- Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City, by Daniel M. Goldstein. Duke University Press, 2015.

Following his former work on informality, insecurity and survival mechanisms of the urban poor in marginal communities in Cochabamba, Daniel M. Goldstein has again written a vivacious monography on urban dynamics in this Bolivian city. In Owners of the Sidewalk he disentangles the everyday life worlds of the vendors of La Cancha, one of the country's biggest informal markets located in the southern zone of Cochabamba. Goldstein makes a splendid analysis of the way in which the different actors in the Cancha market - permanent stall vendors or fijos, itinerant street vendors or ambulantes as well as state officials and private security guards - continuously cross the line between the formal and informal, legal and illegal, albeit in completely different ways, and the various forms of insecurity it brings to the fore.

The book is divided into chapters of two to four pages, each focussing on particular themes that are central to his comparative analysis on the security concerns of legal and illegal market vendors. Due to this rather innovative structure, this ethnographic study reads like a novel, systematically carving out the activities and interactions of four male protagonists: Don Silvio (leader of the federation of the ambulantes), Don Rafo (leader of the federation of the comerciantes fijos), and the author Daniel and his field assistant Nacho. With this narrative approach the book gives an in-depth description of the process of doing fieldwork as well as a more theoretical reflection on issues of urban disregulation and the complex relations between insecurity and informality.

With Owners of the Sidewalk Goldstein makes an important contribution to the discussions on activist and engaged anthropology. His study shows how such an approach gives access to better and more complex insights in the social realities anthropologists attempt to study. The book also reflects on the responsibilities, expectations and ethical dilemmas such an approach entails. It is actually through Goldstein's collaborative approach, and his promises to organize a seminar and write an 'academic book' for the vendors - documenting the causes, effects and solutions to the problem of insecurity in the market - that the diversity of political perspectives in La Cancha market came to the fore. In fact, the book reaches a kind of anti-climax when Goldstein wants to translate some of his preliminary results into concrete action by donating a loudspeaker system to the market. This is the moment that social exclusion mechanisms, dissension or lack of unity among the vendors and the power games in the sindicatos are revealed to the reader. Hence, the donated loudspeaker system would never be operative as there were endless conflicts, ruptures and political disputes on where and when to install it. Regardless of these disappointing results, Goldstein concludes his book on the rather optimistic note that these kinds of experiences are part and parcel of activist anthropology, and help them to adjust their goals.

In general, I think that Goldstein could have had more of an eye for the heterogeneity of his research population from the very beginning of his study. With his categorization of organized vendors - ambulantes versus fijos - he tends to oversimplify the socio-political dynamics at play in La Cancha megamarket. As we also see in many other studies on street vendors in Latin American cities (Cross, 1998; Lazar, 2008; Little, 2005), it builds on the assumption that virtually all street vendors are organized in sindicatos and federations and that markets in Latin America are by definition organized entities in terms of social structures. Part of this assumption builds on the historical importance of federations and grassroots organizations in Latin America, but another part builds upon a practical methodological choice of the researcher. Many Latin Americanists have started their studies on informal workers by embarking on fieldwork with the leaders of vendors' federations. How else would Goldstein have been able to find an entry point or structural factor in the chaos of informal markets with more than 100,000 vendors? In addition I wondered why Goldstein kept on reducing the economic potential of streets vendors to a merely survival strategy while many authors, including myself (Steel, 2008) have argued that informal street activities can vary from a precarious livelihood strategy to lucrative informal entrepreneurship in which vendors can earn more than average wage labourers? Finally, I really appreciate Goldstein's focus on male worlds in markets that have traditionally been described as 'feminine spaces' in the Latin American literature, but what do the changing dynamics bring to these gender issues in terms of empowerment, economic dynamics and political agency?

These are just a few of the questions with which I think Goldstein's book offers a warm invitation, as well as a solid backbone for future collaborative ethnographic research on the economic as well as political struggles of the many street vendors in the hybrid and complex domains of Latin American urban life. Activist anthropologists will never be able to resolve the many problems these urban dwellers must regularly contend with, but they can at the very least contribute to the further recognition of their daily struggles and as such enforce some slight changes over the long term.