 Welcome, everybody, to the SOAS Food Study Center Distinguished Lecture. My name is Jacob Klein. I'm the current chair of the Center, which was established in 2007, to promote research and teaching in the field of food studies at SOAS, and to foster links between SOAS and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in food studies. The Center runs a weekly seminar series, convenes workshops and conferences, and oversees a master's program in the anthropology of food. Each year, the Center invites a prominent figure in the world of food studies to deliver a distinguished lecture. Previous speakers in the series include Sidney Mintz, Melissa Caldwell, James Scott, Yotam Otolenghi, Amita Bhaviskar, and Alan Ward. Several of the previous distinguished lectures have been recorded and can be viewed via the SOAS Food Study Center web pages and YouTube Playlist. Tonight's lecture by Professor Krishnan Duray will also be recorded and made available online. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session, and after that, you are all warmly welcome to join us and the speaker for drinks and nibbles. The reception will be held in the foyer just outside this lecture theater. Tonight's distinguished lecture has been made possible by the contributions of several people and institutions. We are very grateful for the help we've had from Patrick Campbell in the SOAS A.V. team, from Mukta Das, who has just completed a Ph.D. at SOAS in the anthropology of food, and from several student volunteers on the MA anthropology of food program, Natasha Bunzel, Apoor Vasripati, Missy Malik Flynn, and Ananda Binkhurst. The assistance and support that we have received from Jane Savry and Charles Tyende Ubsel in the SOAS Center and Programs Office has been outstanding. In fact, every major event that the center has held since we were established nearly 12 years ago from distinguished lectures to book launches to conferences has been made possible by our stellar colleagues in the Centers and Programs Office. Since 2014, the SOAS Food Study Center has enjoyed the collaboration and sponsorship of Gastronomica, the Journal of Critical Food Studies. Tonight's lecture will be published in the journal, as have several previous distinguished lectures. We are deeply grateful to Gastronomica, to its publisher, the University of California Press, and not least to its outgoing editor, Melissa Caldwell, and its outgoing managing editor, Rebecca Farnberg. Melissa Caldwell is here tonight. Before introducing the speaker, I would like to invite her to say a few words. Melissa? Hi, thank you all very much for coming here. It's a little bittersweet for me tonight because this is my last formal public duty as the outgoing editor, but I wanted to say a few words because I think this has been an incredibly rich and rewarding partnership between Gastronomica and the SOAS Food Study Center. As Jacob mentioned, we've had a number of wonderful, exciting lectures. We have some of the lectures that have been published in Gastronomica include those by Yota Motolenghi, James Scott, Amita Bhavisgarh, David Sutton, Alan Ward. Did I miss anybody yet? Oh, I'm sorry? But he wasn't part of the Gastronomica partnership yet. That was pre-Gastronomica. So there's kind of a pre-Gastronomica partnership and a current Gastronomica partnership. So anyway, it's going to be exciting to have Krishna and Dew's piece in the journal as well. So as my last formal public duty, I would like to say thank you to a number of people. And first is the SOAS Food Study Center for making this possible and for really doing an incredible job with these lectures. And in particular, Jacob Lizzie Hall and Harry West, who was the chair of the SOAS Food Study Center before Jacob, and the Army of Masters PhD students in postdocs who have come through the SOAS Food Study Center, who have been incredibly helpful and wonderful, intellectual interlocutors as well. And then more generally, I think one of the nice things about this partnership is it has brought many other people in the local food studies community into Gastronomica and Gastronomica has been enlivened by these. So a couple of other thank yous to Sammy Zubeda and James Staples, among others, who have been wonderful reviewers and contributors to this. And then lastly, Gastronomica and this partnership would not have worked without members of the editorial board of the journal and their wonderful contributions. And so here, I'd like to thank Jacob as an editorial board member and Mercott as an editorial board member and Christian Endure as one of the editorial board members. And so it's especially exciting now that Christian Endure is giving this lecture because he's not only moving from the editorial board, but he's now going to be part of the new editorial collective that's taking the helms of the journal. So thank you all very much for your work and thank you all very much for supporting these lectures by being here. Thank you, Melissa. Christian Endure is a leading figure in the world of food studies. He is chair in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University and until recently president of the Association for the Study of Food and Society. He is also, as mentioned, one of the incoming editors of Gastronomica. Ray was for many years based at Upstate New York's renowned culinary institute of America, where he developed and led their School of Liberal Arts and Food Studies. Ray holds a master's degree in political science from Delhi University and a PhD in sociology from the State University of New York in Binghamton. He is most renowned for his scholarship on food and migration, through which he brings the culinary lives of migrants to the center of our discussions of cuisine and modernity. His