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Patrimoines en négociation : composer avec la diversité

Tensions with Intangible Cultural Heritage in Urban Foodways: Cooking, Eating and Sharing Hawker Food in Singapore

Tensions autour du patrimoine culturel immatériel dans les pratiques alimentaires urbaines : cuisiner, manger et partager la cuisine de rue à Singapour
Bryan Wee, Brian Page et Amy DePierre
p. 157-179

Résumés

En 2020, la culture des hawkers (restaurateurs de rue) de Singapour a été inscrite au patrimoine culturel immatériel de l’humanité de l’Unesco afin d’affirmer et de promouvoir l’identité culinaire unique du pays. Autrefois, les hawkers étaient des vendeurs ambulants immigrés, mais ils sont aujourd’hui tenus d’exercer leur activité dans des stands situés dans des marchés publics – hawker centres – qui servent de véritables « salles à manger communautaires » du quotidien dans la cité-État. Cet article met en lumière les tensions et conflits (au sein des individus, des groupes et de la nation) qui ont émergé avec cette inscription en examinant plusieurs aspects : comment l’élévation des hawkers au rang de patrimoine vivant par l’Unesco contraste avec leur réalité économique et leur capacité à refléter la diversité des identités culturelles présentes dans les pratiques alimentaires de Singapour ; les tensions qui se dégagent entre les différentes visions de l’authenticité culinaire ; la manière dont la cuisine des hawkers est marchandisée et exportée ce qui contribue paradoxalement à lui faire perdre l’unicité que le patrimoine culturel immatériel est censé préserver.

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Hawker Heritage

  • 1 Michael Di Giovine and Ronda Brulotte, “Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage”, in Michael Di Giov (...)
  • 2 Chi-Hoon Kim, “Kimchi Nation: Constructing Kimjang as an Intangible Korean heritage”, in Casey Man (...)
  • 3 Julia Csergo, “Food as a Collective Heritage Brand in the Era of Globalisation”, International Jour (...)

1In 2020, Singapore’s food hawkers were granted world heritage status by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) under the category “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH). UNESCO passed the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (CSICH) in 2003 and published its operational directives in 2008 to validate a wide range of non-material, place-based cultural forms and practices.1 Even though food as a cultural domain is not officially recognised within the CSICH, some of the first recipients of ICH designation were nations seeking global awareness of their food cultures (e.g., kimjang in South Korea)2 and the ICH lists include a rapidly growing number of food heritage inscriptions.3

  • 4 Nicole Tarulevicz, Eating her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore, Champaign, (...)
  • 5 Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, 2nd ed., Singapore, National Environment (...)

2The Singapore government pursued ICH inscription for its hawkers with the aim of affirming and promoting its country’s distinctive food culture. In the past, hawkers were mobile, itinerant street food vendors but today they are required to operate out of stalls in government-owned markets called hawker centres. Hawker food reflects the culinary traditions of the wide range of people who migrated to Singapore. It also represents the blending of food cultures, cooking methods, ingredients (especially spices), and eating habits that are uniquely Singaporean.4 Today, there are 13,390 hawkers operating in 120 hawker centres across the island. Hawker centres serve as the ‘community dining rooms’ of everyday life in the city-state and hawkers are viewed as national icons (Ill. 1)—embodiments of the nation’s celebrated multiculturalism and its deeply rooted appreciation of diverse foods.5

Ill. 1. Most hawker centres in Singapore were constructed in the 1970’s and 1980’s to confine street hawkers in fixed locations. These facilities were later upgraded.

Ill. 1. Most hawker centres in Singapore were constructed in the 1970’s and 1980’s to confine street hawkers in fixed locations. These facilities were later upgraded.

A food hawker (left) and a line of people waiting their turn to order char kway teow (fried noodles) from him (right), Whampoa Hawker Centre, Singapore.

Source: Bryan Wee.

  • 6 Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha, “Theorising Contemporary Foodscapes: Conceptual and Empirical Insights (...)
  • 7 Foodways are the culinary rituals and everyday social norms that inform/shape food preparation and (...)
  • 8 Foodscapes refer to the distribution of food resources, patterns of food access, and forms of socia (...)

3Yet, while the importance of food in the lives of Singaporeans is commonly acknowledged, there has been relatively little academic research on the topic. In a review of the field, Kong and Sinha6 conclude that “by and large Singapore’s food domain remains under-researched and under-theorised.” Recent research has begun to address these concerns. These studies draw themes from the broader literature concerning foodways7 and foodscapes,8 focusing predominantly on food consumption and its embedded cultural meanings and social practices.

  • 9 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, in Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (dir.), Food (...)
  • 10 Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo, Eating Together: Food, Space and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore(...)
  • 11 Joan C. Henderson, Ong Si Yun, Priscilla Poon and Xu Biwei, “Hawker Centres as Tourist Attractions: (...)

4In this vein, scholars have explored: 1) hawker food as the source of sensory memories that figure centrally in personal and familial identities and form the basis of nostalgic recollections of culinary traditions;9 2) hawker centres as sites of culturally inclusive food practices that foster and reflect social belonging and community identity;10 and 3) hawker globalisation as expressed through the rise of hawker centres as tourist destinations and the spread of hawker food to other parts of the world.11 While this new scholarship emerged alongside the government’s UNESCO application, little research has been done to situate hawkers within a critical frame of heritage construction in urban foodways, and there has been almost no research to date that examines the ramifications of ICH inscription for hawker heritage moving forward. To address this gap, we adopt a foodways and foodscapes approach to analyse how CSICH has altered relationships among people, hawkers, hawker food and hawker culture. Specifically, how has ICH shifted the ways in which hawker heritage is manifested, experienced, and represented in the city-state?

  • 12 Laurajane Smith , Uses of Heritage, New York, Routledge, 2006.
  • 13 Michael Di Giovine and Ronda Brulotte, “Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage”, art. cit., p. 2.
  • 14 Maggie Roe, “Landscape and Intangible Cultural Heritage”, in Michelle Stefano, Peter Davis (dir.), (...)
  • 15 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge/Oxford, Polity Press/Blackwell, 1994.
  • 16 Brenda Yeoh, “Postcolonial Geographies of Place and Migration”, in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve (...)
  • 17 National Library Board (2021). Former Telok Ayer Market. Singapore Infomedia Website accessed on Au (...)

