can be described. However, some vital
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Cities 131 (2022) 103959
characteristics of practitioners, especially in the locations where they
engage in informal economic activities, were not collected in these
surveys – because, on the one hand, most of these practitioners have
erratic business locations. On the other hand, due to long-term conflict
of interests, the practitioners distrust the administration that does the
data collection; they would not tell truthful information about their
career, explicitly their business location, to an investigator for fear of
being evicted.
The locations and spatial patterns detection of the informal sector are
vital not only to improve governance but also to promote geographical
research of the informal economy. Firstly, the accurate mapping of
informal economic activities and employment is fundamental to the
monitoring and evaluation of the urban informal economic sector. By
using the spatial pattern of informal economic activities, for example,
can be analyzed the employment scale and the spatial heterogeneity of
their externalities. Secondly, the spatial delineation of the informal
sector is enabling strengthens the understanding of the geographical
links between informal economic activities and the urban physical and
socio-economic environment, and in turn, explains the determinants of
practitioners' behaviors. Thirdly, the informal sector maps are important
for improving the research of associated governmentality policies and
spatial regulating strategies makings towards the urban informal econ­
omy. The spatial formalization zones delineated based on city-scale in­
formation of the informality employment, comparing those delineation
dominated on street-case, are more respect for the naturalness and
heterogeneity of the informal economy.
Despite the importance discussed above, measuring the spatial pat­
terns of the informal sector at city-scale yet still poses a significant
challenge (Li et al., 2022; Turner & Zuberec, 2021). The informal eco­
nomic practitioners are a massive group and their businesses are
mobility, flexibility, and hidden distribution all over the city's streets,
which make it difficult to measure with traditional data sources and
methods. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, like
deep learning, coupled with emerging open-access sources of large-scale
street-level imagery, have the potential to significantly advance the ef­
ficiency of mass investigation of the urban informal sector. Such ad­
vances can help identify specific areas of concern at the earlier stages of
a comprehensive investigation so that the interventions can be more
quickly implemented by targeting policies to areas that greatest need
them (Chen, Liu, et al., 2017; Kang et al., 2020). Recognizing these
factors, several studies have successfully used street view images (SVIs)
and deep learning methods for city's physical environment or socio-
economic status investigations to the point of increasingly fine spatial
resolution, such as urban land use or landscape change (Naik et al.,
2017; Zhu & Newsam, 2016), neighborhood walkability or safety
(Arietta et al., 2014; Ki & Lee, 2021; Yin & Wang, 2016), urban job-
housing pattern and housing prices (Law et al., 2019; Yao et al.,
2021), and social and environmental inequalities (Suel et al., 2019).
Although SVIs and deep learning methods are widely used in a city's
physical environment or socio-economic status measurement, the study
of the informal economy has been barely reported. For informal econ­
omy employment investigations, SVIs were collected along the road
networks that provide abundant information related to every individual
practitioner. Such massive investigations provide a unique opportunity
to map out the informal economy employment at the city-scale. How­
ever, there are no usable methods and labeled SVIs samples set for
massive investigation of the informal sector so far. Therefore, a research
gap about “how to detect and measure the spatial patterns of the
informal sector employment with open-access street-level images and
deep learning techniques” is worthy of study.
Accordingly, this paper takes the street vendor – one of the most
visible occupations in the informal economy – as the study case. We
present a SVIs and AI-based automatic investigation method that is used
to (1) identify the individual practitioner from SVIs; (2) map the street
vendor distribution and spatial agglomerated patterns; and (3) evaluate
their agglomerated pattern and location preference for the purposes of
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
associated policy makings towards the informal sector.
3. Methodology
3.1. 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 ac­
cording to their characteristics. Second, a deep learning detection model
was trained based on the labeled samples. Then, the well-trained model
was applied to the city-scale SVIs dataset. For the final procedure, a
spatial kernel density model was applied to the detection results in order
to evaluate the hotspots of street vendors in the city. The detailed pro­
cess in each procedure will be explained in the following section.
3.2. Street informal practitioners spatial investigation model
As illustrated in Fig. 1, the overall design of the SIPSI method
included three major procedures: (i) data acquisition, (ii) practitioner
detection, and (iii) practitioner mapping.