first monograph, The Migrant's Table, Meals and Memories in Bengali American Households, was published by Temple University Press in 2004. Employing ethnographic methods and questionnaires, Ray invites us into the everyday lives of middle class West Bengalis in the United States, showing how cuisine is shaped by migrant experiences and demonstrating, and I quote from the book, how migrant practices illuminate the ambivalence of modern actors toward locality, community and authenticity and toward the home and the world. His most recent monograph, The Ethnic Restaurateur, published by Bloomsbury in 2016, explores the American culinary field from the perspective of immigrant chefs and restaurateurs in New York City. The book is a crucial corrective and previous scholarship in the sociology of culture, which has demonstrated the importance of tastes in ethnic foods in the accumulation of cultural capital of elite diners and cities, while at the same time failing to take seriously the work of immigrant entrepreneurs as creators and shapers of such tastes. As tonight's lecture will further demonstrate, Ray's work has also moved beyond the empirical ground of migration and food in North America. A beautiful 2015 essay on the pleasures of an Indian Ocean cuisine urges us to rethink cuisine beyond the territorial strictures of nation states and regions. In Currid Cultures, Globalization, Food in South Asia, a collection of essays co-edited with Tulasi Srinivas and published by the University of California Press in 2012, Ray and Srinivas argue that while global culinary flows are not new, contemporary globalization is marked by a particular sense among urban middle classes of ever closer cultural proximities, and that South Asian cuisines and culinary entrepreneurs often play an important role in creating this sense. Throughout his work, Ray combines scholarly rigor with methodological creativity, intellectual breadth with political sharpness, and theoretical sophistication with serious attention to the material culture of cooking and the multisensory nature of food. As a writer, researcher, and institution builder, he is a true pioneer in the field of food studies. It is a great pleasure and honor to welcome this year's Food Studies Center and Gastronomica Distinguished Lecturer, Professor Krishnan DeRay. So thank you, Jacob, and thank you, Lisa, for this invitation. As you heard, my work has mostly been in the domain of mobility and food, if that's kind of the widest frame. I would say almost the opposite of the rich literature on roots and terroir. So with a little bit of exaggeration, one can say my work is, in fact, on rootless foods. So I have worked on immigrant home cooking and immigrant restaurateurs, and this work is new and exploratory, and I invite your thinking with me on street food, much of which, in fact, is done in the world by rural to urban migrants, if you are in the global south, or in fact, transnational migrants if you are in the global north. So with that, let me kind of immerse you quickly into my setting, and then I'll pull you out into a broader frame and kind of pose some of the questions that are and the answers that are beginning to shape my thinking on street vending and street food. So it's close to 7 p.m. on a Saturday in August. Imagine yourself in the sweltering heat of Delhi. Can you do that? The Sun is setting in a South Delhi colony and an acre of land across from a hospital. This is a particular location in South Delhi. It is one of about 550 markets. It has a particular shape and location. This is what it looks like. The market sits adjacent to a heavily trafficked road, churning dust and smoke, and the cacophony of horns and vendor calls produce a surprising envelope of calmness. The intersection is set up between 4 to 6 p.m. and would be dismantled in the wee hours of the next morning. It has over 200 fruit and vegetable sellers, clothing and houseware hawkers, and a scattering of cooked food sellers. A Y-shaped plot of land, as you saw from the map, it is on other days the location of a car repair shop and an auto stand that you can see behind. The two arms of the Y streets on other days enclose a working class settlement of domestic workers, waste pickers and vendors. It faces the hospital behind which is an upper middle class Delhi Development Authority colony, scattered with majestic German trees. Almost 70% of colony residents are customers of the vegetable market. The 2016 study in fact showed in Bangalore shows that almost 75% of rich and poor households shop at informal vendors, a very different structure than what we see in the global north. And the market is a spatial and a social meeting ground of classes and I will talk about that a bit more. The better off and less sensitive shop early between 6 to 8 p.m. while working class populations shop later to get better deals, which is usually after 9 p.m. It is not only a functional space, but a source of entertainment, which is heightened late at night as maid servants make their way in clusters with made-up hair in sparkling attire. Seeking talk, leisurely loitering, Chow Main, which is now an Indian dish, and Chole Bouture. In fact, my cousins think that Chinese food in India is better than Chinese food in China. And so, thank you for giving me this opportunity and kind of helping me think a bit about it. So this market is one of 550 markets in Delhi and this particular work is a look into laws and what I call laws and liveliness of markets and livelihoods of street vendors. I have initiated this work specifically with Shalini Sinha, who works with a fascinating organization called Women in the Informal Sector, Globalizing and Organizing. You will see a lot of references to it, WIEGO, which is an exemplary