The Signal
In downtown Bogotá, under the bridges where informal vending concentrates, Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán’s administration launched a system that changes the relationship between the street vendor and public space: it no longer tolerates it or chases it — it charges for it. Decree 117 of April 14, 2026 created the so-called Regulated Economic Use Zones, a scheme in which the District characterizes vendors, assigns them a spot, and charges them for occupying the sidewalk. Registration is done with a biometric QR code — designed to prevent the subletting of slots — and payments are exclusively digital. The operation is run by IPES and DADEP. The response reached the street: informal vendors protested and blocked arteries in the south of the city, rejecting the idea of having to pay for the piece of public road from which they earn their living.
The Context
The diagnosis underpinning the policy is no small matter. Between 2024 and 2025, the District characterized more than 19,000 vendors: of these, 55% are in a situation of vulnerability and 54.3% are women. On that basis, the charge is not flat. Decree 117 provides for a differential scheme, with exemptions and reductions for vulnerable populations, so that those with the least do not pay the same fee — or simply do not pay — as those who do have economic capacity. That is an important difference from the caricature of a “tax on poverty”: the administration designed a sliding scale. Even so, the underlying gesture remains intact: the use of the sidewalk, which until yesterday was a free and settled fact, becomes an administered right, with registration, fee, and digital traceability. The vendor who once existed in informality now exists in a database.
The Reading
Here it is worth holding two truths at once. The first: the differential charge is more humane than the raid, and acknowledging that more than half of the vendors are vulnerable is more honest than pretending they do not exist. The second, the one that gives the signal: however tiered the fee, the system installs a new and powerful idea — that occupying the sidewalk to work is a privilege that is administered, registered, and, in principle, paid for. The biometric QR is not a technical detail: it turns the informal vendor into a traceable data point, with an assigned slot, a payment history, and a verified identity. It is formalization, yes, but it is also control. And whoever is exempt today as vulnerable may cease to be so tomorrow without the framework changing: the exemption softens the price, not the logic. That is why the vendors do not block the south because they reject order; they block because they sense that the order comes with a toll, and that a toll, once installed, is rarely dismantled.
The Pattern
Bogotá rhymes with five continents at once. The District does not ban street vending: it regulates it, characterizes it, and puts a fee on it. Eviction no longer needs police force and has learned to charge. It is the same move as the relocation microloan in Mexico City, the income-capped welfare card in Bangkok, or the $18,000 regulation cart in San Francisco: different languages for a single sentence. What makes Bogotá singular is the sophistication of the instrument — the biometrics, the digital payment, the database: it is not the most brutal version of the pattern, it is the most advanced. Here the toll is charged not in blows or in cash, but in traceability. And that is precisely the warning: when eviction becomes so clean that it fits inside an app, it stops looking like eviction. What remains is an orderly record, a reasonable fee, an exemption for the poorest. And what also remains is a sidewalk that, from now on, has an administrative owner.