What does the future hold for street food in Bangkok?
On Friday, December 13, Bangkok city officials launched a pilot project to close several streets to traffic on weekend evenings: the goal is to make room for street vendors, attract tourists, and thereby boost the local economy.
Gwenn Pulliat, University of Montpellier and Carmen Dreysse, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
These few streets are located in the city’s most tourist-heavy neighborhoods: Yaowarat (Chinatown), Khao San Road, and Silom. While the capital is already a major hub for the region, the development of tourism remains a priority for local and national authorities.
This initiative may seem rather mundane, given the global trend toward reimagining pedestrian zones to revitalize city centers. But in Bangkok, it is not without irony: since 2014, local authorities (the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, BMA) have been implementing a policy banning street vending. This is part of the “reorganization of public space” decided by the ruling military junta. The BMA translates this general directive into the campaign “Give the Sidewalks Back to Pedestrians,” which promises order and cleanliness in the city. This eviction policy affects some 200,000 to 300,000 street vendors (of whom about 40% are food vendors, according to estimates), including those who were registered and operating in areas officially designated for street vending.
The removal of street vendors: differences depending on the area of the city
The enforcement of this eviction varies across different parts of the city. For instance, in the central commercial and business district around Siam Square or along the main thoroughfares, intense police monitoring ensures that street vendors do indeed leave public spaces. The soi, the city’s typical alleyways, are conversely less closely monitored and still host numerous street vendors. The boundaries between public and private space are porous there, as anthropologist Bronwin Isaacs has highlighted.
Vendors negotiate with residents or stores to rent private spaces along the street. Most, however, occupy public space illegally and must therefore flee when the police arrive, or risk having their goods and carts confiscated and being fined. Police checks are a daily occurrence. The vendors interviewed report a decline in their income and new difficulties resulting from these police evictions.
Street food: a cultural heritage promoted for tourism
In this context of evictions, tourist districts occupy a unique position. As early as April 2017, in response to the uproar in the international press following the ban on street vending, theTourism Authority of Thailand issued a statement confirming that two major tourist districts would not be affected. The statement also emphasized that “Bangkok would remain a premier destination for street food.” The authorities’ removal of street vendors is therefore not accompanied by a rejection of street food as such—quite the contrary. Indeed, the capital’s street food has been renowned beyond Thailand’s borders for several years. For example, the American television network CNN ranked Bangkok first among the world’s best cities for street food two years in a row. This is a definite asset for the government, which is well aware of the importance of tourism to its economy (38 million visitors in 2018, contributing approximately 15% of GDP).
Tourist districts are therefore designed to preserve what contributes to the capital’s charm: its street food culture, within a global context that is generally favorable to street food. The Michelin star awarded in 2017 to a “street vendor,” Jay Fai, symbolizes the worldwide recognition of the quality of this cuisine. However, although portrayed as a street food icon, notably by the Netflix series Street Food, Jay Fai is not representative of street vendors. She operates from a fixed stall and offers dishes at prices that are exorbitant for the local market. Her famous crab omelet costs twenty times more than the dishes offered by street vendors.
Policies regulating street food sales thus tend to distinguish between street food on the one hand and street vendors on the other. Street food, highlighted as cultural heritage, is promoted; protected in tourist districts and new weekend night markets starting in December 2019, it has become a leisure activity tailored for foreign visitors and the dominant urban classes. Street food is set to endure in these neighborhoods, but its authorization goes hand in hand with its regulation.
Municipal authorities are thus helping to shape a particular form of street vending that retains the appearance of traditional street food (the same typical dishes, the same stalls open to the outside, the same air of simplicity and bustle) but diverges from it due to new restrictions imposed on street vendors (reduced sales areas and hours, increased health inspections, wearing specific uniforms, for example). Informal street vendors, on the other hand, are being driven out of public spaces and face daily police crackdowns. Thus, the return of street vendors to the capital’s tourist areas is less a reversal by the local government than an attempt to control street vending, aiming to turn this cuisine into a marketing and leisure commodity rather than a daily food source for residents.
Street vending: a target of the city’s modernization policies
The main argument for banning street vending citywide is the need to modernize the city. This is a narrative that recurs frequently in the history of street vending in major cities around the world. This vision of modernity can be traced back to the early20th century in New York, for example, as analyzed by Daniel Bluestone. Authorities contrast street markets—deemed chaotic and archaic—with specialty stores and shopping malls, which serve as showcases of a clean and orderly modernity.
Similar arguments can be found today in various cities across Southeast and East Asia. These eviction processes can be understood through the lens of the concept of the “revenge city,” originally developed by Neil Smith to analyze gentrification processes in New York and Philadelphia. In Bangkok, this same analytical framework highlights the class dynamics at play: if we can speak here of “revanchist” urbanization, it is because street vendors—often from working-class backgrounds and hailing from rural areas across the country—are being targeted by the urban political elite that has been in power since the coup. Urban planners view them as an obstacle to both vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The argument invoked is that of mobility; it justifies the removal of a practice associated with illegality, disorder, and even filth (waste management). Thus, street vendors are considered undesirable in a public space planned first and foremost for the middle and upper classes, whether local or foreign.
Promoting “tourist-oriented” street food sales while banning the daily food sales of city residents: this policy of displacement raises serious questions about equitable access to food. Regulations governing public spaces tend to exclude Thailand’s working classes, while simultaneously reintegrating and reinterpreting practices that were once customary for them.
This article is based on a study conducted as part of the Street Food research project funded by the CNRS and INRA.
Gwenn Pulliat, Geography Researcher, University of Montpellier and Carmen Dreysse, Research Intern at the CNRS, UMR Art-Dev, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.