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The Colombian state is widely understood to be failed due to its inability to monopolize violence. Yet such an understanding of the state is misleading in that it suggests that the state is entirely ineffective, incapable of any form of territorial control. An analysis of policy mechanisms through which the Colombian state controls territory suggests that the Colombian state is far from impotent. In fact, it is highly successful in regulating access and giving meaning to domestic space. In this paper, I analyze state policies to create, maintain, and recuperate public space and the effects these policies have on citizenship as it is increasingly defined through participation in proper forms of consumption and exchange. The state has focused on ambulant street vendors as the sole impediment to the creation, safe use, and enjoyment of public space by citizens, thus framing street vendors as security threats and non-citizens. The state seeks to ameliorate these problems through the "formalization" of vendors, forcing them into fixed spaces, hours, merchandise, and saving patterns. Based on three months of field work, policy analysis, and extensive interviewing, this paper argues that the state's efforts to create public space for citizens seek to maintain state legitimacy, despite visible "failures". In doing so, it relies upon the framing of certain (citizen) populations as security threats, and thus non-citizens who do not deserve the same rights as the "market citizens" the state embraces as part of its modernizing and legitimizing project. This paper raises salient questions regarding the crafting of policies to improve both the quality of public space as well as the working conditions and prospects of street vendors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]