Curators of Markets, Designers of Place: The Case of the Street Food Scene in London

This article focusses on the work of street-food market organizers in London as a design practice. The argument is based on ethnographic research about the curation of the street-food scene, which aimed at understanding how market organizers created markets as economic entities and design marketplaces as urban forms. Space, objects, people, aesthetics, and atmospheres were designed into a marketplace with distinctive qualities. As such, market designers perform an important role as urban actors. They not only design the qualities of place but also use them to create inequalities in the street-food scene and the urban realm more widely.