The benefits of cities depend not only on what they provide, but on who is able to use them. This paper studies how women and men use cities differently, and whether urban public-space provision can change these patterns. I combine 10,216 hand-labelled Google Street View panoramas from Jakarta with a machine-classified panel constructed from approximately 1.4 million images from 2013-2019. I find that women account for about one quarter of identified adults visible on the city's streets. Employment, occupational visibility, hours worked, and commuting can explain at most 69.8 percent of this gender gap, implying that a quantitatively important component of gendered urban participation lies outside measured market work. Consistent with this, women's non-work trips decline with distance 1.41 times as fast as men's, compared with 1.05 for work trips. I then study 315 neighbourhood public-space facilities opened across Jakarta. Women make up a larger share of adult users inside these facilities than on nearby streets. Their openings also increase surrounding street presence: within 25 metres, expected counts rise by 31.3 percent for women and 23.1 percent for men, with no statistically distinguishable difference in proportional responses. Finally, a destination-choice model shows that reallocating the same facilities in proportion to adult population raises predicted visits by about 18 percent while changing their gender composition little. The results distinguish three margins of urban policy: what public space is provided can be associated with who uses it, local provision can expand participation in public space, and where facilities are placed can substantially affect utilisation. These margins need not move together.

Incentivising informal firms to become formal has been a challenge across all the developing countries. Formalisation policy is built around fiscal and administrative levers, but a state cannot grant legal status to a firm on public land without also deciding where it may trade. For firms without premises, formality is paid for in relocation, delivered across the developing world through designated vending zones whose occupancy is generally low. We price that relocation with a stated preferences experiment covering 2,922 street vendors across 206 marketplaces in Patna, Bihar, where India's Street Vendors Act of 2014 conditions the legal right on location rather than documented tenure. Formality itself is valued: vendors who respond to the terms on offer would pay 2.94 per cent of monthly sales for a vending zone sited at their current commuting distance, INR 1,912 a month at median sales. The cost of relocating is larger than the cost of being further away. Vendors forfeit 2.87 per cent of sales the moment the commute changes at all, in either direction, and a further 1.33 per cent for each additional kilometre, so a zone further beyond by two kilometres is refused even when the spot is free. Rent carries no measurable disutility below one per cent of sales and bites sharply above it. Coordination effects are an order of magnitude smaller, the number of spots a zone offers has no detectable effect, and a randomised information treatment on the Act, which only 1.3 per cent of vendors could name, raises the zone's relative valuation by 1.75 percentage points of sales. The average zone we offered lay 1.19 km further from the vendor's residence, and the cost of moving that far already exhausts the value of the zone before any rent is charged. The binding constraint on place-based formalisation is therefore the location and price of the zones on offer, not vendors' valuation of formal status.

Street vending provides livelihoods for millions of workers across the developing world, yet the sector remains poorly understood and subject to repeated policy interventions that have largely failed. This paper provides a comprehensive microeconomic profile of street vending markets in Patna, Bihar, using original survey data from 2,922 stationary vendors across 206 marketplaces. We document that vendors are deeply embedded in overlapping social, spatial, and economic structures that make their livelihoods far more organized, and far harder to administratively reshape, than standard policy frameworks assume. Entry into vending and product choice are mediated by family networks; labour is almost entirely household-based; procurement is organized through stable relational ties with suppliers; and vendors cluster in spatially differentiated markets from which they derive substantial agglomeration economies. Pricing is implicitly coordinated through shared wholesale cost anchors, and 99 percent of vendors have never changed their marketplace despite operating without legal tenure and facing regular eviction pressure. The regulatory environment compounds this vulnerability: fewer than 2 percent of vendors are aware of the Street Vendors Act of 2014, which was designed to protect them, and over 40 percent report moderate to high psychological distress. We argue that the concept of embeddedness offers a more accurate framework for understanding this sector than the atomistic agent model implicit in most policy interventions, and that formalization efforts, particularly spatial relocation mandates, will continue to fail until they account for the social, spatial, and economic complementarities that sustain vendor livelihoods.