Thanks to NYC’s street vendors, Candy has consumed numerous hot dogs, noodles, biryani, crepes, dumplings, bags, books, slippers, and then some. There are more than 10,000 street vendors in New York City, but selling things from a table or cart isn’t as simple as it seems. Vendors are fined $1000 for small violations, like parking their cart more than 18″ from the curb, and many vendors don’t know their rights when approached by police. The rulebook is intimidating and hard to understand by anyone, let alone someone whose first language isn’t English. As part of CUP’s Making Policy Public series, Candy collaborated with Rosten Woo and John Mangin of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Sean Basinski of The Street Vendor Project, and street vendors around NYC to develop this guide so vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living.

Vendor Power! translates the most commonly violated rules into accessible diagrams. It also illustrates vendors’ rights and includes text in English, Bengali, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. The guide also serves as an educational/advocacy tool and includes a poster full of fun facts on the history and challenges of NYC street vending, personal vendor stories, and policy reform recommendations (lift license caps, increase street access, reduce the fines, and reform administration & enforcement). Thousands of copies were distributed to street vendors for free, and the guide is available for $6 or as a free downloadable PDF on CUP’s Making Policy Public site. Candy designed and illustrated the guide (read her article about the process on the Urban Omnibus). Hang the poster up and show your love for street vendors too! Featured in the 2010 National Design Triennial by the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Good design not only makes the city easier to use, but it’s what will determine if the city functions at all. For the first time in history, more people live in cities than rural areas, and over two-thirds of the world will live in cities by 2050. In order to make that work, we need to improve our infrastructure, and that includes information design. Communication tools are just as important of an infrastructure system as roads, electricity, and sewer drains. Every day citizens are trying to navigate the system as an apartment renter, or a taxpayer, or a small business starter, or a public transportation user – And with good information design that experience can be engaging – and even fun!

“Chang’s Vendor Power! and Tenant Flash Cards projects offer two fantastic examples of how graphic design can be put to use in clarifying everyday, seemingly uninteresting legal situations… The possibilities are bewilderingly wide-ranging.” —BLDGBLOG

2009, 32″ x 22″ fold-out poster, heavy 80 lb. Lynx Brightwhite Smooth matte paper stock. New York, NY. Produced by the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Above photos by Prudence Katze and the Center for Urban Pedagogy

The team: Sean Basinski, Rosten Woo, John Mangin, and Candy Chang

Sean shows us tickets from street vendors – mostly for parking their cart too far from the curb, parking on restricted streets, parking too close to a storefront, and not “conspicuously” wearing their license

Typical page from current regulation book. Snap!

Hanging out with street vendors like Munnu to understand their experiences

Meeting with street vendors to get feedback on drafts of the guide

Four photos above by CUP from the distribution event

An interesting quote Sean recently found from 1905:

“I think it would be a great advantage to all the peddlers to have a translated copy of the license issued. As it is, some of the Italians cannot understand the regulations of the road and the ordinances of the City. If it were printed in English…in Yiddish…in Greek, Italian and Syrian for the others it would prove to be a great aid to them.”
- Rev. Bernardino Polizzo, 1905, during a hearing on the pushcart menace