Mobilizing the streets: the role of food vendors in urban life

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a special issue on food vending in the city. It contextualizes a collection of papers on street food and markets across time and global space that authors submitted before the 2020 pandemic. Focusing specifically on the mobilization of urban space for food provisioning and microenterprise, we theorize markets beyond the singular narrative of capital accumulation. Given the particular moment of its publication – which comes almost one year after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic in March 2020 – our introduction probes the impact of COVID-19 on food vendors as well as on the cities that sustain them. Drawing on examples from cities such as New Delhi, New York City, Los Angeles and beyond, we comment on how the pandemic has unleashed threats to livelihoods and liveliness, and we also draw attention to the possibility of new social and economic opportunities in this moment of crisis, including innovative uses of urban space.

KEYWORDS:

• Street vending
• markets
• food
• informal labor
• livelihood
• global South
• COVID-19
• migration

I. Mobility interrupted

On May 11, 2020, Atul Yadav’s photograph of a 38-year old migrant laborer, stranded on a bridge in Delhi, went viral. With a mask pushed down to his chin and a cellphone to his ear, Rampukar Pandit’s face was contorted in agony. He was speaking on the phone, sobbing uncontrollably. Shaken by “his naked grief,” Yadav asked what was troubling him. Pandit’s infant son was dying more than 1000 km away, and all he had were his two legs to get there. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a government-imposed lockdown across India has not only restricted people’s access to transportation, but has also made it impossible for informal workers – construction laborers, domestic caregivers, tailors and textile workers, and street food vendors – to undertake activities that are their only means to survival.

One-half of Delhi’s street vendors are migrants (Dharmendra Kumar, Janpahal, personal communication with K. Ray). Unable to earn a living on the street, millions of workers left their adopted cities out of fear of not being able to survive or just to give themselves a different set of odds elsewhere. With inter-state bus and rail travel forbidden, the fate of migrant workers rests on their only means of mobility – to walk – creating the biggest migration catastrophe in the sub-continent since partition. The mass exodus of migrant workers from cities across the nation highlights the significant role that informality plays in India and beyond.

Informality broadly refers to economic enterprises, activities and places that are not regulated or protected by the state. To be sure, conceptualizations of informality in places like India, Brazil, Philippines, and Zimbabwe, for example – where such practices and procedures are a normalized part of everyday life – only make sense when juxtaposed with formal practices. The formal economy is in fact responsible for generating informal practices. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that about 60% of the world’s workers – some 2 billion, representing most of the workforce in many developing countries – are informal (Alfers, Moussié, and Harvey 2020). In India, 90% of its workforce of around 450 million is in the informal, unorganized sector (Sinha 2020). In other words, an overwhelming majority of India’s population is without assured wages unless they can work. And without employment insurance, most have received no wages during the COVID-19 lockdown (Chaudhuri 2020). Street vendors in particular constitute a significant portion of the nation’s informal labor force. Estimates put the number at 4 million (NASVI 2014). Others suggest that the total number of vendors in India is more than double this figure (Sinha 2020). These street vendors peddle a range of goods, from clothing and household items to chai, cooked foods, and fresh fruits and vegetables. Shalini Sinha (2020) of WIEGO estimates that before the onset of the current pandemic, street vendors supplied 70–80% of Delhi’s middle-class consumers with their food. To put that another way, both the livelihoods of informal vendors and the ability of a city to feed its residents are dependent upon circuits of mobility. In March 2020, such mobilities were suddenly interrupted.

While mitigating the spread of the pandemic is vital, constraining the mobility of vendors harms the livelihoods of poor people and threatens their very survival. Writing in The Lancet, Cash and Patel (2020) argue that although this pandemic has spread in a different pattern, advice about how to deal with it has been circulating from the global North to the South in old-fashioned ways. One of the central recommendations from that North-to-South flow is a severe lockdown to enforce physical distancing and another is a focus on sophisticated tertiary care. Cash and Patel (2020) contend those are not the right strategies for low-income countries and argue that such “strategies might subvert two core principles of global health: that context matters and that social justice and equity are paramount” (1687). It is clear that without appropriate social support the current lockdown is deepening ongoing structural inequalities.

