Eating in the contact zone: Singapore foodscape and cosmopolitan timespace

Abstract

This paper focuses on an area just off the less fashionable end of Singapore's premier high street, Orchard Road. As a foodscape this neighbourhood is typical of many in Singapore, embracing as it does a heterogeneity of food outlets (from basic hawker stalls to Westernized fast food cafes, from gourmet restaurant to fusion bistros) and ethnic origins of food. There are also major variations in the social class, age, ethnicity, and national origins of the customers (local shopper, local worker or student, tourist, or ‘guest worker’). In particular the heterogeneity is embodied and defined by spatial/temporal architectures and rhythms of everyday practices. The paper discusses attempts to orchestrate these rhythms, particularly around food. Multiple uses, identities, and relationships are played out through complex micro-regions of time and place. Typical of many such sites in global cities, it is in a state of transformation from the local to cosmopolitan. It is suggested that such complex areas can be understood as contact zones where struggles, negotiations, exclusions, and denials around convivial cosmopolitanism are enacted.