3.2.1. Data acquisition
Three datasets were used to build the detection model: these
included the urban road network, the SVIs, and a labeled dataset. The
urban road network, which is used for establishing the SVIs' sampling
coordinates, can be obtained from OpenStreetMap or the local urban
management department. Then, the coordinates along the road network
in a designated interval distance were collected and saved as sampling
points.
SVIs are usually obtained from the online map street-view open-ac­
cess service. A program of web crawlers was designed according to the
online map API (application program interface) and then applied to
obtain the images at each sampling coordinate.
The labeled dataset was used for the deep learning model training
Fig. 1. Flowchart of the Street Informal Practitioners Spatial Investigation (SIPSI) method.
3
Cities 131 (2022) 103959
and validation. The label, a bounding box, was manually marked on
each street vendor in an image. In order to improve the detection ac­
curacy, the street vendors could be further divided into several sub­
classes according to their characteristics: such as the types of vending
commodities, or the types of commodities' carriers.
3.2.2. Practitioner detection
The purpose of this procedure is to build a deep neural network
model that can be used to detect street vendors in each image. In this
study, the detection targets - street vendors involve combination objects
of humans, goods, and appliances (such as the carriers of the goods, the
cookers or containers of the street foods, etc.). What we care about is the
count and locations of the vendors, while the outlines of them are less
important. Hence, if consider the trade-off between the detection effi­
ciency and cost, the series of image object localization methods would
be more suitable for this task. Among this series of methods, there are
several state-of-the-art deep neural networks for the candidate choices,
such as YOLO (Redmon et al., 2016), SSD (Liu et al., 2016), and faster-
RCNN (Ren et al., 2016). The YOLOv4 algorithm (Bochkovskiy et al.,
2020), which is an evolution version of YOLO and thus far is the most
widely used method for object detection industrial applications (e.g.,
autonomous driving), was adopted due to its high effectiveness for ob­
ject detection under complex conditions of variable illumination,
viewing perspectives, partial occlusion, a complex background, and
multiple objects in scenes (Cai et al., 2021; Morera et al., 2020). There
are three steps for building the detector, including network architecture,
model training, and validation.
(1) Deep neural network architecture
The detector, which is based on a YOLOv4 algorithm, inherently
decides regions that belong to the practitioners from the image and
outputs probabilities for each of these practitioners. The deep network
structure of the detector is illustrated in Fig. 2, which contains four
parts, including:
• Input, which is composed of the labeled images and their subsets.
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
Fig. 2. The deep neural network architecture for the street vendor detector.
• Backbones, which are used for extracting features from the training
images. The CSPDarknet53 (Wang et al., 2020) was adopted as the
backbones in this detector.
• Neck, which is composed of a SPP (He et al., 2015) for feature
pooling and a PANet (Liu et al., 2018) for feature fusion in the
detector.
• Heads, which are used to predict classes and bounding boxes of street
vendors. The heads in the detector are inherited from YOLOv3
(Redmon & Farhadi, 2018).
(2) Model training
In order to improve the precision and achieve a significant speedup, a
set of standard bounding boxes was used, rather than a volatile moving
window, for the purpose of detecting if there were any practitioner
targets inside. The standard bounding boxes were decided by a K-means
method according to the distribution of labeled bounding boxes.
Furthermore, to ensure a high recognition rate and to avoid dis­
turbing the complex colors in each image, a weight model was trained
according to the grey-scale image features. Then, for augmenting the
training data scale and improving the generalization performance of the
detector, the labeled samples would be transformed with a variety of
combinations of overturning, scaling, mosaic, stretching, distorting,
reversing, and color gamut changing, and then imported to the back­
bone to achieve the complete detector model.