Pandit’s agonized face is a contemporary palimpsest of the burdens of mobile lives in the global South. His picture is analogous to Dorothea Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, which The Library of Congress titled “Migrant Mother” (Prints & Photographs Division Staff 1998). These two faces of migrant despair generated different responses. In the case from the United States (US), Lange’s picture prompted state officials to provide 20,000 pounds of food to migrant worker camps in California. In contemporary India, Yadav’s photograph provoked a monumental outpouring of voluntary efforts to help migrant workers.

II. Mobilities, street vendors and markets

In this special issue, “Mobilizing the Streets: The Role of Food Vendors in Urban Life,” we examine the ways in which food vendors are important stakeholders of urban liveliness across the world. In the global South, mobile operations constitute informal markets that play a central role in local food systems; they make use of the street to both feed urban populations and generate accessible means of livelihoods for millions of people. In the global North, where local authorities seek to balance consumer experience and entrepreneurial opportunity with policies attempting to neatly structure, regulate, and define the built environment and economic activities, street food also increases urban vitality. Prior scholarship highlights the importance of street food to feeding people around the world and the value of food trucks in generating opportunities for social justice throughout North America (see, for example, Cardoso, Companion, and Marras 2014; Agyeman, Matthews, and Sobel 2017). We build on this work and pay attention to broad, flexible meanings of street food to explore how mobile vending fits within – or is omitted from – visions of metropolitan modernity. Juxtaposing multisensory narratives from cities in the global North and in the global South shines light on the politics of micro-provisioning and on processes of urban restructuring in an age of global mobilities.

To set the stage for this special issue, we first introduce some of the ways that vendors and markets have been impacted by COVID-19, as the routines of everyday life continue to change and movement halted under the present state of pandemic conditions. We then briefly comment on the relationship between food provisioning and the street before outlining the paper contributions that make up this collection. A note on timing and context: this special issue emerged from NYU’s City Food project, as part of a larger global research initiative that examines how mobilities and migrations shape the ways in which people produce, regulate, trade, and consume food in cities throughout the world. All of the papers that appear in this collection on food vending were written and submitted prior to the 2020 unfolding of the pandemic. We offer this introduction as a space not only to contextualize the papers that appear in the following pages, but also to highlight their renewed importance amidst the current social and public health crises that continues to spread globally. Elsewhere, we have shown how street food vendors, as part of the last mile of the food chain, generate liveliness in metropolitan regions (Ray 2020; Allison and Rohel 2020). One year on, the cracks and fissures revealed by COVID-19 show more than ever that micro-provisioning is often an essential way that poor people facilitate and sustain their livelihoods, just as it is an essential mechanism through which many people around the world procure their food. This special issue reveals how various relationships of power have led to the social and historical transformations that have reshaped street food vending and continue to challenge it, over time and across space.

III. Impact of COVID-19 on food vendors

In February 2020, a picture of a black bat in rigor mortis nestled on the edge of a bowl of clear soup circulated through Twitter millions of times. Tagged to the picture was the claim that “this was the BAT SOUP from Wuhan” that spread the Coronavirus to humans (The Observers 2020; Palmer 2020). The picture was not from Wuhan, as bat soup is not particularly popular in the region. Such memes were photographed and fabricated in other places and other times, as King (2020) notes in her recent piece on North American perceptions of Chinese food during the coronavirus pandemic (241–242). Posts and images of bat soup, including the one we reference here, were pulled into the routines of Sinophobic disgust and anti-market hysteria among those who seek to normalize the virtues of supermarket modes of provisioning. This picture nevertheless went viral and was re-tweeted by right-wing, white nationalists in the US, as well as by Indian vegetarians, among others. Claims of “dirty Chinese” eating weird stuff was leavened by old Orientalist assumptions about essential cultural difference. Yet, even voices explicitly critical of racist presumptions draw attention to the Huanan wet market, one of the places associated with an early hypothesis about the origin of the virus, revealing a pressing need for acknowledgment of local politics and local histories of modernization. We echo King in the need to address such markets in China in a way that is socially responsible and that recognizes and contextualizes the historical, political and economic conditions that shape the marketplace across China (King 2020, 241–243). In the early days of the coronavirus, weeks before the WHO had declared a pandemic, James Palmer (2020) argued that the temporary ban on wildlife in Chinese wet markets looks a lot like the creation of the modern regulation system that took hold in US markets after unsanitary practices were exposed. His argument for better regulation raised the question of what that market reform might look like. By drawing an analogy with America at the turn of the twentieth century, he implied a Western developmentalist model as the likely way forward. Yet, such a model so often assumes that the best way to provision people is through a large-scale industrial agricultural production and distribution system that ends up with the supermarket.