instance of globalization from below, and I'll talk a bit about it. So what is at stake here? What I'm interested in is how self-regulating relations are worked out in the hustle of the street, partly so that we can build some of that in other locales. In the intensity of current global developments, it's easy to forget that the primary social movement of the early 21st century, the Arab Spring, was in fact a question of lives and livelihoods of street vendors. Tarek al-Tayeb Muhammad Bouzizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, in the face of harassment and confiscation of about $20 worth of vegetables, a pair of scales, and a wheelbarrow by municipal authorities in a small town in Tunisia. The movement spread ferociously after his death on January 4, 2011, which is almost exactly eight years ago, across the southern rim of the Mediterranean. The importance of Muhammad Bouzizi's rebellion hinges on questions of law and regulation of public spaces. So this is a project with a large research group with more than two dozen collaborators. We are learning how to work with each other. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians are not good at working with each other often. And with advocates working on urban food, vendor livelihood, and liveliness of cities, as I said, and the law. We are looking at questions of culture, economics, politics, and the built environment. The second thing to note is that we work in different cities, and my attempt is to find out what we can learn from each other practically in our advocacy work and conceptually in our theoretical work. For instance, what does it mean to score a major legislative victory in Delhi in the enactment of what is called the street vendors and the Protection of Livelyhood Act of 2014 that technically legalized vending for almost 10 million vendors, okay? Unprecedented in the world. But of course, like everything in India, you can have a lot of progressive laws and implementation is far, far behind. And one of the challenges we are facing there is that, in fact, vendor groups do not have enough capacity to, in fact, intervene once they are technically given the power. In particular, what is the lesson for us, for someone like me who feels defeated by the unsuccessful end of what we called the Lift the Caps campaign in New York City in 2017. The effort collapsed at the end of December where we were trying to basically not... trying to double the number of licenses from about 3,500 to 7,000. In New York City, to give you a sense, there are about 20,000 vendors, but only 3,500 licenses. So only a small percentage are legal. And in fact, what it does, it creates a massive market, black market in vendor licenses. So the point was not to increase the number of vendors, but in fact, put downward pressure in the black market because that's a major problem in terms of sorts of livelihood for poor vendors which I'm going to talk about a little more. Thirdly, there are two kinds of bridging acts we hope to achieve between theory and practice and between the academy and various publics. That's why I'm particularly excited to present this work today, which is in a bit of a mixed audience. That is because we think pure theoretical critique is inadequate at this moment of peril for democracies. So we have to find a way for the sophisticated analysis undertaken in the academy to reach the public, especially in the United States. I will return to that point in a bit. Next, what is interesting about the attention to street food for food studies, the field I have worked on for a bit, is that it adds a new locus to the triad of rurality, domesticity, and oat cuisine that dominates the field. And cooked food has in fact become rarer on the streets in the global north, and that has gone hand in hand with the reach and power of the modern welfare state and stringent municipal regulation because so much of food studies has been built around Euro-American concerns. It has avoided engaging with street food revealingly other than as historical studies because eating on the street has in fact been in decline in Europe and in North America for the last half century. The next thing about street vending that kind of interests me and intrigues this group of researchers is that provisioning from the street throws a critical light on the drift in northern cities towards corporate supermarkets as the preferred model of supplying the city. In contrast, the older model of public markets in some relationship with mobile vendors may have been a better framework of food distribution that I think the developmentalist illusion has sought to erase from our memory. We see that right now in South Asian cities, Southeast Asian cities, is the possibility of that bifurcation between supermarkets or are we going to work with public markets and street vendors that we have also gone through in New York City. Sustainability and social justice may be better served by older models in the global north and the current model in the global south which needs, I think, a bit of a theoretical resurrection. And this gestures towards one of your professors' work, Elizabeth Hull's work that I hope to learn more from in the near future. This new attention to street food has the potential to change the flavor of the politics and politics of good taste and kind of a potentially, I think, in some ways, reground the palatal and philosophical expectations of gastronomy that has come to dominate the field, marking the transition from 20th century welfare politics to an uncharted world of micro-entrepreneurship, risk and precarity in the 21st century. And it, I think, opens up a new theoretical frame towards urban food socio-ecology that attends to a visceral materiality structured