(3) Model validation
The detector performance can be evaluated by the F1 score and the
average precision (AP) score. The F1 score measures accuracy using the
statistics of precision P and recalls R. Precision is the ratio of true pos­
itives (TP) to the total number of bounding boxes detected (TP + FP),
while recall is the ratio of true positives to the actual number of
bounding boxes (TP + FN). A detected practitioner was considered as a
TP result when it meets three conditions: (i) the predicted bounding box
had the same class label as the manual labeled class; (ii) the confidence
score being equal to or greater than the confidence threshold, and (iii)
the bounding box intersection area with the manual labeled bounding
box being equal to or greater than the threshold of Intersection over Union
(IoU) (Everingham et al., 2010). The mAP score is the average enclosure
area of the four classes precision-recall curves and can be calculated by
an integral formula. The F1 score and mAP score is given by Eqs. (1) and
(2).
P*R
F1 = 2* (1)
P+R
K ∫
∑ The influx of immigrants and rapid economic development has led to
1
0
P(R)dR
mAP = i=1 (2)
K
where P = TP/TP + FP, R = TP/TP + FN, and K is the number of label
4
Cities 131 (2022) 103959
classes.
3.2.3. Practitioner mapping and agglomeration analysis
All SVIs were processed by the well-trained detector to get their
predicted labels and bounding boxes. Then, the number of practitioners
in each image was counted and saved as the present number of the
corresponding coordinate points. As a result, the spatial distribution of
the street vendors can be mapped with the detection output.
Since externalities and spatial spillover effects exist in informal
economic activity, the kernel density was introduced as a means to
measure the vitality of street vending in the city, rather than by simply
counting practitioner numbers along the network of roads. Kernel den­
sity is implemented using the quartic kernel function, the present
number of each location is inputted as the weight parameter, and the
bandwidth parameter is automatically determined by “Silverman's rule-
of-thumb” (Silverman & Jones, 1989). The output is a smooth surface
that indicates the densities of the street vendor: the higher prevalence of
a population in a rasterized pixel is indicated by relatively high-density
values. Thus, the hotspots of street vending in the city are intuitively
identified with the kernel density map. These hotspots can be regarded
as the spatial agglomeration of street vendors.
Underlying information about the location or behavioral preference
can be drawn from further analysis on the influence factors. For
example, the agglomeration pattern can be compared to a residential
rent map in order to analyze the income and consumption levels of
street-vending activity regions, or it can be overlayed with city facilities
(such as subway stations, local markets, etc.) for analysis to see if there
any co-location patterns (Chen et al., 2020) or the presence of NIMBY
syndrome (Dear, 1992) in the city. These hints are quite useful for
regulation targeted at street vending.
4. Case study
4.1. Study area and data
4.1.1. Study area
This study picked Shenzhen as the study area to validate the feasi­
bility 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 ur­
banizing cities in southern China. The urban informal economy-related
concerns and phenomena have often emerged first in Shenzhen and then
would follow suit in other cities in developing countries.
a highly active informal economy and produced a dilemma for man­
aging the informal sector in the city. In particular, Chinese Premier Li
Keqiang pointed out in June 2020, during a local visit, that “the street
vendors and the small commodity economy are important sources of
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
Fig. 3. Study area and SVIs distribution.
jobs. It is an indispensable component of the vitality of the Chinese
economy which is as important as the ‘high and mighty’ economy sec­
tors” (Liu, 2020). Over the years, the local administration has sought
effective means to regulate the informal economy. On 13 Aug 2020, the
Standing Committee of the Shenzhen Municipal People's Congress issued
a policy called “Regulations of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone on
City and Environmental Health Management.” One of the main in­
tentions of this policy was to explore a humanized governance mode and
to designate legal business premises for street vendors. However, in this
rapidly developing city, the informal economy data were far too less
abundant to make a scientific decision. The city is thus an ideal case
study to research the potential of new technology applications in
informal economic investigations.
4.1.2. Data source and preprocess
The SIPSI used three datasets to detect the spatial distribution of
practitioners, including the road network, SVIs, and the labeled street
vendors' dataset. Furthermore, an additional dataset was used for the
practitioners' agglomerated characteristics analysis.
(1) Road network dataset
The road network that was used for establishing the SVIs sampling
coordinates was obtained using the rectangular frame covering the study
area within its scope through OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstree
tmap.org). Then, the coordinates along with the road network at 100
m intervals were collected and saved as sampling points. Each point
retained the following information: the sequence number of the point,
the sequence number of the street to which the point belongs, and the
geographic information coordinates of the point.