5Eating regularly at hawker centres is largely synonymous with ‘being Singaporean,’ yet the manifestation of a national identity in the hawker foodway is not accidental. From government interventions that forced hawkers off the streets into hawker centres, to the ICH inscription for hawker heritage, specific knowledge is passed on through intentional actions12 that “imparts value claims on people, their histories, social structures, traditions”13 and gives rise to particular views of reality.14 These power geometries15 are embedded in the foodscape where, for instance, heritage conservation plans legitimise what is selectively ‘forgotten’ or ‘remembered’ in cultural memory.16 One example of this in Singapore is a fish market which was built by the British colonial government in the 1820s and, over a century later, renovated into a food centre by the Singapore Tourism Board.17 Gazetted as a national monument, Lau Pa Sat as it is known today, sits on a heritage trail in the heart of the Central Business District, where people, food and capital flow daily in and out of city streets, and its hawker food draws visitors eager to savour a taste of Singapore’s past remade in the present (Ill. 2).

Ill. 2. Lau Pa Sat in Singapore’s Central Business District (left) and food vendors re-enacting street hawking by preparing satay (grilled meat skewers) outside Lau Pa Sat (right).

Ill. 2. Lau Pa Sat in Singapore’s Central Business District (left) and food vendors re-enacting street hawking by preparing satay (grilled meat skewers) outside Lau Pa Sat (right).

Source: Bryan Wee.

  • 18 Lily Kong, “Conserving Urban Heritage: Remembering the Past in a Developmental City-State”, in Chye (...)
  • 19 Nicole Tarulevicz, “History Making in Singapore. Who is Producing the Knowledge?”, New Zealand Jour (...)
  • 20 Julia Csergo, “Food as a Collective Heritage Brand in the Era of Globalisation”, art. cit., p. 2.

6As an urban conservation project, Lau Pa Sat is designed to reconstitute a simplified, collective identity essential for nation-building.18 When foodscapes are produced in these ways, aided by government policies, places take on a new significance and they generate critical questions.19 For instance, does heritage preservation inhibit the ability of foodways to evolve in response to change? “Who is set to benefit—not just symbolically but also financially—from these safeguarding measures”?20 These questions highlight the complexities of heritage construction in Singapore, the tensions that emanate from designating hawker culture as ICH, and its impacts on urban foodways in a modern, globalising nation.

7In this paper, we take up these questions and present our initial assessment of the material and symbolic changes that have taken place in Singapore following the designation of hawker culture as ICH. This assessment is part of a broader research project on hawker history funded through a recent Digital Humanities Fellowship from the National Library Board of Singapore. In the two years spent gathering and analysing data from primary and secondary sources, as well as field observations, we were able to generate new insights into the tensions and struggles that have emerged in everyday spaces and interactions. We explore these tensions and struggles across three overlapping social/cultural arenas within the hawker foodway. The first, cooking hawker food, considers how the elevation of hawkers as living heritage by UNESCO contradicts the actual economic position of hawkers at the bottom-rung of the local wage scale and the societal pressure to keep food prices low. It also describes how state policies that preclude new immigrants from working as hawkers prevent hawker food from reflecting the diversity of cultural identities present in Singapore’s foodscape. The second, eating hawker food, explores competing imaginaries of food authenticity represented through institutional constructions of hawker culinary heritage on the one hand, and individual and familial sensory memories of hawker food on the other. We also describe how hawker centres are elevated by ICH at the expense of equally important places such as food courts in Singapore’s contemporary foodway, as well as ongoing tensions with other countries’ claims to the authenticity of their hawker/street foods. The third, sharing hawker food, tracks how hawker food is packaged and exported for global consumption. This commodification of hawker food devalues the notion of an intangible heritage, and risks diminishing the uniqueness that the ICH inscription is meant to preserve.

Cooking Hawker Food

  • 21 Bryan Wee, Amy DePierre, Brian Page, Ayn Schmit and Merlin Ariefdjohan, Evolving Foodscapes: A Spat (...)

8During the late 19th century, as the British empire flourished, Singapore became the most important trade and financial hub in Southeast Asia. People came to work as labourers in the port city or in surrounding mines and plantations. Their labour was the foundation of colonial economic success. These workers generated a huge demand for food, which was met by itinerant hawkers—themselves mostly immigrants. The number of itinerant hawkers grew along with the labouring population, in part because it was a livelihood that could be undertaken with very low upfront costs. According to government reports, by 1932 over 11,000 hawkers were working in Singapore, which had a population of about 500,000.21 Hawkers soon became an indispensable and ubiquitous part of daily life in the colonial port city, and hawker food—covering a wide range of dishes drawn from regional cuisines—became an important cultural touchstone for many of its residents.

  • 22 Colony of Singapore, Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Hawker Question in Singap (...)
  • 23 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit.
  • 24 Manuel Castells, Lee Goh and Yin-Wang Kwok, The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Pub (...)

9The presence of so many hawkers on the streets, however, created a dilemma known as the ‘hawker question’.22 On the one hand, hawkers created serious traffic obstructions in the city, blocked street drains, polluted the areas where they congregated, and often cooked/served hawker food in ways that were considered unhygienic. On the other hand, hawking generated income for thousands of people, and provided an essential service by feeding the urban working population with cheap and accessible meals. The ‘hawker question’ then was how to retain the benefits of hawking while simultaneously managing hawker activities in ways that protected public health, improved environmental quality, and enhanced traffic flow? The colonial government imposed fines and attempted to mandate hawker licenses but these efforts were contested and largely unsuccessful.23 In 1965, when Singapore became an independent and sovereign state, hawkers quickly rose to the top of the new government’s urban modernisation agenda due to the intensification of the ‘hawker question.’ Broadly, this agenda focused on demolishing and redeveloping areas in the city centre as well as establishing “new towns” and factory districts at the urban fringe.24 It had multiple goals:1) to create industrial jobs and reduce high unemployment by encouraging foreign investment in the manufacturing and energy sectors; 2) to address the country’s housing shortage and its generally poor housing conditions by building dozens of new public housing estates and resettling thousands of people from the urban core to outlying areas to reduce overcrowding; 3) to improve sanitation and public health conditions by constructing new water supply, sewage removal, and electric delivery systems; 4) to create more open, orderly, and disciplined public spaces through redesign of vehicular and pedestrian trafficways; and 5) to reduce environmental pollution, particularly in the Singapore River basin.

