From Hippie to Hip: City Governance and Two Eras of Street Vending in Vancouver, Canada

This chapter examines the contrast between street vending and city regulatory responses in Vancouver, Canada during two time periods—the 1970s and the 2010s. The comparison of “hippy” vending in the 1970s and “hip” food carts and trucks four decades later illustrates the contradictory impulses that shape regulation of commercial activity on city streets. First, there is a process of “formalization” that seeks to tame the informality and messiness of street vending through new rules, standards and regulations. But by the 2010s, a second, contradictory, impulse appears: an embrace of informality reflecting new ideas about “vital” city streets and identifying street vending, in the form of food trucks and carts, as “hip.” But the apparent embrace of the informal has unfolded through highly formalized procedures, and the vitality associated with vending in Vancouver is acceptable precisely because it has been (re)introduced in a highly formalized, regulated form.

To Serve and to Protect: Food Trucks and Food Safety in a Transforming Los Angeles

This chapter explores the evolution of food trucks and food safety regulations for these vehicles in the Los Angeles region between WW2 and the present. It shows how food trucks have reacted to and influenced the region’s industrialization and deindustrialization, and how food trucks became more informal and public as immigration made Los Angeles a majority non-white metropolis. In considering how food safety changed as operators began cooking on board trucks, the chapter examines how safety rules can both protect the public and reflect social norms of legitimacy around identity and public space.

Relaxing Regulatory Controls: Vendor Advocacy and Rights in Mobile Food Vending

Beginning in 2008, city policymakers across the nation became increasingly involved in regulatory debates and policy revisions surrounding mobile food vending. Despite vendors’ abilities to reactivate neglected urban areas and increase food access for underserved neighborhoods, many issues related to unfair competition, public health and safety, and prejudices continue to dominate regulatory frameworks that limit vendors’ entrepreneurial freedoms and spatial opportunities. Using three regulatory conflicts between food vendors and policymakers, this chapter highlights the motivating factors that can guide regulatory decision-making and the ways vendors destabilize and shape formal mechanisms of regulatory control. Topics include public health, restaurant protectionism, and cultural injustice at both state and city levels. This research suggests that despite rigid regulatory policies and the variety of economic, social, and political factors that influence governments’ responses to mobile food vending, active municipal investment in the public realm combined with vendors’ grassroots efforts can generate just policies. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the significance of vendor advocacy and the supportive roles of food vending organizations across the United States to illustrate the ways vendors increase social justice in cities.

Introduction

The urban food scape is changing rapidly. Food trucks, which are part of a wider phenomenon of street food vending, are an increasingly common sight in many cities throughout the United States and Canada. With this rise in the popularity of food trucks, the key issue of regulatory conflicts between the state, street food vending and food truck entrepreneurs, and the wider industry as a whole, has risen to the fore. Cities have responded in various ways to increased interest in mobile food vending – some have adopted encouraging and relaxed regulations, some have attempted to harness the momentum to craft a city brand, and some have rigidly regulated food trucks in response to protest by brick-and-mortar competitors. This Introduction frames the volume through its guiding questions and a variety of lenses - community economic development, social justice, postmodernism. The Introduction also outlines the sections of the volume (Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices and Spatial-Cultural Practices) and summarizes the chapters included in each section.

Is It Local … or Authentic and Exotic? Ethnic Food Carts and Gastropolitan Habitus on Portland’s Eastside

In this chapter, examine the location of ethnic food cart owners within Portland, Oregon’s food cart scene, and within the broader paradigms of local food and sustainability for which the city is known. Through an inventory of food carts, interviews with cart owners, and a case study of the Portland Mercado food cart pod, we explore how the everyday practices of ethnic food cart owners on Portland’s eastside reflect and differ from those of other food cart owners. Drawing on Bourdieu, we demonstrate how their practices in turn reshape the wider “gastropolitan” field of foodie tastes. We argue that cart owners unsettle the eco-centric values dominating Portand’s foodie culture by emphasizing authenticity and exoticism. The ability to capitalize on a particular set of gastropolitan values – local and organic or authentic and exotic – is geographically uneven, however; it depends on both the physical agglomeration of food carts espousing a particular set of gastropolitan values, and on their location within the foodscape, a position very much tied to economic processes of gentrification and displacement bifurcating the city.