(2) SVIs dataset
The SVIs came from the Baidu Map open platform (http://lbsyun.
baidu.com). To get images with as many visual angles as possible to
the street vendor, the viewing angles that included 90◦ , 180◦ , and 270◦
of each sampling point were obtained. As shown in Fig. 3, the SVIs
dataset containing 76,108 images, along with the road network at 100 m
intervals, was collected through Baidu Maps API and Python in June
5
Cities 131 (2022) 103959
2020.
(3) Labeled dataset
A total of 1957 images containing one or more practitioners were
selected and their bounding box was labeled. The bounding boxes of
street vendors were manually labeled by using LabelImg,1 which is an
open-source graphical image annotation software. The vendors were
classified into four classes according to their commodities carrier,
including ground-stall (C0), booth (C1), tricycle-stall (C2), and minivan-
stall (C3). The identifying characteristics, image samples, and labeled
count of each class are listed in Table 1. Additionally, 224 images
without any practitioners were selected to be combined with the labeled
images to the detector model training dataset.
(4) Agglomeration analysis dataset
The agglomeration analysis dataset includes CBD locations, popu­
lation, and residential rent. The CBD locations, which contain seven city-
level core business centers, come from the Planning and Natural Re­
sources Bureau of Shenzhen. The proximity of CBD was measured by
Euclidean distance and then normalized for subsequent analysis.
The population was made up of real-time user density information
from apps (WeChat, QQ, Tencent Map, etc.) of Tencent Holding Ltd.
According to the “Tencent annual report 2016” and “Big data white
paper of Tencent Holding Ltd. in 2016,” the ratio of Tencent users to the
total population exceeded 93 % in Shenzhen. Due to its high market
possession rate, the Tencent user data can be used to represent dynamic
urban population information to a significant extent (Liu et al., 2019).
The statistical user population information in a 30 × 30 m grid was
provided via the open API on the Tencent Location Big Data service
(https://heat.qq.com/). The populations at 4:00 pm, 15th of June 2015,
were obtained and normalized.
The residential rent is a spatially interpolated map: this was pro­
duced with the listed rental samples from Anjuke, a popular online
1
LebelMe: Image Polygonal Annotation with Python, http://labelme.csail.
mit.edu/Release3.0.
Y. Liu and Y. Liu Cities 131 (2022) 103959

Table 1
The street vendor label classes.
Class code Class name Identifying characteristics Image samples Count

C0 Ground-stall The goods are spread on the floor in front of the vendor. 2674

C1 Booth The goods are placed on a simple table, usually with a large umbrella or sunshade. 3040

C2 Tricycle-stall The goods are placed on a tricycle. 1605

C3 Minivan-stall The goods are placed on a minivan or pickup truck. 226

platform that publishes real estate information of residential apart­

Table 2
ments/houses for sale or rental. The program of web crawlers was
The validation scores of different combination of confidence score and IoU
created to collect the listed rental data in 2015. The obtained records
thresholds.a
contain the attributes of “floor area,” “rent,” and “geographical coor­
Group Confidence IoU Recall Precision F1 mAP
dinate.” Then, the “unit rent” was calculated by the ratio of the “rent”
no. threshold threshold
and “floor area,” and then added to each record. For the next step, the
records were normalized and converted to point features, and then 1 0.4 0.5 0.68 0.81 0.74 0.63
2 0.5 0.5 0.71 0.85 0.77 0.67
inputted into the spatial interpolation model to produce the residential
3 0.5 0.6 0.62 0.71 0.66 0.53
rent map. 4 0.5 0.7 0.50 0.48 0.49 0.34
5 0.5 0.8 0.25 0.17 0.20 0.77
6 0.6 0.5 0.60 0.89 0.71 0.57
4.2. SIPSI implementation and results 7 0.7 0.5 0.51 0.92 0.64 0.49
8 0.8 0.5 0.38 0.93 0.52 0.37
4.2.1. Detector building and validation a
The bold script numbers are the top three ranks of each indicator.
