Vital Streets and Virtuous Food: Food Carts and Urban Space in North America

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Public Spaces

Abstract

Based on a case study of food carts and trucks in Vancouver, Canada, this paper seeks to understand why cities that once regulated most food vending out of and off of city streets and sidewalks have chosen to re-open these spaces to new forms of food vending. This paper argues that food carts bring together a particular set of perspectives on urban space with a set of perspectives on food, effectively serving as “containers of virtue,” capacious enough to represent both the vital urban street and virtuous food. By wedding ideas about good urban space with understandings of good and worthy food, food carts have gained assess to urban spaces that have otherwise largely been given over to the rationalized “flows” of people and vehicles on city streets and sidewalks. Vancouver provides an example where the complex relationship between an ostensibly democratic cosmopolitan food culture (Johnston and Baumann 2010) and cultural perspectives on cities and urban space intersect in increasingly significant ways with city governance, as city leaders view the streets as sites where cultural value can be generated.

Author

• Amy Hanser, University of British Columbia