into the built environment of a living and a livable city where local markets can be remembered and imagined as a locus of a pre-corporate past and a post-liberal future. Fifth, I'm particularly interested, in fact, as you would have guessed from now, in inter-class relations around street vending. First, in the domain of law and regulation and especially in the making, breaking and working around the laws that we see including the domain, a very interesting domain of public interest litigation that has particularly developed, and I'm going to talk a little about it in India and South Africa. And in the area of the everyday practice, as I said and the data from Bangalore shows that, in fact, most middle-class and upper-class folks in India and much of the global south, in fact, shop with street vendors. And the third, in fact, is the leadership of organizations of street vendor organizations. And this is NASVI, the National Association of Street Vendors of India, a street vendor project in New York. WEGO, which is the organization I reference. SEVA, which is self-employed women's association. And SEVA, which is self-employed women's union in South Africa. By the way, in South Africa and in South Asia, especially India, some of the earliest feminist organizations were labor organizations and in the domain of informality. In these three domains, which is law, everyday practice, and advocacy, classes are obviously working together, even when they're embroiled in routine miscomprehension, which is, of course, Badiya's big contribution. I'm interested, in fact, in these collaborative scripts and mechanisms, the convening power of food is one way to think about it as a window into the working of participatory democracies. And I'm going to reference a bit of the recent sociological literature, which is beginning to see the importance of these kinds of spaces. And one example of it is Eric Klinenberg, a recent book just came out, Palaces for the People, who pays attention to the question of libraries and childcare centers, bookstores and parks. These are places where people gather and linger, making friends across group lines and strengthening the entire community. And we have had some kind of interesting, what I call civil society, theorizations that we have to engage with. Klinenberg calls these spaces the social infrastructure. And he gives those examples as ways in which kind of to strengthen a social relationship. And some of my thinking is how to add street corners and marketplaces to that discussion without busting the concept. And these proposed sites, that I think in fact would be necessary to expand the ambit of the sociological theorization from the global north to the global south. The historian Geoffrey Pilcher has named some of this as culinary infrastructure. And he writes, I quote, culinary infrastructure refers to the basic facilities and technologies used to convey food and knowledge about food, not only from field to fork, but across continents and cultures. It is becoming obvious to many of us that we could build cities with laws and materials that have more give and flexibility. Kind of laws of leather instead of laws of steel. What Amita Bhavaskar, my predecessor at the Soyes and Gastronomical Talk, characterized as liveliness of the law, okay? The question is, could good food be made congruent with good livelihoods in a lively city? So I want to pay a little attention to this concept of liveliness of the city. And by the way, this should give you hope. This will mark the sections. So you know that there's an end to this thing. And when you're getting bored, you can count them down. So the underdeveloped idea here is liveliness of the city. And liveliness is what Jane Jacobs underlined as an active, interactional, mixed-use sites of residents, play, recuperation, and business. And urban planners have already registered that. Only when cities are created for everybody can they provide something for everyone, she wrote. Walter Benjamin told us that streets are the dwelling place of the collective, which he argued was an effervescent social group in excess of the functionalist logic of capitalist urban planning and held together by an improvisational mode of street life. Livelyness is what is generated in the shared use of public space by different groups of people. Not always in harmony, but some degree of managed conflict. Livelyness includes the opportunity to walk and observe the life of in fact foot and pedal. It is astonishing to me how modes of transportation shape our cities and our habits reshaping our bodies. Walking in the city for work or for enjoyment is often easier said than done, especially for women, especially Delhi, is not a particularly friendly city. Women, autonomous and independent on the street, making a living if she has to, is often an impossibly difficult task. Her ability to walk, saunter, loiter, are hindered by boorish men and the fleneurs in fact deprecating gays, often the crystallization of easy masculine privilege. To enjoy loitering without becoming unnecessarily visible. As Shilpa Fadke and Simira Kahave asserted, Lauren Elkin notes cuttingly in our study of fleneuse and I quote, pardon the vulgarity, she writes it so I'm just reading it. I quote, as if a penis was a requisite walking appendage. Walking without eliciting comment or surveillance is what has been highlighted by urban feminists like Fadke and Khan in Mumbai to Elkin in New York and Paris. Yet as Annalyn Arnaud, a Belgian historian shows in fact fashionable strolling may have been the big enemy of street vending in 19th century European cities. That dialectic between flenery and loitering needs accounting for in our theorization. Liveliness is often a result of unplanned but ordered