In order to increase the detector training speed and limit the location
error between detected vendor and the image captured location, a set of
indicator are marked in bold and the proper value of both thresholds can
prior standard bounding boxes with fixed width and height sizes,
be found as equal to 0.5. As a result, both thresholds of detection con­
including 17 × 24, 29 × 34, 38 × 51, 50 × 76, 65 × 54, 69 × 108, 91 ×
fidence score and IoU were set to 0.5 in this study case.
81, 107 × 34, 168 × 181 pixels, were first decided by a K-means cluster
After the ten-time training and validation, the average precisions of
method according to the sizes of bounding boxes of manually labeled
four classes of street vendors were calculated, which were 60.30 % for
samples.
C0, 63.75 % for C1, 68.20 % for C2, and 76.03 % for C3. The box plots in
The validation was conducted with the ten-fold-cross-validation
Fig. 4(a) show the precision range and variance of ten-time training and
method. The labeled dataset was divided into ten subsets that were
validation. Among the four vendor classes, the C2 and C3 have achieved
equally and randomly selected without repeating. Subsequently, ten
higher precision due to the fact that these two classes have significant
models have been trained by using nine of these subsets alternately,
identifiable features (the carrier of the stall) while having fewer inter­
while the remaining one data subset was used for validation. The de­
ference factors (other tricycles or minivans opening the cargo tank on
tector performance scores are the average scores of the alternate ten-
the roads). In particularly the C3, the minivan stalls are infrequent in the
time modeling results.
study area and the commodity they were vending is simple, usually filled
For testing the sensitivity of the detector and calibrating two key
with watermelon, durian, or other farm products. These significant
parameters – the confidence threshold and the IoU threshold, controlled
characteristics increase the model performance for C3 detection. On the
experiments containing eight groups with different parameters were
other hand, the C0 and C1 have achieved lower precision because they
conducted. The values of the confidence thresholds ranged from 0.4 to
are easily confused with other pedestrians or formal street stores.
0.8 at 0.1 step, and the values of the IoU threshold ranged from 0.5 to 0.8
The average of the ten results of F1 score was 0.77, the mAP score was
at 0.1 step due to the proper value of the IoU threshold being >0.5
67.07 %, and its variance is 0.0168, which indicates that the detector
(Everingham et al., 2010).
has high steady-state precision and satisfying generalization perfor­
The compared experiment results are listed in Table 2. When the
mance on various data sets. The detector with the highest mAP score was
confidence threshold was monotonically decreasing, Recall was mono­
chosen for the application and Fig. 4(b) displays its precision-recall
tonically increasing; while the overall trend of Precision was decreasing,
curve.
the local trend was increasing or decreasing. As for the IoU threshold
influence, Precision and Recall were monotonically decreasing when the
IoU threshold was monotonically increasing. The top three ranks of each

6
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
Fig. 4. The model performance of the practitioner detectors: (a) the box plots for average precisions of four classes street vendors; (b) the precision-recall curve of the
best performance detector.
4.2.2. Practitioner detection and kernel density mapping
The well-trained model was applied to the SVIs dataset and 3907
street vendors were detected along the network of roads. Some examples
of TP, FP, and FN detection results with a 0.5 confidence threshold are
displayed in Fig. 5 and the locations of detected vendors are illustrated
in Fig. 6.
For the purposes of identifying the practitioner agglomerated pattern
in the city, a heat map based on the detection results was drawn with the
ArcGIS 10.7 kernel density tool. Since kernel density analysis accounts
for points within a certain range and clusters according to their spatial
distribution, the heat map directly shows where in the city the street
vendors were agglomerated. The heat map is shown in Fig. 7, in which
the places from high density to low density were colored in the gradient
ramp from red to blue.
To verify the agglomerated pattern, we have joined the street vendor
local online forum and chat groups to inquire recommended vending
premises. Then a recommended list containing 133 sites was collected.
Fig. 5. The examples of TP, FP, and FN detection results with a 0.5 confidence threshold.
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Cities 131 (2022) 103959
By comparing the heat map with the recommended list, 108 sites were
identified within hotspots, which are illustrated with green triangle
marks in Fig. 7, while the remaining 25 unidentified sites are illustrated
with red triangles.
