ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews urban practices related to street food to begin to map different typologies of street food, their relationship with the built environment, and their strategic value as place activators. Research relating to street food has been an increasingly popular topic within the academic literature in the recent decade, mainly focusing on African and Asian contexts, and typically considering food safety but also availability and consumption patterns. Research primarily explores issues of contamination of the food itself and the practices of the vendors handling the food to understand safety practices, rather than the lived experience of the street food as a phenomenon. Street food has become a self-referential event aimed to attract people for commercial purposes; the authenticity of the food offered and the close link between food and locale is threatened by an over simplistic interpretation of food as a placemaking agent.
