Colin Cheong MFA Collaborative Design Practicum 2016
Street Food Sites: A Recipe for Street Food Spaces in our Cities
It has been estimated by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations that 2.5 billion people eat street food everyday. However, inquiry and discourse of the street food industry’s influence on our cities have been fairly limited. Based on my ethnographic research of the street food scene in Portland, Oregon USA, the aim of this paper is to identify and describe new taxonomy to examine how street food shapes our cities. This paper comprises three main sections. The first section surveys and analyses the key concepts of space in the city. In the second section, I introduce new conceptual frameworks to describe the phenomenon of street food spaces in our urbanscapes. I also propose the term “Street Food Sites” and demonstrate how these Sites develop and function in cities. The final section of the paper incorporates in-depth interviews, observations and portraitures of street food vendors in Portland and argues that “Street Food Sites” shape the identities of our cities and must be considered in urban planning and development.