  • 25 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6.
  • 26 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 3.
  • 27 Can Seng Ooi and Nicole Tarulevicz, “From Third World to First World: Tourism, Food Safety and the (...)

10Street hawkers were a problem for government planners because they continued to obstruct traffic, pollute waterways, and threaten public health. Moreover, they literally stood in the way of slum clearance, infrastructural upgrades and the construction of new office and residential high-rise buildings. The government’s solution was to relocate hawkers from the streets into newly built hawker centres which featured potable water, electrical power, sewers and drainage, toilets, and waste collection. Cooked foods within hawker centres was held to high standards of food safety and environmental cleanliness using measures such as a strict system of letter grades as well as demerit points for hygiene that could result in monetary fines and/or the loss of hawker licences.25 Thus, the Singapore government actively reshaped the urban foodway by herding itinerant hawkers into hawker centres26 and standardising cooking practices (e.g., food safety regulations) as part of “a broader attempt to order and clean the city”.27

11At the same time, the Singapore government developed a plan to integrate hawker centres with new residential, commercial, and industrial development. Of particular importance was the coordinated construction of hawker centres with high-rise, high-density Housing Development Board (HDB) flats. This approach solved multiple problems at once: it expanded and improved public housing for a growing population; it minimised crowding in the city centre; and it provided fixed markets at which street hawkers could be re-sited and ultimately managed. The strategic placement of hawker centres inside or nearby HDB flats also provided hawkers with a ready-made customer base (Ill. 3).

Ill. 3. Aging hawkers in Singapore, where social stigmatisation and low wages have led to hawking becoming an endangered profession.

Ill. 3. Aging hawkers in Singapore, where social stigmatisation and low wages have led to hawking becoming an endangered profession.

Inset: Hawker centre at Chinatown Complex, located among high-rise HDB flats.

Source: Bryan Wee.

  • 28 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6. Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary (...)
  • 29 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 40.

12In addition to providing low-cost public housing, HDB offered flexible and part-time employment near these residential areas. This integrated urban development strategy enabled families, particularly women, to focus on working rather than cooking. Importantly, hawker foods remained affordable because prices were kept in check through informal mechanisms such as self-regulation by hawkers who feared losing their customers if they raised their prices, and by government subsidised rent for food stalls in hawker centres. The outcome of this was an invisible ‘ceiling’ on food prices that kept hawker wages low.28 As Chua29 notes:

Hawker centres… are essential economic institutions which are central to the low-wage policies of Singapore: keeping food costs low through hawker centres in turn keeps [hawker] wages low; the rent forfeited on the land that could generate greater revenue than these hawker centres is an avenue of subsidising capital which brings in foreign investments and keeps the national economy competitive.

  • 30 Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation”, art. (...)
  • 31 Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary Landscape”, art. cit.
  • 32 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 36.

13By amplifying the convenience of eating out, hawker centres freed up more time for Singaporeans to focus on family, education and careers, all hallmarks of communitarian “Asian values”30. Prioritizing national, economic, and urban development in these ways resulted in a modern nation but also a lessening of everyday home cooking.31 Crucially, this placed a larger responsibility on hawkers to continue cooking hawker foods and thereby cemented their place in the urban foodway. According to Chua,32 as “deterritorialised spaces that admit [people] drawn from every point of the island and beyond, hawker centres served arguably the entire population and tourists.”

  • 33 Lily Kong, “Conserving Urban Heritage: Remembering the Past in a Developmental City-State”, art. ci (...)
  • 34 Singapore Food Agency. Numbers of Licensed Hawkers in Singapore, personal communication, 2023.

14But as Singapore advanced economically, hawkers were left behind, consigned to a low-wage and low-status occupation. Hawker numbers have dropped precipitously since the late 1960s when approximately 25,000 hawkers were operating on the streets.33 As of 2022 there were 13,390 licensed food hawkers operating in government managed hawker centres34 supporting a population of almost 6 million inhabitants. Here, tensions appear in the context of heritage designation. Today, as in the past, low food prices on dishes sold in hawker centres means that hawkers have a difficult choice between providing affordable food for people in Singapore, and pursuing a viable livelihood for themselves and/or their families. The ICH inscription is meant to make this choice easier for hawkers by emphasizing their cultural value, but it does nothing to address the underlying wage issue, thereby potentially diverting attention away from the ongoing economic problem of hawking in Singapore. Furthermore, by ‘freezing’ (in time) the memories of tasty and inexpensive foods found in hawker centres, the ICH inscription inadvertently justifies the existence of low-wage workers or hawkers in Singapore’s contemporary foodway. Given that hawker culture is now officially recognised by UNESCO, there is a very real likelihood that retaining the unique characteristics of ICH will require that hawker food prices, and thus hawkers’ wages, be kept low.

  • 35 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6. Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary (...)

15As a result, relatively few people outside of a handful of generational hawkers actively pursue hawking as their profession of choice. This is due not only to low wages but also to a number of other, intersecting factors: 1) the social stigmatisation of hawking as better suited for the uneducated or unemployed; 2) the arduous labor of hawking as a disincentive for younger generations who prefer air-conditioned ‘office jobs’; and 3) the gradual loss of cooking skills—and interest in cooking—in Singaporean society.35 The ICH inscription framed hawkers as living heritage in an attempt to ensure hawkers would remain a vital part of nationhood, yet without accompanying changes in the basic terms of operation, real concerns about the nation’s ability to sustain hawker numbers remain.

  • 36 The Straits Times, So Who Wants to be a Hawker, 2017, February 4.

The Singapore government has launched schemes, working with the private sector, to forestall The Day of the Great Un-Hawkering. Food consultants have offered ideas, such as bulk raw purchases, rent subsidies for new hawkers, and allowing hawkers to hire foreign workers. They are all good ideas, and they might work but I think they will only delay the inevitable. Generational change is driving the trend and that cannot be fixed with carrot-and-stick social engineering.36

  • 37 National Environment Agency, Information for Stallholders, 2024. Online: https://www.nea.gov.sg/our (...)
  • 38 The Straits Times, Government Sets Out Ways it Helps Sustain Hawker Culture, Alleviate Cost Pressu (...)
  • 39 UNESCO, Hawker Culture in Singapore, Community Dining and Culinary Practices in a Multicultural Urb (...)

