Many studies on the lives of female workers have shown the roles and statuses of women are influenced by their workplaces, which can be relatively gendered, such that female workers are confronted with various job challenges and have to come up with their own gender strategies to survive. However, these studies mainly focus on formal workplaces where female workers have social and economic power to some extent, which is significantly different from the situation in the tourism industry for front-line female workers who do not have any power. Through a spatial lens, this article focuses on female employees’ working characteristics and gender strategies in the tourism industry. Yangshuo West Street is selected to be the study site, as informal female tour guides in public spaces are very common there. By using qualitative methods including interviews and observations, this research indicates that female workers take advantage of various gender strategies to survive. These strategies include wearing close-fitting clothes to make prominent their feminine characteristics, developing supportive social networks with surrounding entrepreneurs, abiding by silence rules among peers and mediating with city inspectors. They endow a gendered nature with public spaces, where they struggle for survival and employment benefits by using gendered strategies.

Compared to official sports mega events, grassroots sports events are attractive to participants because of their universality, accessibility, and casual nature. Taking the Shenzhen 100 km Hikathon as an example, this study investigates the effect of grassroots sports events on sustainable development in migrant cities through residents’ perceptions of such events, and how these affect support. We collected 59 questionnaires in a pre-survey and 612 surveys for formal analysis, and used SPSS and AMOS software to construct a structural equation model. The results indicate that the Hikathon’s popularity, low media impact, small scale of investment and construction, and short duration had fewer negative effects and was beneficial to sustainable development for the migrant city. Residents perceived more positive benefits (improved city image and economic, environmental and cultural benefits) and less negative costs (environmental and traffic costs), which lead to broader support for such events. Among residents’ sociodemographic characteristics, only age was found to moderate the relationship between perceived effects and support. The findings suggest that residents generally perceive grassroots sports events positively, especially in migrant cities, such as Shenzhen, where community events are considered to serve an important role in the construction of place identity.