Jakarta’s streets hold deep social and economic value. A major contributor to this role is street vending—an informal commercial practice and mode of urbanisation carried out by ordinary citizens in response to limited employment opportunities and inadequate social services. Despite its importance, street vending is often overlooked and prosecuted by both Jakarta’s provincial and Indonesia’s central governments, which continue to prioritise planning and regulatory strategies that favour visual order, formal aesthetics and high-rise development. These urban visions rely heavily on Eurocentric and modernist methodologies that marginalise everyday informal practices. Nevertheless, these approaches have not halted the growth of street vending. Instead, vendors have developed adaptive socio-spatial strategies that allow them to operate discreetly while actively shaping Jakarta’s urban character. The disparity between government visions, regulatory narratives, and everyday realities motivates this research, which seeks to bridge this gap and offer ways to understand street vending beyond the dominant perspectives that work against it. To do so, the thesis positions street vending as a form of Participatory Interior Urbanism (PIU): a mode of reverse urban interiorization that temporarily transforms existing urban environments into habitable, relational, and participatory interior-like spaces. Through this lens, street vending is understood as a creative situated intervention that emerges from precarious circumstances and introduces intimacy, domesticity and sociality into the urban environment. To explore this aspect of street vending, the research analyses various forms of street vending in Jakarta using a two-stage anthropological approach designed to capture the essence of the practice from the perspective of insiders (vendors, patrons and street users). The first stage—mind-walking—uses virtual methods on Instagram to observe, at a distance, the everyday practices of street vending in Jakarta, a methodology that was highly influenced by the limitations imposed by the COVID-19 lockdown. The second stage—walking—involves in-situ fieldwork to deepen and calibrate insights from the first phase. Inductive coding informed by grounded theory is used to analyse the remote dataset, while an adaptation of autoethnography termed interior writing, paired with Reflective Thematic Analysis (RTA), is used to interpret fieldwork materials. In addition, drawing is used throughout both stages as a non-intrusive interpretive tool to distil spatial qualities and illustrate modes of engagement between people, objects and existing settings. Together, these two-stage anthropological approaches enable a more situated, less prescriptive investigation of urban informality by recognising insiders as the primary experts of the spaces they co-produce. The research offers several key findings. A typology of actions is developed to articulate the mechanisms of PIU expressed through Jakarta’s street vending practices. The interdisciplinary approach also reveals the socio-economic and socio-spatial significance of street vending, demonstrating its crucial role in supporting inclusive urban liveability. Finally, the research identifies contemporary issues that constrain the practice and complicate its integration into existing governance frameworks. Collectively, these findings challenge conventional assumptions about urban informality and invite reconsideration of how everyday interior practices contribute to the making of urban environments.

Funding: LPDP (Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education) from 2019 to 2024