The frenzy of Chinese officials has even generated opportunistic interventions by lawmakers in far-away places like New York State. Linda B. Rosenthal and Luis Sepulveda, for example, have introduced a bill that would eliminate existing wet markets in New York City. While fears of Zoonotic transmission have increased, there is little evidence that disease has spread from these wet markets, where about 208,000 birds are slaughtered in 80 markets a year. The number is miniscule compared to the more than 9 billion poultry slaughtered in the US annually (Ritchie and Roser 2019; FAOSTAT 2020; see also Thornton 2019). As birds in New York City make it to markets on visible supply chains, poultry with pathogens can be traced. Both in terms of hygiene and animal welfare, wet markets can be improved everywhere, and they should be improved, as the World Health Organization recommends (WHO 2006, 2020). But targeting New York City wet markets is only good to invoke disgust against small practices of disadvantaged people, while leaving the very large systems that pose actual threats to population health, animal welfare and environmental welfare intact. More worryingly, such local initiatives point to a global convergence of state and city policy toward a supermarket mode of provisioning rather than a market-based distribution system. The latter sustains huge numbers of livelihoods while keeping profits low. It distributes power amongst numerous smaller stakeholders, and it facilitates trust building between people within communities. By increasing profits for a few, the supermarket model generates little in terms of sustainable and autonomous livelihoods for the many. Still, as Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) have high densities of workers in small spaces, an inevitable consolidation of these businesses is predicted to ensue through the course of the pandemic. According to some experts the dismantling of SMEs will be further accelerated by shifts toward e-commerce for both retail and food delivery in the long-run (Reardon et al. 2020, 18).

Such a trajectory poses more questions: What are the short-term, medium-run and long-term consequences of this form of development, particularly for the lives and livelihoods of informal workers and poor consumers? Who will benefit and who will lose? Commenting on the current market conditions of India, in particular, Barbara Harris-White explains:

[…] the informal economy drives growth and livelihoods. It supplies labor-intensive exports. It provides the goods and services that COVID-19 reminds us are essential. Its costs and returns provide the structure of costs and prices for the rest of the economy. India’s comparative advantage relies on it. Labelled ‘unorganised,’ the informal economy is far from disorganised. […] While it is where poverty is concentrated, it is also the site of considerable wealth. (Harris-White 2020)

The lives of migrant and informal laborers are under pressure from two directions: on their capacity to circulate and make a living; and through the delegitimization of micro-street operations, markets and marketplaces. As illustrated throughout this collection, these are the places and activities such groups use to make a living, feed and entertain themselves. As the pandemic has left millions of people without work in cities around the world, it is difficult to take any recommendations seriously that do not directly engage with the problem of employment generation in proposing any reform of the food system in general.

Let us now turn to two other cases of markets and urban informality, this time looking to the global North. Refocusing attention on the streets of New York City, one of us has recently observed that few places have initially endured the strains of the pandemic as much as the borough of Queens (Allison 2020). Within its ethnically diverse, densely populated neighborhoods, many have fallen ill with the virus. That is, by March 26, 2020 – the first wave of the pandemic – New York City’s Health Department reported 7,362 cases in the borough (New York City Department of Health 2020; Correal, Jacobs, and Jones 2020). The main cause for this, according to healthcare providers, is that the pandemic is excessively impacting restaurant workers, street vendors, and cleaners. For example, within the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, Corona and Elmhurst, more than 23,000 people work in the restaurant sector, a share of more than 10% of the local workforce; the vast majority of these restaurant workers are immigrants: 88.7% in Jackson Heights/North Corona and 90% in Elmhurst/South Corona (see Office of the New York State Comptroller 2020, Appendix A). Like much of New York City, at the outset of the pandemic, the outbreak literally transformed parts of Queens. Roosevelt Avenue, the major commercial street that crosscuts these three neighborhoods, is host to many street vendors, both licensed and unlicensed; the street all but shut down in March (Heisler 2020). At the time of this writing, more people have joined its ranks of street vendors, many selling for the first time after having lost other work (Arredondo and Gonzalez 2020). On top of maintaining jobs that society considers “essential,” destitution, cramped housing, and reported state inactivity has made parts of Queens especially exposed to the virus. Exacerbating the catastrophe, many of these workers lack health care insurance and are prohibited from receiving federal government aid. For financially stressed minority groups, the gross wreckage and uncertainty echoes the stark inequalities of precarious informal work in cities of the global South.