16The challenges of a dwindling hawker population are further complicated by the fact that only Singapore citizens or permanent residents are allowed to obtain hawker licenses and to benefit from government subsidies that lower their rent at hawker centres.37 The reason for this policy is to safeguard the local identity of hawkers and to “avoid the full liberalisation of hawker centres that would significantly alter their make-up and feel”.38 This policy, however, contradicts Singapore’s UNESCO application which states that, “hawkers in Singapore include both men and women who have equal opportunities in the hawker practice…hawker culture is a social and economic leveller… providing wide-ranging opportunities to people, including an avenue to gaining livelihood”.39 Another tension, therefore, is this: on the one hand, ICH acknowledges and celebrates hawker foods that have been heavily influenced by migrant communities while on the other hand it excludes immigrants from becoming hawkers.

17This invisibility and exclusion of migrant labour in cooking hawker food extends from hawker centres to households. For those who can afford to hire domestic labour, cooking is often left to low-wage female workers recruited from Southeast Asia e.g., the Philippines and Indonesia. This has allowed more married women, especially in a patriarchal society like Singapore, to participate in the labor market as domestic responsibilities are outsourced to other women.40 In 2023, there were approximately 1.21 million foreign workers in Singapore (about one-fifth of the total population), of whom 276,000 were domestic helpers.41 Domestic helpers play a critical role by feeding thousands of families with culturally familiar foods. By restricting immigrant/migrant culinary skills to the household, hawkers are deprived of the cultural innovations and cuisines that ironically, mark the origins of hawker culture in Singapore.

Eating Hawker Food

  • 42 Sylvia Tan, Singapore Chronicles: Food, Singapore, Straits Times Press, 2016.
  • 43 Peranakans in Singapore trace their ancestry to mixed marriages of Chinese traders to people of Mal (...)
  • 44 Unlike the terms ‘hawker’ and ‘hawker centre,’ ‘hawker food’ is not defined in Singapore’s UNESCO a (...)
  • 45 Andrew Tam, “Singapore Hawker Centres: Origins, Identity, Authenticity, and Distinction”, Gastronom (...)

18Sylvia Tan42 borrows the term “exterior society” to describe how Singapore and its cuisines have been influenced by the people who came to live there at various times in its history. These influences include: indigenous Malay; colonial British, Dutch, and Portuguese; immigrant Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian; and Eurasian and Peranakan.43 As a result, food cultures, cooking methods, and ingredients are blended alongside eating habits in a uniquely Singaporean way. Without such culinary openness, where foods could be (and still are) influenced by outsiders, hawker food44 as we know it today would not exist45 (Ill. 4).

Ill. 4. Different types of hawker food in Singapore.

Ill. 4. Different types of hawker food in Singapore.

From left to right (clockwise): Laksa (spicy coconut milk-based soup, a Peranakan-influenced dish), Mee Rebus (boiled noodles in gravy, a Malay dish), Chwee Kueh (steamed rice cakes topped with pickled radish, a Teochew dish), Wonton Soup (meat dumplings in broth, a Chinese dish)

Source: Bryan Wee.

  • 46 Ibid.
  • 47 Jean Duruz, “The Taste of Retro: Nostalgia, Sensory Landscapes and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore”, a (...)
  • 48 Ibid., p. 137.
  • 49 Andrew Tam, “Singapore Hawker Centres”, art. cit., p. 14.

19Take for example chicken rice, Singapore’s unofficial national dish. Chinese immigrants, many of whom worked as labourers, are credited with creating chicken rice in the early 19th century when Singapore was a British trading port.46 Similarly, Duruz47 describes how laksa has been associated with a specific neighbourhood (Katong) through its Peranakan heritage as well as the state’s discourse on food tourism. The distinctiveness of both dish and place have undergone multiple reinterpretations over time, especially as “competing food stalls laid claim to serve the original and real Katong laksa”.48 The hawker foods chicken rice and laksa, like many other ‘Singaporean dishes’, are “embedded with colonial and immigrant influences but heralded as authentic and local”.49

20Notably, views on what constitutes authentic hawker food have morphed through time. For older people who remember the era before hawker centres, the only authentic dishes may be the ones associated with youthful memories of the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of itinerant hawkers cooking and selling food along the streets. But itinerant hawkers were moved into hawker centres fifty years ago, and despite any alteration to the various traditional dishes that occurred as part of that transition, hawker food served from stalls in hawkers centres is now widely represented as true hawker food. This is another tension created by ICH, whereby hawker food in hawker centres is granted a level of authenticity that not only distinguishes, but also elevates it from historic street hawker food, and from the myriad places where hawker food is available today.

  • 50 Lim Tin Seng, “Hawkers: From public nuisance to national icons”, BiblioAsia, vol. 9, no 3, 2013, p. (...)

21Chicken rice, laksa, and other hawker foods are eaten not only in hawker centres but also in food courts, which have recently emerged in the urban foodway. Food courts are air-conditioned spaces with food stalls, but whereas stallholders in state-owned hawker centres are individual tenants who rent from the government, a private operator/corporate entity owns, manages, and rents out the stalls in a food court.50 Without the hawker centres’ government subsidies and informal price controls, hawker foods in food courts tend to be priced higher. The trade-off is that food courts are located within shopping malls where they are frequented by young people, working professionals, and families who prefer eating hawker food in relatively convenient, comfortable spaces (Ill. 5).

Ill. 5. A food court in the basement of the shopping mall at Marina Bay, Singapore.

Ill. 5. A food court in the basement of the shopping mall at Marina Bay, Singapore.

Source: Bryan Wee.

  • 51 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6.
  • 52 Lim Tin Seng, “Hawkers: From public nuisance to national icons”, art. cit., p. 15.

