Eating in the city

Abstract

This special issue introduction examines why and how food matters in Asian cities and foodscapes, thus providing a different lens from Western interpretations of urban space. As cities transform, the ways that people eat and procure food also change, along with the sociocultural meanings of food itself. The special issue brings together seven research papers that together draw attention to the everyday culinary habits, rituals, creativity, and sensory experiences that are collectively used to nurture shared senses of cultural identity and economic livelihoods. In so doing, the papers as a whole consider important issues to do with urban infrastructure, urban governance, diversity, conviviality, and cosmopolitanism.

Keywords:

• Food
• urban space
• urban governance
• conviviality
• diversity
• cosmopolitanism

Notes

1. This special issue brings together papers that were first presented at a 2015 workshop on “Food and the Global Asian City,” which we co-organized with the thematic group TG07 Senses and Society of the International Sociological Association. The workshop was funded by a grant from the NUS-ODPRT for which we record our appreciation. A subsequent call for papers was later announced, thereby adding articles by Alison Hulme, and Taro Futamura and Kazuaki Sugiyama to the original set. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable time and comments for papers in this collection.