Atlanta’s Food Truck Fervor: Policy Impediments and Entrepreneurial Efforts to Expand Mobile Cuisine

This chapter explores the evolution of Atlanta’s local food truck movement, contextualizing the rise of this emerging industry within the changing local and state regulatory environment. Through a review of historical documents and a survey of social media outlets, the researchers find that food truck vendors in Atlanta, aided by third sector intermediaries, have thrived by working around, rather than within, the existing regulatory framework. Despite the ability of this new industry to cater to a specific middle and upper class market, food trucks in Atlanta have not increased entrepreneurial diversity or access to new and healthy foods for low-income neighborhoods as some advocates have argued. The Atlanta food truck case exemplifies the problems that restrictive policies can cause by demarcating public and private space in ways that privilege entrenched interests and restrict entrepreneurship and innovation.

Scripting the City: Street Food, Urban Policy, and Neoliberal Redevelopment in Vancouver, Canada

The reintroduction of food trucks to Vancouver responds to widespread public demand, yet has also been taken up as another tool of urban governance. Licensing restrictions are used to further municipal policy priorities, thus incorporating street food into city branding and urban redevelopment strategies. Although crafted to foster liveability, food truck licensing is also expected to advance the goal of making Vancouver the Greenest City and to project an image of a healthy, sustainable, multicultural city. While street food is being made increasingly accessible, it is simultaneously becoming a tool of biopolitical regulation. As food trucks participate in shaping urban space, they risk contributing to gentrification and the displacement of the very residents this increased accessibility is meant to serve.

Eating in the City: Fidel Gastro, Street Performance, and the Right to the City

This chapter applies different concepts of radical street theatre and urban performance in order to theorize the ways in which food trucks form temporary communities in urban spaces through embodied, performative intervention. An ethnographic portrait of one of Toronto’s first and best-known food truck entrepreneurs, Fidel Gastro, is employed to demonstrate the precarious position food trucks hold within the political narratives governing public space in the city of Toronto, and the ambivalence food truck entrepreneurs display toward current configurations of urban market economies. David Harvey’s conception of the right to the city is then critically applied to this scenario in order to argue that food trucks harbor the potential to intervene in dominant urban narratives, allowing urban dwellers to assert the common right to change ourselves by changing our cities.

Reflexive Food Truck Justice: A Case Study in CLiCK, Inc., a Nonprofit, Shared-Use Commercial Kitchen

This chapter critically applies the concept of reflexive food justice to the creation and running of a non-profit shared-use commercial kitchen, CLiCK, Inc., in Eastern Connecticut in order to critically evaluate to what degree it does or does not meet the criteria of reflexive food justice. The purpose of such an analysis is to question the ways in which shared use kitchens can act as agents of progressive social change in relation to facilitating low-income community members to have access of a commercial kitchen so that they may incubate a food business, which may or may not involve a food tuck or food cart. In many states food trucks and food carts need to be affiliated with a brick and mortar kitchen and so CLiCK makes such an affiliation affordable to those who might not be able to otherwise start a food business. Since the chapter is written by CLICK’s co-founder and Board President this critical analysis provides intimate details as to the struggles in not just running a non-profit shared use commercial kitchen, but in doing so in ways that seek to promote progressive social change, both within the organization itself and the surrounding community.

Learning from New Orleans: Will Revising or Relaxing Public Space Ordinances Create a Just Environment for Street Commerce?

During 2010s, in response to new food truck operators, the city of New Orleans loosened regulations for food truck vending. At the same time the city turned its regulatory eye towards other forms of street vending and introduced a new second line vending ordinance. Using the New Orleans case, we argue that relaxing rather than revising regulations—and subsequently planning for ways to make street vending compatible with other activities—would be more effective and just. The authors participated in and observed 32 second line parades (parades organized and sponsored by African-American historic benevolent societies) during one season to understand how second line vending played out and the potential impacts of the new ordinance. This analysis demonstrates that compliance with the second line ordinance would have restricted vending without resolving identified concerns. New Orleans is an instructive case because the intent was to allow rather than eliminate vending. We argue that increasing compatibility between vending and other street activities makes food and goods available in the spaces were urban residents can most easily access them, and thereby establishes a more effective and just public space.