After two years of nominal legalization, vendors in Los Angeles are losing their livelihoods as the city has prohibited them and increased enforcement. The ban comes just weeks before Mayor Garcetti rolled out the LA Alfresco initiative, which allows brick and mortar restaurants to seat diners in public spaces like sidewalks, alleyways, and parking lots after submitting a free application. Meanwhile, street vendor licenses cost over 500 USD to start, and even then there are multiple hurdles that must be navigated to be in compliance (Bureau of Street Services – StreetsLA n.d.). While the ban on vendors is currently in the process of being rescinded, the treatment of precarious laborers in Los Angeles reifies the inequities that mobile practitioners consistently face. Even though formalization of vending through legal instruments was meant to help secure mobile food practices, the pandemic is illustrating that in some US cities, although the state recognizes sidewalk businesses as legitimate, unless bounded by or associated with physical and permanent structures, mobile enterprises are not treated equally. Such perspectives not only perpetuate unjust treatment of mobile food provisioners, they also work to produce more spatial inequities.

IV. Micro provisioning on the street

In an age when consumers are drawn to big box stores and online retailers, including virtual restaurants, streets nevertheless remain places that feed cities. Some streets are more effective in producing and maintaining everyday social activities than others. While historical processes of development, planning, and design undoubtedly influence the effectiveness of streets, their utility today stems from the way in which ordinary people repurpose banal and everyday places: sidewalks, street corners, alleys, and parking lots. In particular, it is these places that make possible other momentary, unsanctioned, and unscripted activities centered around food. In other words, by individually adopting and carving out spaces on existing infrastructures, marginalized groups sustain their livelihoods through the confluence of formal and informal activities, which in turn significantly affects the social activities – and social hierarchies – along and adjacent to city streets.

Streets can support temporary social practices, not only enabling people to sustain their livelihoods but also to generate urban conviviality. A street’s ability to regularly accommodate temporary urban fluxes is contingent upon its commercial density and proximity to transportation infrastructures, but it is also influenced by urban planning and design institutions. The visions of urban design, however, often reflect the values of only some segments of society. As a result, not all have a say in what public space is and who has primary claim to it. As COVID-19 has forced some brick and mortar businesses to reconfigure the public realm, the potential to permanently transform some cities’ public sphere becomes visible. In New York City, local advocates for street vendors have insisted that vendors be included in the City’s official plans to open the streets to restaurant dining, which launched in June 2020 (The Street Vendor Project 2020), although the potential is restricted by the City’s severe cap on mobile food vending permits. In Los Angeles, architects, urban designers, and planners are beginning to pay attention to the ways that ordinary people use the cracks and fissures of cityscapes during the pandemic. In this way, COVID-19 presents opportunities for urban practitioners to reimagine underutilized elements of cities. For instance, restaurateurs in Koreatown have started to line alleyways and parking lots with canopies and white plastic tables to safely feed local residents, bringing tented food stalls (known as pojangmacha, as we see in the pages of this special issue) to the streets of Los Angeles. Activating the nooks and crannies of the built environment for temporary urban provisioning – as places where people can procure, cook and eat food – could not only help to create more livelihood opportunities for more people, but it could cumulatively transform a city into a more just place (Allison 2020). They are spaces that offer a sense of certainty for marginalized groups to mobilize and claim their right to the city. We therefore not only see streets as places of commerce, but also as sites of opportunity to support livelihoods, as urban provisioning infrastructures and as conduits of belonging for marginal populations.

V. Mapping this collection

The papers in this special issue bring a multidisciplinary approach to representations and practices of food vending across time and space. By focusing on street food and telling the stories of those who make it, sell it, regulate it and eat it, they reveal the various roles that street food plays in cities of the past and present; they peer into the relationship between micro-enterprise and urban liveliness; and they show how processes of urbanization shape both the social lives of streets and can in turn be shaped by vendors themselves.

