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| THE DISTRIBUTION AND SPATIAL IMPACT FACTORS OF STREET HAWKER——A Case Study of Street Hawers on West Zhongshan Road |
| PANG Yu-qi1, XUE De-sheng2, WANG De1 |
1. College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China;
2. Geography and Planning School of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China |
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Abstract Street hawker is a familiar phenomenon in lots of cities of China and many other countries. Most of the street hawkers are official illegally without a license. It is a kind of informal economy by occupying pavements, pedestrian overpasses, entrance of residential communities or supermarkets, surrounding region of subway stations and many other public space for economic gain. Though the existing of street hawker offers convenience to urban residents and sometimes brings validity of a city, it also has a detrimental effect on traffic and cityscape. The distribution of the street hawkers is quite floating and temporary but is still greatly impacted by some factors. It has positive meaning to study the characteristic of spatial distribution and influencing factors of the street hawkers. So far, researches study on spatial distribution of informal economy has not rich achievements yet, which needs more attention to study the informal economy in a spatial view.
This research chose the street hawkers on west Zhongshan Road as a topic cases to study their spatial distribution. Spatial data was accessed by using observation, maps marking method and supplement interviews, which were also verified by the relevant news and reports. The research finds that the distribution of street hawkers has distinct spatial agglomeration. Though with a temporal and floating appearance, there are some regular rules of the spatial distribution of street hawkers, which are affected by the interface of land use, interface of land property, and interface of spatial characteristics. Among these, the interface of land use and land property with an attraction of people and helping to form a stream of pedestrians, is more likely to become a preferable place for street hawkers. More details are stated in the article to reveal the root of street hawkers, so that it might give some illumination to urban planning for building a harmonious and genial city.
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Received: 24 April 2011
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2012, Vol. 27 