4.2.3. Agglomerated patterns and location preference analysis
The heat map of street vendors presents obvious multi-core cluster
characteristics in the city. For further understanding the location pref­
erence of street vendors, the detection results and heat map were
compared with the maps of the road network, CBD locations, popula­
tion, and residential rent. For a clearer view, two subregions, Site A and
Site B, were chosen to enlarge their overlaid maps respectively in Fig. 8
(a)–(c) and (d)–(f). Both subregions covered the central urban districts of
the city. Several pieces of underlying information and hints can be
derived from these comparison maps.
First, vendors prefer agglomerating near low-level roads rather than
high-level roads. This characteristic can be observed in both Fig. 8(a)
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
Fig. 6. The spatial distribution of the detected street vendors.
Fig. 7. The kernel density map of the detected street vendors. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.)
and (d). Almost all of the detected street vendors (green triangles) were
located alongside the low-speed limit (≤80 km/h) roads (black lines).
Low-level roads with slow-moving traffic and low car volume are more
friendly to pedestrians which are the consumer source for street vendors.
Second, the street vendors did not agglomerate near CBDs. As illus­
trated in Fig. 8(a) and (d), Site A and Site B contain five CBDs. There is
only one detected street vendor located within the proximity of 1 km
from CBDs. The CBDs are the cores of a city that are allotted stricter
regulatory measures from the city enforcement officers. As a result, the
street vendors will be evicted from these areas.
Third, the street vendor agglomerations are highly correlated to high
population distribution (as shown in Fig. 8(b) and (e)). This finding
indicates that street vendors tend to seek premises with more pedes­
trians for a greater potential market, which are consistent with the
consensus of existing literature (Huang et al., 2016; Martínez et al.,
8
Cities 131 (2022) 103959
2017; Zhang et al., 2017).
Lastly, Fig. 8(c) and (f) manifests that the street vendors prefer low
and medium rent level locations rather than high rent level locations.
The reasons could be, on the one hand, that most of the practitioners are
from low-income groups, which makes them reside in low-rent areas.
They would not make long-distance commutes, especially for the C0 and
C1 vendors. Furthermore, based on the cheap commodities they are
selling without any warranty and after-sales service, practitioners
decided they would not target the high-end consumers who lived in
high-rent areas. On the other hand, high-rent residential areas have
limited tolerance for the negative externalities of street vendors.
Although there is not enough official force to regulate all high-rent
areas, private property management companies and security personnel
would execute the evictions. These findings indicate that the distribu­
tion of practitioners is not only confined by government control
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
Fig. 8. The comparisons of the street vendor agglomeration and the maps of the road network, CBD locations, population, and residential rent: (a)–(c) are the
enlarged maps of Site A; (d)–(f) are the enlarged maps of Site B. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.)
(Martínez et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2014b) but also influenced by the
NIMBY syndrome from high-rent area residents.
In general, the agglomeration patterns of street vendors were a
compromise, which was affected by the location preference of practi­
tioners, the official regulating force, and the NIMBY syndrome from
high-rent area residents. The street vendors prefer to agglomerate near
the lower-level road and higher-density population areas. In the mean­
while, NIMBY syndrome manifests in CBDs and high-rent residential
areas, such that it seeks to evict street vendors to the lower-rent areas.
5. Discussion
5.1. 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
informal economy that are caused by difficulties in massive observation
of the informal economic activities.
There are three types of policies that aim to govern street vending
which are widely adopted in the modern human habitat: these include
inclusive policy, eviction policy, and formalization policy. These policies
are not isolated but might be simultaneously implemented in different
9
Cities 131 (2022) 103959
regions or periods in cities all over the world. Although the findings on
the agglomeration of street vending in the case study are generally
consistent with the existing literature (Huang et al., 2016; Li et al., 2022;
Tran & Yip, 2020; Zhang et al., 2014a,b; Zhang et al., 2017), further
studies about the spatial heterogeneity of the geographical links among
practitioners, consumers, and the urban physical and socio-economic
environment base on the SIPSI method would be beneficial for assist­
ing the improvement and implementation of refinement regulatory
policies.
