How is your mayor doing? It sounds like a simple question. But how do we actually know which things happening in our cities deserve the credit—or the blame—of the people we elect?

Political scientist Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, author of The Fog of Accountability, joins Chip to explore why accountability in local government is so difficult: overlapping agencies and jurisdictions, limited information, fragmented responsibility, and the growing number of public, private, and nonprofit actors involved in making cities work.

Then the conversation moves from City Hall to something much smaller: there’s trash on the sidewalk. Who’s responsible for cleaning it up?

Morgan Berman, founder of Philadelphia-based Glitter, offers a different way into that question. Glitter gives neighbors a way to pool resources, create paid local work, and take direct action to care for the places they share. But if residents take responsibility for their own streets, does that empower communities—or let government off the hook?

In the Season Two finale of The Sidewalk Ballet, two conversations about accountability become a larger exploration of civic responsibility, collective agency, and what it means to shape a city.

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner

The FOG of Accountability

https://www.shareglitter.com/

instagram.com/peacoatproject

Street vending is everywhere in Mexico City. It is part of the city’s economy, its culture, and the everyday experience of its public spaces. But describing that work as simply “informal” misses much of what is actually happening.

Verónica Crossa is a geographer and professor at El Colegio de México whose research examines street vending, public space, and urban life. We met in Mexico City’s Parque Hundido to talk about the complicated systems that allow people to make a living in public space: the relationships between vendors and government, the politics of regulation and enforcement, and why the familiar divide between the “formal” and “informal” city may be a false one.

It’s a conversation rooted in Mexico City, but one that raises a much broader question: Who gets to work in public space, under what conditions, and what do the words we use to describe that work reveal about who—and what—we believe belongs there?

Verónica Crossa Niell Reading for difference on the street: De-homogenising street vending in Mexico CityResisting the Entrepreneurial City: Street Vendors’ Struggle in Mexico City’s Historic Center

Recorded at the International Downtown Association Annual Conference in Toronto, this bonus episode brings together voices from downtowns across North America. Chip asks a group of downtown leaders what’s exciting them about the the field of Urban Place Management, what’s happening in their own communities—and one question chosen at random. A quick, lively snapshot of the people working every day to make cities stronger, more welcoming, and more resilient.

https://downtown.org/event/2026-annual-conference/