everyday social interaction across difference. Drawing on the literature and urban planning and sensory urbanism, we can find three nested aspects to liveniness. One, engaging the urban food system with attention to access but also to everyday aesthetics and sensory aspirations of multiplicity of publics in the city. Second, observing and recording the local vernaculars of good taste of various social groups in different parts of the city. Third, noting the processual planning and market mechanisms of sorting through and living in energetic but peaceful disagreement between these constituents. The overall ambition is to observe and record dynamic participatory and inclusive projects in various neighborhoods and marketplaces, register and underline the inclusive life-giving activities occurring in every neighborhood. And in this, not to concede all of the marketplace to capitalism in fact. Furthermore, we agree that it is clearly not a good idea to abolish street food prematurely if you want to protect poor people's livelihoods. For that, we need a new infrastructure of post-liberal legal innovations. And South Africa and India are showing some examples and some of the problems with it. In the long run, it might even be better to revive street foods in the global north in light of the lessons from the south, perhaps as we already see with seasonal fares and local public markets, hopefully without too much heavy-handed aesthetic curation. David Zetland observes, I quote, I think that developed countries could borrow habits from the developing countries. More street vendors, shared taxis, mixed-use buildings to improve street and urban life. Some of that is already happening around you. In the global north, the informal sector is smaller than it is in the global south, but not altogether irrelevant. As a recent study called, the book called the Informal American City, Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor, investigates garage sales, informal parking lots, community gardens, et cetera. So it's also become apparent as Andy Merrifeld notes, the poor global south exist, of course, in northeast Paris, or in Queens and Tower Hamlets, and the rich global north also lives high above the streets of Mumbai, if you have noticed that obscene building, and flies home in helicopters to its penthouses in Jardins and Murambi in Sao Paulo. So yet today we are in the throes of a new regulatory offensive launched in cities such as Bangkok and Shanghai to push back if not eliminate street vending. Shanghai has effectively eliminated street vending and turned it into corporate outlets. Bangkok is trying to do the same. The new regime in Thailand, for instance, is once again trying to clear the streets of the food vendors. A recent policy brief penned by Weego notes alarmingly, since 2014, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority has led a campaign to reduce the number of vendors under the motto return the footpath to the pedestrians, which is always an argument about flow, either traffic, cars, or people, and poor people as an obstacle to flow of other things. They have reduced the number of licensed vendors by more than 17,000 and have removed more than 500 of over 700 designated vending areas. The new regime is attempting to reverse what the previous government had promoted as, in fact, culinary tourism. In the process of engaging with sociologists and anthropologists, we also, our attention was drawn by historians like Hsia Dainer, who has extended the contemporary analysis backward and outwards to millions of Jewish peddlers from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in the long 19th century. In the process, she shows how these peddlers were engaging with Christian women, shaping each other's notion of the Jew and the Gentile, commodity and culture, provincialism and cosmopolitanism. Dainer's work on Jewish peddlers raises questions of the relevance of the comparison between the peddlers of early modern Europe and street vendors in the global south today that directly connects to Laurence Fontaine's beautiful book called The History of Peddlers in Europe who shows how the word peddler and the various synonyms reveal a hidden social history. In early modern England, the word was Chapman from Cheapman and a hierarchy developed between Welloff merchants of Manchester who traveled all over the country to supply shopkeepers and the lowly peddlers with packs on their back traveling to the villages in the small towns. In Spain, he was the Gabajo, the coarse man from the mountains of the north. In Germany, he was sometimes the hawkerer, the one who squirts from which we get hawker. In northern India, the colanders, the bazikars, the madaris, the yogis, the mirases, the fakirs and the gharia lohares were often equally condemned by sedentary folks and administrators as trickster, rogue or thief as the historian Niladri Bhattacharya underlines in his work on peddlers and itterance in the 19th century. This pattern, in fact, is no different for the Silleti hot dog sellers of New York and New Orleans from the mountains of Bangladesh in close proximity to the port of Chittagong that Vivek Bald has reconstructed in a beautiful book called Bengali Harlem. Bengali continues, in fact, to be the most common language of hawker vendors in Manhattan today. In this next section, I want to quickly draw attention to Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's assertion in his autobiography, which he, in fact, revealingly called from the third world to the first, the Singapore story, how in the 1960s, thousands would sell cooked food on the pavements and streets in total disregard of traffic, health or other considerations. In shifting them to hawker centers, for moving Singapore