For inclusive policy, the SIPSI method could provide the practitioner
scale dynamics monitoring information. The inclusive policy is typically
adopted in the early development stage or a newly, rapidly developing
region of the city. The administration recognized street vending as an
important source of income for low-income groups or new migrants
(Maneepong & Walsh, 2013), so they let it freely develop without any
regulation. However, the inclusive policy makes urban street spaces
become common-pool resources so as to cause conflicts between the
vendors and citizens, among the street vendors, and between the street
vendors and formal vendors (Boonjubun, 2017). Hence, the practitioner
scale and prominent harmful externalities of crowded street vendors
ought to be monitored for future control. Adopted the massive SVIs, or
even introducing other new data sources, such as the street view photos
from social networks or the live updated surveillance videos, could help
monitor the growth dynamic of street vendors groups in the whole city
area, identifying their agglomerated patterns, and their spatial correla­
tion with harmful externalities or social problems.
For the eviction policy, the fine-scale spatial distribution and
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
agglomerated patterns of practitioners would be helpful for the optimal
scheme of limited law enforcement resources. In many cities, street
vending is assumed to be a ‘threat’ to the city's safety and orderliness
(Boonjubun, 2017; Cresswell, 1992). Thus, the administration adopted
an eviction policy and the enforcers attempted to expel the practitioners
from public spaces and streets through probabilistic law enforcement.
The fine-scale spatial pattern of practitioners offers two benefits for the
enforcement system: Firstly, the limited enforcement resources could be
optimal allocation and saved because the agglomerated sites of practi­
tioners have been detected and the focus enforcement areas could be
delineation accordingly. Secondly, the success rate of law enforcement
could be increased by providing the precise location of the hidden street
vendors. For fear of eviction enforcement, the street vendors have
played cat-and-mouse games and even formed organizations to help
each other keep watch for the enforcers (Crossa, 2009; Hanser, 2016).
Nevertheless, the practitioners usually would not elude the street view
cars or surveillance cameras.
For the formalization policy, the spatial agglomerated pattern
derived by SIPSI could be helpful to designate more suitable spatial
formalization strategies which more respect for the location preferences
of the street vendors. To regulate the harmful externalities and simul­
taneously make a shift to keep the livelihood of low-income or new
migrants intact, formalization by designating permitted places is
increasingly being adopted by modern cities (Kamete, 2018). Street
vendors are formalized by relocation to the formal market or by being
given permitted licenses for vending in specified public spaces. The
Fig. 9. The uncovered road network of SVIs in the study area (the SVIs coverage maps are from Baidu Maps).
10
Cities 131 (2022) 103959
vendors have to apply for business licenses and pay entry fees to get in
return an operation place without harassment. However, in reality,
spatial formalization is at risk of failure in terms of vendors' rejection
due to the failure for respecting the logic of street vending, which makes
the vending business less profitable than before (Huang et al., 2019).
Thus, the information about the spatial agglomerated characteristics
and location preferences can help to designate more suitable relocation
business premises. How to demarcate the geographical boundaries of
spatial formalization policy based on the city-scale spatial pattern in­
formation of street vendors is worthy of being studied further.
5.2. Limitations of the SVIs dataset
The number of practitioners in the study area is undoubtedly
underestimated due to the limitations of the SVIs dataset. The limita­
tions occur based on two considerations: the spatial coverage limitations
and the temporal coverage limitations.
5.2.1. Spatial coverage of SVIs is confined to the main streets
The SVIs used in this study were from online map street view ser­
vices, which were mainly captured by cars: GPS-equipped cars drive
through along the streets and use the panorama cameras mounted on the
car roof to record the street photos. Due to the low accessibility of
narrow roads for the car, the street view cannot cover every corner of the
city. Inevitably, a portion of the practitioners were not recorded by the
street view cars, especially since some vendors prefer to peddle around
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
the internal path of the wet market, wholesale market, neighborhoods,
or urban village in a city. Three partial coverage sites are illustrated in
Fig. 9; there are >50 % of roads that do not have any street view images
cover in the study area. This has led to no street vendors being identified
in the SVIs-uncovered areas.