22Within a short time after the opening of Singapore’s first food court along Orchard Road in the 1980s, many more sprouted up, driven by the demand for hawker food in upscale settings and drawn by the promise of large profit margins.51 Surprisingly for a nation obsessed with food, food courts have thrived even with the cultural perception that “food court fare tends to be characterless due to mass-produced recipes…compared to rough and tumble hawker centres where one might find older hawkers who have honed their craft for several decades using carefully guarded recipes”.52 For adults today, eating food in hawker centres forms the basis of vivid, sensory memories of meals with family and friends. Conversely, younger generations of Singaporeans may have a stronger affinity for food courts so for them, food court fare is not “characterless” as it is likely to contain significant memories. Like hawker centres, food courts are spaces where “it is common to see grandparents and parents bringing children [to eat], and transmitting values related to multigenerational and multicultural interactions”. While eating hawker food has evolved over the years, it remains central in the formation of personal and familial cultural identities surrounding food and culinary tradition in Singapore. However, the tension here is that the ICH inscription protects certain food memories, specifically those in hawker centres that it deems heritage-worthy, and perhaps de-legitimises those that fall outside its boundaries e.g., food courts.

  • 53 UNESCO, Hawker Culture in Singapore, Community Dining and Culinary Practices in a Multicultural Urb (...)
  • 54 Ibid.
  • 55 National Environment Agency, Information for Stallholders, op. cit., p. 10.

23Furthermore, the title of ‘community dining rooms’ is reserved solely for hawker centres yet its definition as “important communal spaces frequented by diverse communities residing in Singapore… situated in business and recreational districts where people work, meet and play… where one can hear multi-lingual exchanges over meals in a lively atmosphere”53 applies equally to food courts. In essence, the ICH inscription sets hawker centres apart from food courts via claims of an authentic dining experience, thus intensifying the tensions and competitive relationships between the two. Despite the growing popularity and cultural relevance of food courts as places where hawker foods are eaten on a daily basis, they are not designated as ICH. Furthermore, food vendors in food courts are not hawkers, even though they might serve the same types of hawker food found in hawker centres. The distinction between hawkers and other types of food vendors is based on location and legal status. Specifically, the label of hawkers is reserved for people who cook/sell food in hawker centres,54 and while there is a pathway from food vendor to hawker, the requirement of Singapore citizenship/permanent residency remains.55

24Just as importantly, the experience of eating hawker foods in Singapore has been dramatically and irrevocably altered by urban and economic development. Dining on the streets with makeshift wooden tables and/or chairs next to an itinerant hawker preparing your food, is a distinctly different experience from eating in a modern hawker centre or an air-conditioned food court (Ill. 6).

Ill. 6. Changing foodways result in different dining experiences, food memories and an evolving cultural heritage in Singapore.

Ill. 6. Changing foodways result in different dining experiences, food memories and an evolving cultural heritage in Singapore.

From top left (clockwise): mobile street hawkers (source: National Heritage Board), Old Airport Road hawker centre, Food court at Takashimaya shopping mall.

Source: Bryan Wee.

  • 56 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 3.
  • 57 Daniel Bender, “Dipping in the Common Sauce Pot: Satay Vending and Good Taste Politics in Colonial (...)

25Itinerant hawkers traversed specific daily routes in the urban foodway, and the temporal and spatial regularity of their stops marked meal times for those who would anticipate their arrival.56 There was an unspoken familiarity between hawkers and their customers that often blurred the boundaries between private and public spaces where people ate.57 There are few left who have such sensory memories of eating hawker food on the streets of Singapore. Today, people eating at hawker centres largely communicate with workers through digital platforms (e.g., electronic payments, mobile apps), and the consumption of hawker food can be a very different sensory experience. Official recognition—despite positive intentions—privileges these relatively static versions of food experiences and inadvertently constrains the democratic and diverse practices that originally made hawker culture meaningful.

26Hawker heritage means different things to different people who have experienced eating hawker food in different settings over time. Yet the Singapore government has limited heritage to a specific set of experiences from a specific time in the nation’s history—namely, the cultural practices found in modern hawker centres. In validating the authenticity of food memories solely through hawkers in hawker centres, the ICH, in this case, fails to address both the historical value of hawker culture (street hawkers) and the contemporary nature of Singapore’s urban foodway (food courts).

  • 58 The origins of nasi lemak are contested by Malaysia which claims it as their national dish, both in (...)
  • 59 Joan C. Henderson, Ong Si Yun, Priscilla Poon and Xu Biwei, “Hawker Centres as Tourist Attractions: (...)
  • 60 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6.
  • 61 Can Seng Ooi and Nicole Tarulevicz, “From Third World to First World: Tourism, Food Safety and the (...)

27The ICH designation of Singapore’s hawker culture also introduces tensions with neighbouring countries around what could be viewed as exclusionary claims to food and hawker heritage. Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, also have deep traditions of street food hawkers who cook and sell dishes very similar to their Singapore counterparts e.g., nasi lemak.58 Henderson compares eating hawker foods in hawker centres to the street foods found in other parts of Southeast Asia, and concludes that “while street cleanliness and tidiness and hygienic hawker centres have undoubted merits, the absence of spontaneity and activity can be compared unfavourably to the energy-infusing public spaces and stimulation of the senses in other cities [in Southeast Asian Street Foods].”59 In Singapore, the government removed the “street” from street food long ago, so that today, eating hawker foods is both a physical act and a symbolic representation of the state’s emphasis on public order and control.60 These manufactured foodways are arguably less ‘organic,’ and thus can be perceived as less ‘authentic’ than the street-based food hawkers still operating in cities across the region.61 Yet the ICH inscription for Singapore’s hawker culture provides a formal decree of authenticity that a) omits the street food traditions in neighbouring countries, b) obscures the regional origins of Singaporean hawker food itself, and c) provides Singapore an advantageous platform from which to compete for food tourism revenue.

Sharing Hawker Food

  • 62 Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary Landscape”, art. cit., p. 8.
  • 63 Nasheen Naidoo, Rob M. van Dam, Sheryl Ng, Chuen Seng Tan, Shiqi Chen, Jia Yi Lim, Mei Fen Chan, L (...)
  • 64 Department of Statistics, Population Trends, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Singapore. 2019.
  • 65 Tan Shin Bin, Keeping the Char Kway Teow Cheap-At What Price, ScholarBank@NUS Repository, 2015, p.  (...)

