Trucking in Tastes and Smells: Adelaide's Street Food and the Politics of Urban “Vibrancy”

This paper analyses the use of food trucks in spaces of an Australian city, as one of Adelaide City Council’s strategies for creating “a more vibrant public realm” and for “bringing … streets and laneways to life”. Such calls for the revitalisation of city streets bring to mind Edensor’s comparison of the western (British) street – as over-regulated, soulless and sanitised of sounds, smells, tastes and visual spectacle – with the richly-textured sensory landscapes of the Asian (Indian) street. To unravel the politics of “vibrancy”, linked with movement within and beyond built landscapes, this paper follows the food truck, la Chiva, a council-sponsored initiative of a group of young Colombian migrants, to a number of urban locations. Here, our project is to capture, particularly through the senses of taste and smell, the ghosts of transnational belonging. However, this is not simply a story of diaspora, or of brightening up the city (for whom?) with novel tastes and smells. Instead, Law’s conceptualisation of sense-based imaginaries of cosmopolitan identity, and Low and Kalekin-Fishman’s “sensorial interface” suggest other scripts.  Meanings of mobility, multiculturalism and inter-ethnic encounter; meanings of health and sustainability; meanings of community-building and activism; meanings of fusion cuisine and cultures – these are all part of La Chiva’s “mixed” sensescapes, together with lingering sense memories of “home”. Unravelling such meanings will indicate the messy, yet potentially productive, politics at the intersection of nostalgia and cosmopolitanism, of commodification and entrepreneurialism, and, perhaps, provide a challenge to Tonkiss’ claim that “the gentrification of contemporary cities” tends to “aestheticize rather than represent urban ‘diversity ’”. The question remains: to what extent do transnational identities and spaces inscribe performances of “vibrancy” for others, or are these identities sensorily “grounded” in meanings of hospitality, reciprocity, community-building and remembering?