5.2.2. Temporal coverage limitations
The temporal coverage limitations of SVIs include two aspects: on
the one hand, SVI- capturing is a time-consuming job; thus, not all im­
ages are in the same time slice. In addition, the SVIs processing process,
from photo capturing to publishing, takes several months. This means
that the presence of street vendors in the corresponding location may be
from months or even years ago, and we do not know the exact date and
time.
On the other hand, more importantly, all of the SVIs were captured
during the daytime while the informal economy was more active at
nighttime in most cities (Lemessa et al., 2021). This leads to an under­
estimation of the number of practitioners. The field-trip photos of two
street vending places were captured at daytime and nighttime respec­
tively (as shown in Fig. 10). There were no street vendors in these places
in the daytime, while these streets were full of people and street vendors
at nighttime.
There are two solutions for improving the spatial-temporal coverage
of SVIs. First, researchers can adopt multiple sources of SVIs, which
come not only from the online maps but also from location-based ser­
vices, social networks (such as Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, Panor­
amio, and so on), or even city-wide surveillance cameras. This approach
is the most potent in enriching the street-level dataset, and it has been
adopted by several recent social sensing studies. For example, Zhang
et al. (2020) combined the images from Tencent Maps and Panoramio to
uncover inconspicuous places in the city.
Second, some miniaturization camera equipment can be used to
capture SVIs as supplementary. The cameras carried by motorcycles,
bicycles, pedestrians, or even the security monitoring system can easily
capture the street images of the areas that cars cannot traverse. Espe­
cially given the rapid development of mobile internet and smartphones,
the pedestrian has become an important contributor to street view im­
ages. Several crowdsourcing platforms like Mapillary, OpenStreetCam,
and even the traditional online map like Google Maps, collaborate with
these voluntary amateurs without financial compensation (Mahabir
et al., 2020).
Fig. 10. The comparison photographs of two validation sites at daytime and nighttime (photo credit: Yilun Liu).
11
Cities 131 (2022) 103959
5.3. Limitations of SIPSI and future improvement
A deep learning detection model was used in our framework to
identify the presence of the street vendors. However, besides the infor­
mation of spatial presence, some socio-economic features, such as
gender, age, and types of goods for sale, are also important information
for drafting regulations and improving policies. Some high-efficiency
pre-trained models have the potential to couple with SIPSI in order to
identify these socio-economic features. For instance, Deep Convolu­
tional Neural Networks can achieve state-of-the-art age estimation and
gender recognition tasks (Chen, Zhang, et al., 2017; Duan et al., 2018;
Levi & Hassner, 2015). How to couple these models into the SIPSI
framework for extracting more socio-economic characteristics of
informal economic practitioners is a future research direction.
6. Conclusions
The informal economy has been regarded as troublesome and un­
manageable 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 practi­
tioners and their spatial agglomerated pattern. The presented AI-based
SIPSI method, which is driven by open-access street view images, was
successfully applied to the study cases, which are the street vendors in
Shenzhen, and 3907 street vendors were detected. The kernel density
estimation further shows that these vendors agglomerated in a multi-
core cluster pattern in the city. SIPSI proved to be a cost-effective and
time-effective tool for detecting practitioners along the city road
network, despite there being coverage drawbacks of the detection re­
sults due to the limitation of SVIs' spatial-temporal availability.
Furthermore, SIPSI has the potential to detect more comprehensive
socio-economic characteristics of practitioners by coupling other deep
learning models, that are worthy of being studied further.
Second, this work strengthens the understanding of how street ven­
dors agglomerate in the city. According to the study results, the street
vendors tend to agglomerate at locations near the lower level roads and
at the higher population sites. In the meantime, the street vendors keep
away from the CBD and high-rent regions, providing evidence that the
agglomeration pattern of practitioners is not only confined by
Y. Liu and Y. Liu
government control but also influenced by the NIMBY syndrome from
high-rent area residents. The presented methodology and results can be
helpful for other cities, whose street view images are abundant and
freely available, for a high-efficiency massive investigation of informal
economy employment and further beneficial for assisting the improve­
ment and implementation of urban informal economy spatial gover­
nance policies.
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Founda­
tion 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, Super­
vision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Yuchen Liu: Soft­
ware, Validation, Data curation, Writing – review & editing,
Visualization.
Declaration of competing interest
No conflict of interest to declare.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
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