Taking readers from Beijing to Boston in the modern world, this special issue begins with Jayeeta Sharma’s comparative historical analysis of street cries. As a historian she posits conceptual and methodological questions, such as: How and why did city governments silence street cries across the world? What evidence exists to write such a sonic history? Sharma contends that for centuries food cries have been an acoustic, socio-economic, and cultural phenomenon that are key constituents of culinary provisioning and subaltern livelihoods. From the nineteenth century, her article examines how and why such cries began to be portrayed negatively. Along the way, she argues that after street cries were sanctioned, curtailed, and banned, they reemerged as sites of sentimentality as postcards and coffee table books.

Elaborating on the concept of culinary infrastructure, historians Joel Dickau, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Samantha K. Young show how immigrant vendors and retailers shaped Toronto while becoming an essential part of its system of provisioning. Culinary infrastructure is the hard and soft aspects of urban provisioning systems: the marketplaces, streets, trucks, street carts and cultural knowledge that goes into getting the best produce for the price and transforming it into desired dishes. In focusing on the history of St. Lawrence Market and Kensington Market, the authors reveal that while the allocation and regulation of markets were intended to assimilate immigrants into an idealized Anglo city, newcomers actively shaped Toronto’s foodways.

Sociologist James Farrer takes readers to postwar Japan’s vast black market districts surrounding urban commuter train stations with small-scale retail, food and alcohol vendors. He reveals that most markets were removed during a period of high economic growth at the end of the twentieth century and replaced with modern shopping centers. Today, only a few of the dense warrens of pedestrian alleyways survive – one of them, “Willow Alley,” has recently been revived as mixed-gender space of eating and drinking. Farrer’s analysis shows why people still hanker for the sociability of the street even after it is successfully eradicated with modernist dreams.

Singapore is the city of dreams for those who want to travel quickly from Third World to First World status, as Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (ruled from 1959–1990) wrote into the title of his memoirs. One of his claims to fame was moving street vendors to hawker centers built around housing developments. Hygiene and flow of traffic, two enduring arguments in the removal of street vendors, were most successfully constructed there. Historian Daniel Bender shows that many mistake the symptom – vendorless streets – with the substance of upward mobility for the city-state, which in reality is linked to its function as a hinge in the rise of the East Asian regional economy. The Singaporean case study illuminates how a combination of supermarkets and hawker centers can function as a new mode of feeding the family as servants and housewives are pulled into the formal economy.

Another instance of vendors vanishing from the streets comes from Seoul, South Korea, where tented food stalls called pojangmacha have for generations purveyed cheap, tasty fare from early evening until late into the night. Accompanied with beer and soju, these male dominated places used to sell tteokbokki, odeng, and gimbap. Increasing numbers of female customers, students and foreign tourists are however transforming the demand toward new kinds of foods, argues Robert Ji-Song Ku, Jungah Kim, and Hyunjoo Yu. From a Cultural Studies lens, the authors show how street foods have come to intersect with the changing nature of Korean masculinity, altering alcohol consumption, and new media ecologies where Hallyu – Korean Wave – has taken hold, driving Chinese tourism that is shifting the gendered geography of Korean streets.

Street vendors may be vanishing in some parts of the world, especially in those regions that have climbed most dramatically in the global hierarchy of capital accumulation over the last fifty years, but they remain an essential part of the urban infrastructure in Mexico, argues Tiana Bakić Hayden. She contends that access to cheap food for the commuting poor residing on the city’s periphery is an important but under-explored dimension of urban food security. The anthropologist’s piece engages with scholarship focused on African and South Asia cities, which suggest that street food vendors play a crucial role in providing affordable food to the urban poor and working classes. The discourse of vendor removability, she contends, can be seen as describing a spectrum of actions, from tolerance to periodic or performative repression, to outright removal that are relevant to a variety of urban contexts around the world such as Bangkok, Delhi and Durban.

Fabio Parasecoli grapples with how mobile gentrification influences streets as he presses on the cultural coolness of the Anglophone “street food” in Italian cities, and their difference from traditional foods of the street (cibo di strada). The food design scholar contends that this new “street food” tends toward handmade pasta, and pizzas with haute toppings. He interrogates the difference between the two categories of food of the street and how those differences emerged within the broader social dynamics, such as the birth of new professions and the appearance of new media and architectural ecologies.