decisively from the third world to the first. Today, malls are threatening to replace the hawker centers as incomes are rising, the hawking population is aging out, and hawking becomes a less remunerative occupation. In fact, a very recent, the 2017, hawker center 3.0 committee report seeks to transform the belagered hawker as the heroic entrepreneur, having failed to kill him off the first time around. The Singapore model is different from the American model that was built to feed its sub-urbanizing population, where women and servants were pulled out of the household. The spatial form of Manhattan, which is narrow and long, did not allow for efficient public markets. In New York, the downtown population, in fact, was declining by 1870, while all 10 public markets were stranded below 14th Street. Yet 90% of food was consumed above it. Thomas DeVoe, a butcher and commissioner of markets, a pragmatic mid-19th century supporter of public markets, but a critic of their inefficiency and corruption had noted that the system would have worked if a public market was planned in every ward with some foresight. In fact, a little, I was reminded of that, a little like the ubiquitous, those of you who know Delhi, the New Delhi municipal council markets in Delhi, that I was reminded as I started my field work, every municipal council has a public market. This history of peddling in the long durée reinvigorates the question, is the demise of the street vendor the inevitable future? As has happened in most of Northern Europe. The dream of cleaning up the streets in the hope of fabricating a world-class city is probably going to falter in places such as Bangkok, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mexico City in the short run, because it goes against the very logic of the demographic transition the cities are undergoing. Cities of the South have 15 to 30 times more vendors by population compared to even a relatively liberal Northern standard such as New York City. Southern cities are in the throes of a massive rural torban migration, often due to high birth rates conjoined with unviability of rural livelihoods, which is related to insecure land tenure, high debt exposure produced by increasing costs of agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizer, water, and low returns on cereal crops due to subsidies in the global north. Climate change probably will put even greater pressure on these flows. Rather than eliminating street vending, a better pathway to a livable city would be a nuanced balancing of the laws, at least in the medium run, which can account for livelihoods of poor people, along with the liveliness of cities for all, allowing a slow, fruitful traffic in life-sustaining activities on the street. Yet, the developmentalist delusion continues in the imagination and the implementation of something called a smart city project in India, for instance, where every one of the 79 smart city plans submitted by city planners to Bloomberg Philanthropies for funding seeks to constrain vending to improve traffic flows rather than work with it as a major source of employment and sustenance. Kind of that model kind of persists. So this whole question of street vendors bringing life to dull streets, yet urban planners often describe street vending as a manifestation of both poverty and underdevelopment, so that its disappearance is viewed as progress towards the brave new world of universal prosperity. But subtle new work is coming from scholars working in cities such as Mumbai and Ho Chi Minh City and Cochabamba, who share what I call a normative realism. Let me explain. Their argument is street vendors are everywhere in the global south, so we need to focus on what are the best ways to record their presence, describe their function and their role, and theoretically, in fact, explain their persistence. These scholars sidestep the questions typically asked about whether street vending flourishes because it is state policy or because it exceeds the capacity of the state to provide livelihoods and govern urban spaces. And at my Kim's demographic and topographic maps of Ho Chi Minh City are overlaid with what she calls the desire paths of everyday unplanned use. What she finds exemplary in the developing world is its rich, milling, sensuous public life that has been lost with development and automobility in the north. She also suggests interestingly that a framework of her right to the city may in fact be too limiting to account for the population growth that exceeds public service provision. Trade-offs and compromises are required rather than absolute rights of either property or mobility or livelihood. Daniel Goldstein's work in his beautiful book called Owners of the Sidewalk, A Study of Street Vending in Bolivia and Jonathan Shapiro Anjiria's Slow Boil in 2016 on Mumbai confirmed my Kim's interview showing that property aborters often in fact provide free water and electricity to the street vendors, store their goods, and local police often help in fact vendors skirt the law so that they can continue to vend. If urban informality preceded this conjuncture of neoliberalism, Anjiria sharply asks, can neoliberalism be made to stick as a causal argument? He insists that what really needs explaining is why street vending persists in spite of all the ambition and repeated attempts at clearing the streets. What ensures livelihoods and liveliness in Mumbai, in Ho Chi Minh City, is in fact mixed-use sidewalks negotiated between different kinds of owners and purveyors of properties, usufructory and moral claims. Instead of the straight jacket of developed cities with their massive infrastructural costs and unsustainable consumption patterns, we might in fact benefit from incurring into the conditions