28As part of an integrated approach to national development in the 1990s, the Singapore government built extensive networks of train stations and public transportation hubs linking people to the places where they lived, worked, and ate. Hawker centres, food courts, restaurants, and coffee shops provided people with tasty meals at affordable prices.62 Eating out or getting take-out soon became a way of life for Singaporeans, many of whom frequently dined out, with more than 75% of the population visiting hawker centres at least once a week.63 As a part of average monthly household expenditure on food, 38.9% was spent at hawker centres and similar establishments,64 and this percentage generally increased for those from lower-income backgrounds.65 These changes to the foodway brought about by rapid urban renewal led to hawker food being shared widely in Singapore (Ill. 7).

Ill. 7. Map of integrated development: HDB flats, hawker centres, food courts, Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) network.

Ill. 7. Map of integrated development: HDB flats, hawker centres, food courts, Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) network.

Source: map created by Amy DePierre with data from data.gov.sg.

29Hawkers faced increasing competition for their customers, particularly with air-conditioning in food courts and the convenience of numerous food establishments scattered across the island. In addition to sharing hawker food with people through integrated development, therefore, the government embarked on a massive overhaul of hawker centres to attract local as well as foreign visitors.

  • 66 Can Seng Ooi and Nicole Tarulevicz, “From Third World to First World: Tourism, Food Safety and the (...)
  • 67 The Straits Times, All Hawker Centres to be Upgraded, 19 February 2001.
  • 68 Lim Tin Seng, “Hawkers: From public nuisance to national icons”, art. cit., p. 12.

30One approach taken was further implementation of regulations such as a mandatory food safety course to ensure tighter control over hygiene.66 Another heavily publicised approach was the Hawker Upgrading Programme (HUP), launched in 2001 at a cost of SG$420 million to improve the dining experience in hawker centres.67 Upgrades were implemented over 13 years and largely focused on infrastructure (e.g., better airflow and ventilation) as well as hygiene (e.g., updated toilets). As part of the HUP, select hawker centres were also revisioned thematically. For example, renovations at the East Coast Lagoon Food Village included pavilions, gazebos, cabanas, tables and chairs on sand, and open-sided structures to accentuate a tropical island setting.68 This systematic transformation of hawker centres and hawker culture reaffirmed the central role of hawkers in Singapore society, and generated food tourism revenue that bolstered the national economy. It also led to many of the “original” hawker centres built during the 1970s and 1980s being remade to fit the image of a modernising Singapore.

  • 69 Clare A. Sammells, “Haute Traditional Cuisines: How UNESCO’s List of Intangible Heritage Links the (...)
  • 70 The Business Times, Makan in the USA, 2015, October 24.

31In similar fashion, the UNESCO inscription commodified hawkers by clearly marking them as ICH, thereby positioning them on the global stage for consumption. According to Sammells,69 “national cuisines cannot be merely of local importance if they are to appeal to foreign tourists and global restaurants…this feeds back into touristic marketing and it is not a coincidence that national tourism boards are among the first to proclaim UNESCO honours.” A recent example of this ‘touristic marketing’ is the export of hawker culture and food to New York, USA.70

We're looking for [hawker] stalls…with scalability, maybe the second-generation kind of stall who can develop their business model, but they still have to fit into [Anthony Bourdain’s] vision of “curated chaos and orchestrated filth”. However it's described, the bigger picture is that this could well be the biggest breakthrough for Singapore cuisine to grow its global appeal. While you can find the occasional Singapore restaurant in cities around the world, to have 50 Singapore hawkers in one place outside of their home turf is unprecedented, even in a diverse melting pot like New York.

32The use of the term “curated chaos and orchestrated filth” in the quote above parallels the mass-market appeal of hawker centres as sites where ‘authentic street food’ (chaos and filth) is hygienically cooked and eaten within clean, inviting spaces (curated and orchestrated). Furthermore, this location in New York City leverages ICH as marketing language to draw diners into “the first [food hall] of its kind in the United States featuring stalls from the UNESCO hawker centres of Singapore”.71 Thus, there are multiple benefits stemming from UNESCO’s ICH recognition. First, ICH validated hawkers and hawker centres as repositories of shared traditions and identities in Singapore. Then, upon internal validation, ICH defined and packaged hawker culture as a material and thus marketable commodity to promote food tourism.

  • 72 Jean Duruz, “The Taste of Retro: Nostalgia, Sensory Landscapes and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore”, a (...)
  • 73 The Straits Times, Changi Food Street Stalls Renamed, 10 August 2014.

33When hawker culture is commodified in these ways, local places and place names associated with certain hawkers and hawker foods can be removed and rendered insignificant. There is a strong cultural link between places and hawker foods, with food nostalgia in Singapore often captured in place names. These place names are even ‘borrowed’ to retain identity and authenticity (cf., bragging rights to the famous Katong laksa mentioned above),72 but their meanings as well as the connections to those places are lost when, for example, eating a bowl of laksa in New York City is marketed as ‘the same experience’ as eating a bowl of laksa at a UNESCO hawker centre. Almost a decade earlier, a food court in Singapore’s Changi Airport came under fire for usurping famous place names for specific hawker foods (made through mock-street signs), receiving so much backlash that they were forced to remove the references and rename the stalls. At the time a Straits Times article73 stated, “gone are the famous street names and geographical locations synonymous with particular local dishes.” This calls into question the authenticity of hawker foods that, even with the ICH designation, are unable to replicate food memories linked to specific places and experiences in Singapore. Here, authenticity refers to place-specific hawker food being commodified and extended to parts of Singapore (such as the airport food court) and other parts of the world, such that it is disconnected from its place of origin and thus made less authentic. 

34The sharing of hawker food is further exemplified by the use of Michelin awards to attract customers. According to Michelin’s website,74 as of 2024 there are 81 food vendors in restaurants, food courts and hawker centres in Singapore with a Michelin Bib Gourmand award. These ‘bib gourmand’ awards are relatively new and not intended for ‘fine dining’. Rather, they recognise foods that provide the best value for money. Ironically, hawker foods with bib gourmand awards are labeled on Michelin’s website as street food (e.g., chicken rice at People’s Park Complex), even though Singapore’s street hawkers were replaced by hawker centres decades ago. This marketing of authenticity to stimulate food tourism goes against the idea of ICH as “an assemblage of cultural traditions and artefacts belonging to a particular community”.75 Instead, it suggests that the sharing of hawker food is less about cultural continuity and heritage preservation than it is about maintaining profitability within a competitive economy.

