What does the future hold for street food in Bangkok?

On Friday December 13, Bangkok's municipal authorities launched a pilot project to pedestrianize some streets on weekend evenings: the aim is to make way for street vendors, to attract tourists and thus develop the local economy.

Gwenn Pulliat, University of Montpellier and Carmen Dreysse, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

These few streets are located in the city's most touristic districts: Yaorawat (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 alike.

This initiative may seem rather banal, in an international context of redeployment of pedestrian zones to revitalize city centers. But in Bangkok, it doesn't lack 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 slogan into a campaign entitled "Return the sidewalks to pedestrians", which promises order and cleanliness in the city. This eviction policy concerns some 200,000 to 300,000 street vendors (of which an estimated 40% are food vendors), including those who were registered and set up in areas officially dedicated to street vending.

Evicting street vendors: differences between different areas of the city

Enforcement of this eviction policy varies from one part of the city to another. In the central business district around Siam Square and on the main thoroughfares, intense police surveillance ensures that street vendors do indeed leave the public space. On the other hand, the soi, the city's typical alleyways, are less controlled and still have many street vendors. The boundaries between public and private space are porous, as anthropologist Bronwin Isaacs has shown.

Vendors negotiate with residents or stores to rent private spaces adjoining the street. Most, however, occupy public space illegally, and have to flee when the police appear, on pain of having their products and trolleys confiscated and having to pay a fine. Police checks are a daily occurrence. The vendors interviewed report a drop in income and new difficulties due to police expulsion.

Street food, a cultural heritage that promotes tourism

In this context of eviction, tourist districts occupy a singular place. Back in April 2017, in response to the international press's outcry over the street food ban, the TourismAuthority of Thailand issued a statement certifying that two major tourist districts would not be affected. The statement also emphasized that "Bangkok will remain a leading destination for street food ". The authorities' eviction of street vendors does not mean a rejection of street food as such - quite the contrary. In fact, the reputation of the capital's street food has extended beyond Thailand's borders for several years now. For example, the American television channel CNN has awarded Bangkok first place among the world's best cities for street food two years running. This is a definite plus for the political powers that be, aware of the weight of tourism in its economy (38 million visitors in 2018 contributing around 15% of GDP).

The tourist districts are thus shaped in such a way as to preserve what would be part of the capital's charm: its street food, in an international context that is globally favorable to street food. The Michelin star awarded in 2017 to a "street vendor", Jay Fai, symbolizes global recognition of the quality of this gastronomy. Yet, although portrayed as a street food icon, notably by the Netflix series Street Food, Jay Fai is not representative of street vendors. She operates out of a fixed stall, offering dishes at exorbitant prices for the local market. Her famous crab omelette costs twenty times more than the preparations offered by street vendors.

Policies to regulate street food sales therefore tend to distinguish between street food on the one hand and street vendors on the other. Street food, as a highlighted cultural heritage, is promoted; protected in tourist districts and the new weekend night markets from December 2019, it becomes a leisure practice, built for foreign visitors and the dominant urban classes. Street food is set to continue in these districts, but its authorization goes hand in hand with its supervision.

In this way, the municipal authorities are helping to build a certain type of street vending, which retains the appearance of traditional street food (same typical dishes, same stalls that are wide open to the outside, same appearance of simplicity and effervescence), but is distanced from it by the new constraints placed on street vendors (reduced sales areas and hours, increased health checks, wearing of specific clothing, for example). Informal street vendors, on the other hand, are driven out of the public space and face daily police repression. As a result, the return of street vendors to the capital's tourist areas is less a U-turn on the part of the local government than an attempt to control street vending, by tending to make this gastronomy a marketing and leisure object, rather than a daily food resource for the inhabitants.

Street vending, the target of city modernization policies

The main argument for banning street vending in the capital is the need to modernize the city. It's a line of argument that can be found throughout the history of street vending in metropolises the world over. In New York, for example, this vision of modernity can be found as early as the beginning of the ^20th century, as analyzed by Daniel Bluestone. The authorities contrasted street markets, considered chaotic and archaic, with specialty stores and shopping malls, showcases of clean, orderly modernity.

Similar arguments can be found today in various cities in Southeast and East Asia. These eviction procedures can be read through the prism of the "revanchist city" concept, originally developed by Neil Smith to consider gentrification processes in New York and Philadelphia. In Bangkok, this same framework highlights the class relations at play: if we can speak of "revanchist" urbanization here, it's because street vendors, often from the working classes and coming from rural areas in the rest of the country, are targeted by the urban political elite in power since the coup d'état. Planners see them as an obstacle to both road and pedestrian traffic. The argument used is that of mobility, justifying the eviction of a practice associated with illegality, disorder and even dirtiness (waste management). Street vendors are thus considered undesirable in a public space planned first and foremost for the middle and upper classes, whether local or foreign.

Promoting "touristified" street food sales while banning daily food sales by the city's residents: this policy of eviction strongly raises the question of justice in access to food. Public space regulations tend to exclude the Thai working classes, while reintegrating and reinterpreting practices that were customary to them.

This article is based on a study carried out as part of the Street Food research project funded by CNRS and INRA.

Gwenn Pulliat, Geography researcher, University of Montpellier and Carmen Dreysse, CNRS research intern, UMR Art-Dev, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.