Importing the night market: urban regeneration and the Asian food aesthetic in London

Abstract

London is witnessing an increasingly frequent occurrence of “Asian-style” night markets, especially in the form of “pop-ups” in run-down areas and derelict urban spaces. Such spaces are fashionable and highly popular, offering an aesthetic that plays upon “Asian” styles. They exist in areas that the largely middle-class clientele (who do not live there) feel are “cool” and “edgy.” The popularity of the night market as a food aesthetic and dining culture provides an example of the way in which Asian foodways are used to restructure urban life by bringing new prospects to run-down areas. A new clientele of diners play out their own cosmopolitan ideals via the night market, in a process that not only eats the Other, but insists that eating the Other is relatively everyday, and in doing so makes more complex the category of “Other.” The night market is effectively a theatre for the performance of cosmopolitan subjectivities, rich in global cultural capital. Local authorities, keen to regenerate deprived areas, are now capitalizing upon these subjects’ desires in ways that play with the fluidity of globalized identities in one of the most famous world cities.

Keywords:

• Regeneration
• night-markets
• aesthetics
• cultural capital
• cosmopolitanism

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are offered to the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments during the writing and editing of this article.

Notes

1. 2046 was directed by Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar Wai.

2. See http://www.bighospitality.co.uk/People/Jonathan-Downey-Streets-ahead

3. See ibid.

4. See my article “The ‘small commodity city’ of Yiwu: Functionality and Subjectivity in the Era of the Image Space” in City journal for a greater elucidation of what I mean by “image space,” as contrasted with a space of more tangible function. Essentially, an image space is one whose greatest function is to provide tempting images for geographically removed Others whose imagination of the place in question matters for its success.

5. William Whyte and Jane Jacobs (1961) took up the cause against large-scale intervention, suggesting a tactics of “emphasis and suggestion” that focused on helping people make order out of the chaos around them by making small changes. Their thinking can be linked to that of earlier thinkers such as Charles Mulford Robinson and Jane Addams, who also relied on small-scale incremental change to accomplish their objectives. The Everyday Urbanism movement is also influential here. This saw an appreciation of individual effort outside the bounds of institutionalized planning practice and a disdain for top-down master planning. But, unlike Jacobs, Everyday Urbanism, while also focused on the bottom-up, nongovernmental approach, was a movement that distanced itself from any objectivity in the determination of standards of beauty, reflecting instead on the urban vernacular, where improvisation, bricolage, and the use of commonplace objects make everyday urban worlds something to celebrate.