Taking the case of Jay Fai, the first Michelin-starred street vendor in Bangkok, consecrated both by the King and Thai Airways for its street food menu, Trude Renwick examines how street vending is positioned relative to nation-building in Bangkok. Both advocates for street vendors and officials arguing for restrictions frame street vending as a part of national culture, yet much of that argument is mounted round the contested notion of ‘good’ vendors worth preserving and not-so-good criminal vendors coming in the way of traffic flows and tourists. The urban studies scholar shows how models of development and ethnic conflict play out in Bangkok, the locus of new administrative initiatives pushing for the Singapore model, which is corporatizing commercial spaces.

Lastly, using examples from Delhi, India, Amita Baviskar shows how street vendors maneuver to survive in an inhospitable city. Derived from multiple histories of migration, as well as the layout of the city, the sociologist illustrates that vendors depend on their own ethnic identities as well as their customers as sources of survival. In describing the rich seasonal fare of fresh sugarcane juice squeezed with ginger and lime, chicken soup, samosas, and peeled, salted cucumbers, Baviskar reveals the subtle connections between markets and migrants which provides a larger thematic unity to this collection. Wherever there are markets there are migrants and wherever there are migrants there are markets. Furthermore, as in Singapore, negotiations over food vending occur not only on the street, but also through the virtual world of food blogs and videos. By representing street food as a valued part of city culture, she additionally shows how the internet has emerged as a space where the claims of street vendors acquire greater legitimacy in the public sphere.

VI. In closing

From a comparative perspective, this collection examines the lives of street vendors, their markets and their representations in discourse and visual materials prior to the onslaught of the pandemic. Modern states often see good food as something that is driven off the street into supermarkets, homes, cafeterias, messes, and restaurants. This special issue counters the gaze of capital and the state in its theorizations about provisioning, cooking, and feeding – the very things that Modernist urban planners, such as Le Corbusier, wanted to banish from consideration (Scott 1999). Over time, where less-competitive markets for provisioning have prevailed – such as the scaled-up supermarket model of development in the global North – street vending has been undermined. And, as we highlight throughout this introduction, immediate threats to vendor livelihoods have become even more acute in some cities today. There is no doubt that the current pandemic poses new challenges to street food and to the mobile lives of vendors and informal workers who provision cities around the world. Looking forward, we urge stakeholders to use this as an opportunity to re-think, re-envision and re-work how cities feed themselves for a socially sustainable future.

The ongoing challenges to street vendors and essential workers in the informal sector – now so forcefully laid bare to the broader public by the COVID-19 crisis – illustrate how the food system is twinned with the healthcare system. In the global North, inequality expresses itself primarily through inadequate access to nutritious food, especially fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Those without access to such foods can experience chronic malnutrition. Unsustainable wage and scarcity of time force the poor to consume foods that are industrially processed and stripped of nutrients in the pursuit of value-added, shelf-stable profits. Populations structurally condemned to absorb profit-making processed foods pay the price with co-morbidities that have devastated poor populations, often Black and Brown, in places such as New York City. In cities in the global South, like New Delhi, the connection between healthcare and the food system manifests most directly by unemployment for the poor and by hyper-consumption for the rich. Without sustainable employment, financially insecure people lack access to minimum and necessary resources both in terms of food and healthcare. Secure employment is the lynchpin of sustainable development in parts of the world where the poor are literally hungry and malnourished. There are no short-term alternatives for street vending which provides income to a substantial population in cities of the global South.

As the opening vignette in Delhi reveals, the COVID-19 crisis has the capacity to kill street vending and competitive markets, further endangering the lives of the poor and liveliness of cities. It remains to be seen how Indian writers and artists can bring the Pandit family’s travails to bear on the conscience of the nation. While Pandit received a charitable gift of 5,500 rupees and a train ticket from a woman who witnessed his plight, time will only tell if Pandit returns to work in the city that betrayed him, but many others like him will. As some observers point out, many rural migrants already have returned, driven by the search for livelihood and basic necessities to enable their survival (Kumar 2020b); this speedy return to the status quo makes invisible the harms to migrant labor practices (Kidambi 2020), despite a continually unfolding humanitarian crisis of hunger and precarity. Responding to the need for more social supports, India recently revealed a national initiative to provide microcredit to street vendors to help formalize the sector. Street vendors are newly eligible to receive loans of up to 10,000 rupees for one year, though as commentators note the cap on the number of loans made (5 million) and the strict qualifying criteria exclude many more people who make their living by selling goods on the street (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India 2020; Kumar 2020a). So overall, in the short-run, the challenges for informal workers have been acute due to the unevenness of strategies and the paucity of resources used to protect the livelihoods of the poor. In the medium-run, there may be better prospects for vendors and markets in the global South, particularly in parts of South Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa where the reach of both capital and state are under-developed. But, in the long-run, there are storm clouds gathering on the horizon for flexible forms of micro-provisioning.

