The research concentrates on the urban phenomenon of a long-lasting informal wholesale cake market in the Southeast Asian megacity Jakarta, Indonesia. At this Pasar Kue Subuh Senen (PKS) cake market alone, 600 vendors utilize contested outdoor parking space of a strategically located commercial centre every night. Among the economic interplay of different actors, the research places special emphasis on the group of female vendors and how spatial, social, economic and institutional determinants affect their consolidation efforts. The research design takes the social-scientific approach of the relational nature of space into account and reveals that the relational arrangement of objects and people taking place at the cake market features a static condition: PKS vendors avoid the change of selling positions and show a long-term orientation. The analyses of quantitative and qualitative data collection have shown that neither female wholesalers nor other vendor groups are marginalized when trying to access a selling space at the PKS. Female cake vendors can achieve a stable net income and gain appreciation among their social networks for enhancing the social advancement of their families. Empirical evidence suggests that PKS business women, interacting with customers in the public realm of the urban night market, do not contradict long engrained gender roles as long as they are not too young and not selling alone. On the contrary, the PKS offers opportunities for women to experience the role of a salesperson, diminishing the importance of gender and social background. However, even though the professionalization of kitchen work helps to lower women's threshold for self-employment, male vendors are far more common at the PKS. Comprising just 20% of all vendors, the low share of female vendors indicates that income generating activities at the PKS wholesale market are not as attractive for women's informal self-employment as usually known for the urban informal retail and street food sector in Indonesia. With regard to the preservation of the PKS, the land-use right construct stipulates the PKS as only a temporary location for street vendors and is subsequently extended after a 2-year period again and again. This 'permanent temporariness', in combination with the redevelopment plans for the entire Senen Market area, leaves the cake market's continuance in suspense and counteracts vendors' consolidation efforts. It is under these circumstances that the research reasons to introduce constructs that will contribute to the on-site preservation of the PKS and thus translate the economic and social importance of the informal market into the realm of urban spatial planning policies.