Hawker Heritage Revisited

  • 76 Rachel Ng, Singapore’s iconic but endangered street food now has UNESCO status, National Geographic (...)

35Hawker culture remains a cornerstone of national identity; it is what makes Singapore Singapore. This is recognised by National Geographic, in which a recent article described how, “some civilisations chronicle their pasts with art or books. Others pass on history orally through folklore. In Singapore, the tale of how a humble fishing village in Southeast Asia evolved into a buzzing modern metropolis often comes in spoonful’s of peppery pork rib soup or bites of fried egg noodles at its hawker centres”.76 The UNESCO inscription protects hawker culture, but it does so within the context of a manufactured urban foodway, and within the timeframe of a modernising Singapore. Specifically, the ICH preserves two primary components of hawker culture: hawkers and their culinary practices, as well as hawker centres as multicultural community dining rooms.

36Where hawkers were once essential to Singapore’s culinary and cultural infrastructure, they are now struggling to stay relevant. It is not only the numbers of hawkers that are diminishing, but also the recipes, creativity and skills essential to a thriving foodscape that are being diluted. Whether or not ICH status can revitalise hawking in ways that shift the dominant narrative of hawkers as a low-wage, low-status profession is an open question. Similarly, important questions concerning food security (e.g., where will cooking skills come from in the future, and who will be doing the cooking), food identity (e.g., extending the authenticity of food memories to include food courts), and the ongoing commodification of hawker culture (e.g., marketing generic hawker foods for global consumption), remain unresolved by ICH. Taking foodways and foodscapes into account in talking about hawker heritage, as we have done here, is important because more tensions are likely to present themselves as Singapore and other countries continue to seek and receive UNESCO recognition for their food cultures.

  • 77 Julia Csergo, “Food as a Collective Heritage Brand in the Era of Globalisation”, art. cit., p. 461.

37Furthermore, not only has ICH created and exacerbated tensions in Singapore’s urban foodway, but it has also changed the nation’s food culture in material and symbolic ways. We describe how hawker heritage represents commodification for economic development through food tourism, and how ICH inscription only elevates certain aspects of hawker culture. In particular, official heritage narratives selectively reinforce specific culinary traditions and locations—such as government-managed hawker centres—while sidelining alternative spaces, practices, and sensory memories inherent in historical and contemporary forms of hawking. Given that one of the mandates of CSICH is “to take full advantage of intangible cultural heritage…for inclusive and equitable economic development encompassing a diversity of activities with both monetary and non-monetary value”,77 further research is warranted on the impacts of ICH on modernising spaces such as urban foodways.

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Notes

1 Michael Di Giovine and Ronda Brulotte, “Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage”, in Michael Di Giovine and Ronda Brulotte (dir.), Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, Burlington, Ashgate, 2014, p. 1-21.

2 Chi-Hoon Kim, “Kimchi Nation: Constructing Kimjang as an Intangible Korean heritage”, in Casey Man Kong Lum and Marc de Ferrière le Vayer (dir.), Urban Foodways and Communication, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016, p. 39-53.

3 Julia Csergo, “Food as a Collective Heritage Brand in the Era of Globalisation”, International Journal of Cultural Property, no 25, 2018, p. 449-468.

4 Nicole Tarulevicz, Eating her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore, Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2013.

5 Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, 2nd ed., Singapore, National Environment Agency, 2024.

6 Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha, “Theorising Contemporary Foodscapes: Conceptual and Empirical Insights from Singapore”, in Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (dir.), Food, Foodways and Foodscapes: Culture, Community and Consumption in Post-Colonial Singapore, Singapore, World Scientific Publishing, 2016, p. 1-22 (here p. 14).

7 Foodways are the culinary rituals and everyday social norms that inform/shape food preparation and consumption. See Casey Man Kong Lum and Marc de Ferrière le Vayer, “At the Intersection of Urban Foodways, Communication and Intangible Cultural Heritage”, in Casey Man Kong Lum and Marc de Ferrière le Vayer (dir.), Urban Foodways and Communication, op. cit., p. 1-21. Conceptualizing foodways as heritage sensitizes us to people’s everyday interactions with their surroundings and heightens our appreciation of ICH as a constantly evolving social construct.

8 Foodscapes refer to the distribution of food resources, patterns of food access, and forms of social interaction embedded in the built environments, institutional arrangements, cultural spaces, and discourses that mediate relationships with food, and how these change through time. See Christiana Miewald, “Foodscapes”, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020, p. 197-201. Gisèle Yasmeen, “The Historical Role of Cities in Recursively Shaping Global Food Systems (Southeast Asia)”, in Ana Moragues-Faus, Jill K. Clark, Jane Battersby, Anna Davies (dir.), Handbook of urban food governance, New York, Routledge, 2022, p. 48-61.

9 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, in Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (dir.), Food, Foodways and Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 23-40. Jean Duruz, “The Taste of Retro: Nostalgia, Sensory Landscapes and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore”, in Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (dir.), Food, Foodways and Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 133-158. Kelvin E.Y. Low, “Tasting Memories, Cooking Heritage: A Sensuous Invitation to Remember”, in Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (dir.), Food, Foodways and Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 61-82.

10 Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo, Eating Together: Food, Space and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Kelly Ong, “Food, Language and Identity in Singapore’s Hawker Centers”, in Stanley D. Brunn & Roland Kehrein (dir.), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, Cham, Springer, 2020, p. 629-665. Shin Bin Tan and Mariana Arcaya , “Where we Eat is Who We Are: A Survey of Food-Related Patterns to Singapore’s Hawker Centres, Food Courts and Coffee Shops”, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, no 17, 2020, p. 1-14.