While the current crisis is a grave test for the informal sector, it also presents new opportunities, and the potential for durable, innovative social and economic uses of urban space. As we see even in regions where the state is over-developed, such as in China, South Korea, and Taiwan, it is difficult to simply legislate away street vendors. On June 1, 2020, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang noted that street vending would be important to alleviate high rates of unemployment that officially stood at 6.2% in February 2020, but are unofficially estimated to have hovered around 20% (Zhang 2020). Official statistics show that Chengdu added 100,000 new street vendors. As The Economist has underlined, “For years, municipal officials pushed out hawkers, trying to tidy up the colorful hubbub that once characterized China’s cities. In the name of ‘civilizing’ urban life, they wanted to see steamed dumplings and plastic toys sold inside shopping malls, not from the back of carts” (2020). Twenty-seven Chinese provinces and cities welcomed hawkers back this past June, and though Shanghai city officials still oppose street vendors, they did open a large night market. There are new openings for lasting equitable interventions in the global North, too. Social distancing practices meant to stave off the spread of the virus are fundamentally changing the way that some cities are using public space. The unintended consequences of COVID-19 in some places, like Los Angeles and New York City, are motivating people to think about, use, and manage some of the most underutilized public spaces for food provisioning, such as sidewalks and parking lots. New and creative ways of feeding the city also have the potential to economically empower marginalized groups. Context matters, of course; what works in Los Angeles may be different from what works in Shanghai or in New Delhi. We are cautious not to interpret the pandemic’s effects on food vending through just one narrative, but rather to pay attention to experiences from the cities of the global South to acknowledge the varied ways that people collectively and flexibly navigate urban life (Bhan et al. 2020). Thus, while our focus on street food vendors and markets is to reflect a larger story about how disparities manifest themselves – both within cities and across them, on a global scale – we might end on a sanguine note, to put forward the current moment as an opportunity to empower the many in their lived experiences of the city.

In this collection, we theorize markets – and the mobilization of urban space for food provisioning and microenterprise – beyond the singular narrative of capital accumulation (for lively examples of other uses of marketplaces, see Mohanty 2020; Kasinitz 2020; Anderson 2011; Zukin, Kasinitz, and Chen 2014). These are opening gambits in that re-conceptualization, underlining historical, comparative and critical cultural analysis. We hope that juxtaposing cities and practices in the context of the current crisis provides an opportunity to re-think the city-provisioning model imported from the global North and mimicked in every aspiring global city. At its most ambitious, this collection provides insights from elsewhere and other times to illuminate the multiple possibilities of urban provisioning systems, showing how they could be more participatory, lively and accessible to many.

– November 2020

Acknowledgments

This special issue was made possible by an NYU Provost Global Seed Grant for Collaborative Research. We extend our thanks to this issue’s contributors and to all participants at the November 2018 City Food workshop, Comparative Study of Street Vending Across Time and Place, which influenced the early direction of this work. We take responsibility for any errors and omissions. Finally, we are beholden to the mobile food practitioners who, in the past and present, feed and activate cities around the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NYU Provost’s Global Seed Grant for Collaborative Research.

Notes on contributors

Noah Allison

Noah Allison holds a PhD in Urban Policy from The New School in New York City. His research focuses on cities at the intersection of migration, everyday life, and food. His book project, “Immigrant Foodways,” analyzes food practices to understand how they influence the spatial, social, and political dynamics of ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Queens, New York.

Krishnendu Ray

Krishnendu Ray is the Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University; author of The Migrant’s Table (2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016); and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012). He was formerly a faculty member and the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America (1996–2005) and the President of The Association for the Study of Food and Society from 2014–2018.

Jaclyn Rohel

Jaclyn Rohel holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University and recently took up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Culinaria Research Centre. Her work focuses on cities, public culture and the marketplace. She has written on culinary mobilities and innovation in global foodways, on hospitality and material culture, and on social issues that intersect, policy and urban governance.