Someday soon I'd like to try the offerings of Kogi Korean BBQ-TO-Go, a Los Angeles taco truck with a devoted cult following. Its food, a melding of Korean and Mexican foods, offers a uniquely L.A., "glocal" sense of place and culture: owner Roy Choi told the NYTimes in February that “It is my vision of L.A. in one bite." Choi is onto something there, and it sounds great.
Of course, food trucks are a staple piece of street furniture worldwide, and zooming out a bit, it's not a stretch to state that taking part in their offerings can often provide a seductive, kaleidoscopic meditation on place. Does rotisserie chicken "go" with San Francisco? Of course. Dumplings in New York? Sure. These things, and many others, enter the pantheon of global street foods that you already know; the trucks are part of the streetscape, the food an authentic descriptor of place.
Apart from the sense of place so often imparted by a food truck's wares, the other half of their appeal is wrapped up in their ephemerality; drag your feet, and you miss the goods. The NYT piece mentions how Kogi has garnered fame for using Twitter to complement its business: Kogi's owners tweet real-time updates about their truck's location, as well as any can't-miss daily specials. The restaurant's Twitter feed brings together food, commerce, and geography--an entertaining read, even if you are thousands of miles away (like me)--and the constantly-updating stream of locations seems to add cache to the restaurant's product, as something uniquely specific to the city.
So, it's fun to think about the ties between food and place; as the WSJ notes, the combination of Twitter's emergence and the ongoing economic downturn (to which I would add growing interests in walkability, local food, and a curiosity about urban transformation, out there in the ether) are, interestingly enough, spurring a food truck boom.
A Worldchanging piece by Julia Levitt considers what this combination of impulses could yield for the fixed parts of the built environment. In the same way that Kogi and its counterparts harness social networking to do business--making the urban fabric more dynamic while doing so--consider how private, fixed spaces could transform themselves, if seen through an analogous lens:
The next time you're waiting at an intersection, look around and imagine how much of the built (and furnished) environment stands empty and unused at any given time. Cafés in the financial district are closed at dinnertime; restaurants that specialize in dinner fare are silent until mid-afternoon; parking lots that fill during the workweek are largely vacant after 6pm and often on weekends.
This idea, however, harnesses another kind of embedded energy -- by creating meaning, activity and experience where there would have been emptiness, waste or worse. It's about using up every bit of urban space to its fullest.
The article cites an example where two restaurants operate from the same space on different days. But there's a lot of possibility here. It proceeds from a provocative question--how can we make our building/neighborhood/city more dynamic, strong and efficient? The answer lies in brainstorming complementary uses for a single site. Just as single-use zoning becomes an anachronism, so could single-use programming. As Levitt points out, aside from a practicalty standpoint, "there's something magical about transience:"
The feeling that you're partaking of an experience, an ambience, an event that simply cannot happen the same way again creates an immediate sort of scenius. The quality of impermanence adds a kind of specialness to an everyday activity – visiting a restaurant, crossing a public square, or even taking a walk. Vonnegut mocked the superficial connections between granfalloons – groups of people who attended the same college, or follow a certain sports team. (Or those that follow the same Twitter feed.) But when the thing you all showed up for is rare and will only happen once, the connection clicks.
What I like is that temporary spaces can be both transcendent and practical at the same time. These exchanges enable innovators to grab hold of useful spaces whose owners haven't previously seen a way to make profitable, and use them to mutual benefit. Even better, they often make our neighborhoods more lively in the process.
Temporality: it's the next frontier in infill urban development.
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