of the survival and the fluorescence of the cities of the global south with their frugal per capita ecological and infrastructural imprint and visible environmental costs. As you must be aware, nothing is hidden or whisked away in the cities of the south. In those contexts, street vending is a symptom of the quiet encroachment of the ordinary under conditions of precarity. So this question of good food for better livelihoods, that's one of the questions we are struggling with. It is obvious to some of us that street foods have become attractive for culinary enthusiasts recently. That is partly because of democratization of taste and partly because of the increasingly competitive omnivorousness of gastronomes who acquire cultural capital by showing fluency in consuming local food globally. As you must know, Lonely Planet now has both a web-based and a print-based guidebook called the world's best street food published in 2016 and the height of Oat cuisine chef's interest in the subject is marked by my colleagues at the Culinary Institute of America, their big fat book called Street Foods which was published in 2016. But it also has something to do with the materiality of street foods and their capacity for in fact visual representation on Instagram and Pinterest. As you saw in your poster, street food in fact make beautiful pictures. Compared to domestic cookery, street foods tend to be visually attractive. That is, they tend to stand up compared to in fact peasant cuisines with their stewed yellows and browns because they are often raw foods that retain their color, fruits and vegetables such as mangoes and coconuts, corn and peanuts or ceviches for instance, or fried and sweet foods such as empanadas, tostadas, samosas, jalebes, kebabs, even tart flambés, pizzas, sweetened breads and treated meats such as sausages and hot dogs. They're all portable, visually attractive, rare foods of the poor that stand out visually, sane contrast to, if you're not convinced yet, to stews and dolls which is out of a lot of angles and light, it still doesn't look that good on Pinterest. They are often, of course, also crispy, crunchy, spicy, sour, sweet, and typically eaten in small bites which is always more interesting especially in the context of affluence. One of the important points of disagreements within our group was around the question of difference between, say, hipster food trucks and immigrant street vendors that relate to culinary omnivorousness and the end of old-fashioned snobbery, okay? Are food trucks and street vendors part of the same universe or very different things? Some argue that the more fashionable food trucks should be seen as a form of gentrification of the street. Fabio Paracicoli, one of my colleagues, reminded us of the gap with his use of a lovely Italian linguistic distinction between cibo d'estrada, which is the old street food, and the stylish Anglophone street food. Now, if you go to any of the Italian cities, you will see street food there. You might even have in the next one there. Yet the fact that both in European and Japanese cities we have very little cooked food on the street, yet much of sidewalk cafes and alleyways say something about the lure of these liminal spaces in spite of the apparent death and disdain for street food. And so in the process we realize that we have to grapple with the gap between the street and the sidewalk. There are liminal spaces not exactly on the street, but are open to the streets, such as, of course, yakitoris in Tokyo, or any tapas in Pinchobar in Spanish cities, for instance. There's kind of the openness onto the street. There's a robust discussion about whether such spaces should be included in the ambit of our project. Instead of defining away the problem, I want to keep open the analysis of the gaps and the connections between sidewalk food and street food and between the weekly fruit and vegetable markets we see everywhere in Europe, and the cooked food on the sidewalk cafe. What might be the relationship between, for instance, the proliferation of yakitoris and the elimination of street vending as we saw in Tokyo right after the Second World War? In fact, Tokyo had the largest number of street vendors anywhere in the developed world because the markets, in fact, had been flattened by Allied bombing. So the recently insurgent power of food as an object of gustatory and aesthetic interest has not gone unnoticed by advocacy groups for street vendors in New York and New Delhi, who were initially suspicious of gastronomic interest in their objects of labor and livelihood. For instance, the street vendor project with whom I work in New York founded by Sean Basinski in 2001 was mostly indifferent to the nature and quality of the food served by vendors until the hosting of something that some of the younger volunteers and interns convinced him about called the Vendi Awards for the first time in 2005. Since then, Basinski has been eager to cultivate the attention garnered by good food for the benefit all within quotation marks with the benefit of livelihoods of the vendors and seeking changes in the law. Similarly, the National Association of Street Vendors in India is also working with an eye to this gastronomic interest. They have hosted an annual street food festival since 2008 to draw attention to the relationship between livelihood, law, hygiene, and good taste. So the question of good food cannot be ignored as a possible cultural resource for improving the lives of the urban poor and reforming the legal framework portrayed on the streets. The street food festival I attended in Delhi in January 2018 had about 130 stalls hosted over 500 vendors serving foods across urban India with over 60,000 mostly young professionals and student