assignment 2: emily

Sweet Auburn Curb Market, while receiving more attention from what you might call a bourgeois crowd recently due to establishments like Grindhouse and Cafe Campesino as well as the pseudo-gentrification of the surrounding area (or vice versa if that's possible), has historically and until recently, been the marketplace of a lower-middle income people. Immigrant vendors peddle cheap produce, fish and meat (the latter of cuts that are foreign to many of us). On the edge of an edgy downtown and the Old 4th Ward, the upper classes would hardly find their way down there. And yet, a popularizing of street food culture (also historically lower class and blue collar) in cities across America, has guided a movement to infiltrate the PARKING LOT (that most ubiquitous, ordinary, and utilitarian of spaces) at Sweet Auburn and use it as their backdrop for a political, cultural and community movement. In occupying this public space (legally mind you) the Street Food Coalition, vendors, and consumers are voicing their disapproval of Atlanta's unusually strict street food vendor policies (designed, most likely, to keep these blue collar lunch trucks off the streets—a policy of exclusion). But in the act of gathering we are, as Crawford says, "redefining both 'public and 'space' through lived experience. We are enlivening our sense of community, breaking class boundaries, and exposing ourselves to new experiences culinary, cultural and political. We all have experienced the Parking Lot, some of us many times a day, but here is a way to LIVE it.

check out the header for the atlanta food carts blog.



Secondly, because that was not 3 pictures, i have to share one of the most intriguing examples of 3rd space i've seen. Outside of Cheese Board Pizza in Berkeley, the median has become a picnic ground for the overflow from the inadequate interior and sidewalk seating. I have no idea what the policing of this area has been like, but as streets (and thereby medians) are public, i imagine there is little the Berkeley police can or will do about the impromptu dining room. It was very greasy, very tasty and i highly recommend taking your pizza (to go) to the middle of the street.