Street Hustle as Spatial Practice

Figure 1. Roland’s work on canvas. Photograph taken by the Noah Allison, 2024.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was standing in a gas station queue to order tacos al pastor from a truck when a man approached and asked if I could spare him a dollar so he could buy a champurrado. Growing up in Los Angeles, I was accustomed to such encounters. However, Roland had charisma; tall, dark, and muscular with a big smile, he had the salesman's knack of putting people at ease. We fell into talking that day, and most days after when we crossed paths in the neighborhood.

           

Over the next several years, I learned that Roland (not his real name) was born in Jamaica thirty years ago, and moved to Los Angeles with his family at age twelve. Since 2017 he has lived in a tent near the Santa Monica Freeway. A dispute and the death of his father had landed him on the street. As a practicing artist, he draws and paints infamous cartel leaders like El Chapo and Pablo Escobar, as well as Mixed Martial Art fighters and superheroes (figure 1). Over the years, I saw him selling his art and panhandling motorists in the middle of the street. When I asked if I could document his movements, he immediately agreed.

Figure 2. Aerial view of the location where Roland hustles in the street. Source: Google Earth.

Roland typically emerges from his tent late in the afternoon strapped for cash. It is at these moments that he walks fifty feet to Arlington Avenue just north of the 10 Freeway to solicit money from motorists (Figure 2). This small area of the city is both his home and his workplace.  He begins by walking to the middle of the crosswalk and stops to wait for southbound cars to gather at a red traffic signal. He then navigates between one of the three lanes with the most cars and approaches each vehicle at the driver's side window (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Traffic calming lanes that Roland relies on for safety while soliciting donations from motorists. Photographs taken by Noah Allison, 2024.

Roland does not directly ask for money or say anything. Instead, he presents one of his paintings because motorists are more inclined to donate if he appears to be selling his work. He approaches every car until the signal turns green. Then, he turns 180 degrees and solicits all the slow-moving motorists traveling in the opposite direction. As Roland walks back to his starting point, he strategically moves between the yellow traffic calming lanes, which provide a nominal buffer zone between vehicles traveling in opposite directions (see Figure 3). Upon reaching the signal, he patiently waits at the crosswalk for southbound vehicles to gather at the signal before repeating the circuit (Figure 4). Most days, he employs these tactics for one or two hours, typically earning between $50 and $100 (Figure 5).

Figure 4 . Roland’s strategic hustling tactics and the locations of other informal activities occurring at the intersection. Conceptualized by Noah Allison. Designed by Victor Cano Ciborro.

Figure 5. Roland defying the autocentric-designed road while hustling in the street. Photographs taken by Noah Allison, 2024.

These routines of embodied performative practice have enabled Roland to build a career, however precarious, in this corner of Los Angeles.  Hustling at this intersection for nearly a decade, he has never been hit by a car. While luck may play a part, such outcomes are primarily due to agility and strategy, with tacit sensory knowledge of vehicular patterns honed over time. Countless cars honk their horns as he weaves in and out of traffic. To ensure his safety and demonstrate his awareness, he often stretches out his arms so drivers can gauge their proximity to him. All this underscores that Roland must make himself visible and movements defined in order to sustain this informal spatial practice amid the swirl of traffic. And despite hustling at this intersection for nearly a decade, Roland has only encountered one police officer, who simply told him to get out of the street.

This snapshot of Roland’s practice serves as a potent example of how socially marginalized people intervene spatially in the urban landscape as a livelihood strategy. The street is Roland's shop floor, and he negotiates Los Angeles' governing logics, legal regimes, and deadly traffic not because he wants to, but rather out of bitter necessity, the need to survive. By navigating city streets to sustain his livelihood, he challenges prevailing narratives of urban space shaped by state and elite private power alone. His daily presence on Arlington Avenue disrupts conventional notions of pedestrian mobility and prompts critical reflection on whose voices and experiences are centered in city-making processes.

Roland's daily struggle amidst the hazards of Los Angeles' streets underscores the pressing need for urban practitioners to prioritize the needs of unhoused people, street vendors, and other marginalized people when planning and designing pedestrian projects. While this will not solve poverty's root cause, it is one small part of a making a city for everyone. And until society's urban inequality is thoroughly eradicated, incremental interventions that meaningfully consider marginalized people's actual situations--their access, movements, and spatial navigations--need to be considered. A basic way to accomplish this task is to recognize the significance of embodied knowledge, local understandings, and spatial practices undertaken by people surviving on the street.

 

Works Consulted

 

Hou, Jeffrey. "Guerrilla Urbanism: Urban Design and the Practices of Resistance." Urban Design International 25 (2020): 117-125.

 

Kim, Annette. Sidewalk City: Remapping Public space in Ho Chi Minh City. University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Simone, AbdouMaliq. "People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg." Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407-429.

 

Venkatesh, Sudhir. Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Harvard University Press, 2006.

 

Weizman, Eyal. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Princeton University Press, 2017.