visitors who came to eat and listen to the inevitable celebrity chefs in Jeev Kapoor. Many street vendors earn in fact 500 times more than their regular income during the three-day festival. States in India are replicating the model in state capitals and various ministries of tourism now invite NASVI to their programs which is very interesting to watch the institutionalization of street vending as part now of state governance in India. So in this penultimate section I want to draw some quick attention to something I've gestured towards before. I think few of these initiatives saying the Delhi one in protecting the livelihoods of the urban poor could have been consolidated without a major legal innovation in Indian jurisprudence that has emerged since the late 1970s. That was done by expanding access and lowering the demand for standing which is crucial in law via public interest litigation. Nandita Huxer highlights the Right to Food campaign which led to the distribution in fact of cooked meals in schools following a Supreme Court order in April 2004 the passing of the National Employment Guarantee Act in August 2005 and the passing of the National Food Security Act of 2013 and in fact it was public interest litigation on behalf of street vendors that also influenced the legislation eventually in 2014 that legalized vending as a mode of protection of livelihood. But Gautam Bhan shows in contrast how by the 21st century, especially in the domain of some slump clearance environmental protection and evictions the court's more restrictive class character may have come into full view and there's an interesting tension there how class interests are getting played out. And the tension is opening such as the expansion of standing and shortcuts to access to the courts by the poor not as individuals. In fact one of our biggest challenge in New York City is we cannot bring a petition on behalf of vendors other than in the political process not in the legal process. As individuals but as collective groups as prisoners in India as bonded laborers as women it's precisely of course what makes it a public interest litigation compared to any other legal intervention. Be used to secure the rights collectively in law in the space of the built environment. This is what Bhaviska comments as in fact the liveliness of the law, the negotiations around it. Based on the daily experience my answer is a qualified yes especially in the domain of right to livelihood. The post-liberal, post-colonial or may in fact be more flexible than the standard liberal architecture of individual rights and individualized standing as enshrined in American law we face in New York City. So I've given you a sense of some of the questions that we are wrestling with and some of the research that is going on so in closing I'm going to say this to shift from the dour and pessimistic mood of his previous work on neoliberalism David Harvey had to leave behind La Favre's Imagine Paris of 1968 and go south to Porto Alegre Brazil where he found the strange collision between neoliberalism and democratization. The case in fact of the warwick junction street vendors in Durban, South Africa is an even more acute instance of collective action in a post-liberal world. It is a compelling story of how about 8,000 street vendors many of them women forced their way into a collaborative urban planning process and exhilarating proof of how poor people in sensitive collaboration with urban planners can enliven a city center as Keith Hart the original theorist of informality put it. Much of the early organizing work in warwick junction was done by the self-employed women's union of South Africa which was launched in Durban in 1994 modeled after the self-employed women's association in India which I think is an excellent example of south to south modeling and collaboration. Sehwu was successful in securing agreement with the Durban City Council to install water supplies and temporary toilet facilities which was one of the way of working against the argument of hygiene and risk that what vendors need in fact are bathrooms and fresh water and we have a similar example in Delhi from Sehwu's work at the ladies market which was also built in fact to protect women from harassment and so that opening into collaborative and participatory planning was threatened by a proposed lease that would create the warwick junction site to a private company but that plan was successfully rescinded in 2011 as a result of collective pressure and public interest litigation by the legal resource center. Academics wrote in newspapers to oppose the plan for the private mall two former city workers resigned and formed AET to launch the inclusive cities project and we are learning much from that. Planning transformed the city and changed the potentiality towards a new kind of city beautiful that accounts for the choices and needs of the poor. Harvey notes that the right to the city does not arise from intellectual fads and fascinations but from the streets out of the neighborhoods as a cry for help and sustenance by the oppressed people in desperate times. How then do academics and intellectuals both organic and traditional as Gramsci would put it respond to that cry and that demand? That is our question and we hope to respond in ways that is useful to the people who are generating new inclusive post-liberal visions. In Harvey's word the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be. What kinds of social relations we seek what relations to nature we cherish what style of life we desire what in fact aesthetic value we hold. So it may not be necessary and that's probably my last thought on this to insist on the gap between the ethical and the ordinary aesthetic of good food. Thank you.