Nocturnality and Transformations in Informal Street Vending in Sanhattan: Regulation,Resistance and Dispute of the Urban Space/ Nocturnidad y transformaciones del comercio informal en Sanhattan: regulación,resistencia y disputa del espacio urbano

Abstract

This article examines informal street vending in Sanhattan, the financial district of Santiago de Chile, to explore how urban regulation shapes experiences of exclusion and how, in turn, practices of resistance emerge. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025, the study draws on participant observation and interviews with informal workers to highlight the contrasts between daytime and night-time dynamics. Results show that during the day, the strong presence of surveillance and municipal ordinances generates the displacement, stigmatisation and precarisation of street vending, reinforcing the figure of the informal worker as ‘out of place’. By contrast, at night, lower institutional control enables public space to be reappropriated, giving rise to a ‘nocturnal rift’ where solidarity, cooperation and adaptive strategies are deployed. These findings engage with debates on the social production of space, nocturnality and urban exclusion and offer new insights into how inequality shapes subjectivities and collective practices. The study concludes that nocturnality constitutes a key dimension for understanding urban resistance and contributes to advancing a more global social psychology grounded in Latin American contexts.