11 Joan C. Henderson, Ong Si Yun, Priscilla Poon and Xu Biwei, “Hawker Centres as Tourist Attractions: The Case of Singapore”, International Journal of Hospitality Management, no 31, 2012, p. 849-855. Joan C. Henderson, “Foodservice in Singapore: Retaining a Place for Hawkers?”, Journal of Food Service Business Research, vol. 19, no 3, 2016, p. 272-286. Lily Kong, “From Sushi in Singapore to Laksa in London: Globalising Foodways and the Production of Economy and Identity”, in Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (dir.), Food, Foodways and Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 207-241.

12 Laurajane Smith , Uses of Heritage, New York, Routledge, 2006.

13 Michael Di Giovine and Ronda Brulotte, “Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage”, art. cit., p. 2.

14 Maggie Roe, “Landscape and Intangible Cultural Heritage”, in Michelle Stefano, Peter Davis (dir.), The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage, New York, Routledge, 2017, p. 342-355.

15 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge/Oxford, Polity Press/Blackwell, 1994.

16 Brenda Yeoh, “Postcolonial Geographies of Place and Migration”, in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift (dir.), Handbook of Cultural Geography, London, Sage Publications, 2009, p. 369-383.

17 National Library Board (2021). Former Telok Ayer Market. Singapore Infomedia Website accessed on August 21 at https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=1c45187f-be24-4af9-8e9d-db5dd699352d#:~:text=The%2520former%2520Telok%2520Ayer%2520Market,and%2520entertainment%2520complex%2520in%25201989.

18 Lily Kong, “Conserving Urban Heritage: Remembering the Past in a Developmental City-State”, in Chye Kiang Heng (dir.), 50 Years of Urban Planning in Singapore, Singapore, Scientific World Publishing, 2017, p. 237-256. Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation”, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2003.

19 Nicole Tarulevicz, “History Making in Singapore. Who is Producing the Knowledge?”, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 11, no 1, 2009, p. 402-425.

20 Julia Csergo, “Food as a Collective Heritage Brand in the Era of Globalisation”, art. cit., p. 2.

21 Bryan Wee, Amy DePierre, Brian Page, Ayn Schmit and Merlin Ariefdjohan, Evolving Foodscapes: A Spatial History of Hawkers in Singapore, Denver, University of Colorado Denver/National Library Board of Singapore, 2023. Online: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/a24b930bc0fa4666844eb6c0577a71e7.

22 Colony of Singapore, Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Hawker Question in Singapore, Government Publication Bureau, 1932.

23 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit.

24 Manuel Castells, Lee Goh and Yin-Wang Kwok, The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore, London, Pion Limited, 1990. Belinda Yuen, “Guiding spatial change: Singapore urban planning”, in Somik V. Lall, Mila Freire, Belinda Yuen, Robin Rajack and Jean-Jacques Helluin (dir.), Urban Land Markets: Improving Land Management for Successful Urbanisation, Dordrecht, Springer, 2009, p. 363-384. Gavin Shatkin, “Reinterpreting the Meaning of the ‘Singapore Model’: State Capitalism and Urban Planning”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38, no 1, 2014, p. 116-137.

25 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6.

26 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 3.

27 Can Seng Ooi and Nicole Tarulevicz, “From Third World to First World: Tourism, Food Safety and the Making of Modern Singapore”, in Eerang Park, Sangkyun Kim and Ian Yeoman(dir.), Food Tourism in Asia, Cham, Springer, 2019, p. 73-88 (here p. 77).

28 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6. Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary Landscape: Is Anyone Cooking?”, in Lily Kong and Vineeta Sinha (dir.), Food, Foodways and Foodscapes: Culture, community and consumption in post-colonial Singapore, Singapore, World Scientific Publishing, 2016, p. 159-184.

29 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 40.

30 Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation”, art. cit., p. 36.

31 Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary Landscape”, art. cit.

32 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 36.

33 Lily Kong, “Conserving Urban Heritage: Remembering the Past in a Developmental City-State”, art. cit., p. 2.

34 Singapore Food Agency. Numbers of Licensed Hawkers in Singapore, personal communication, 2023.

35 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6. Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary Landscape”, art. cit., p. 8.

36 The Straits Times, So Who Wants to be a Hawker, 2017, February 4.

37 National Environment Agency, Information for Stallholders, 2024. Online: https://www.nea.gov.sg/our-services/hawker-management/information-for-stallholders.

38 The Straits Times, Government Sets Out Ways it Helps Sustain Hawker Culture, Alleviate Cost Pressures on Singaporeans, 2024, November 14.

39 UNESCO, Hawker Culture in Singapore, Community Dining and Culinary Practices in a Multicultural Urban Context, Nomination file no 01568, the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 2020, p. 4.

40 Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary Landscape”, art. cit., p. 8.

41 Ministry of Manpower, Foreign Workforce Numbers. 2023. Online: https://www.mom.gov.sg/documents-and-publications/foreign-workforce-numbers.

42 Sylvia Tan, Singapore Chronicles: Food, Singapore, Straits Times Press, 2016.

43 Peranakans in Singapore trace their ancestry to mixed marriages of Chinese traders to people of Malay descent in Melaka and other Straits settlements. This generated unique cultural practices of food, language, dress and architectural forms.

44 Unlike the terms ‘hawker’ and ‘hawker centre,’ ‘hawker food’ is not defined in Singapore’s UNESCO application. Based on field experience in Singapore’s urban foodway we consider that hawker food is not specific to hawkers, rather, it is an implicit reference to culturally familiar, ‘Singaporean dishes’ that are typically available in multiple locations across diverse settings e.g., hawker centres, food courts, coffee shops.

45 Andrew Tam, “Singapore Hawker Centres: Origins, Identity, Authenticity, and Distinction”, Gastronomica, vol. 17, no 1, p. 44-55.

46 Ibid.

47 Jean Duruz, “The Taste of Retro: Nostalgia, Sensory Landscapes and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore”, art. cit., p. 3.

48 Ibid., p. 137.

49 Andrew Tam, “Singapore Hawker Centres”, art. cit., p. 14.

50 Lim Tin Seng, “Hawkers: From public nuisance to national icons”, BiblioAsia, vol. 9, no 3, 2013, p. 10-17.

51 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6.

52 Lim Tin Seng, “Hawkers: From public nuisance to national icons”, art. cit., p. 15.

53 UNESCO, Hawker Culture in Singapore, Community Dining and Culinary Practices in a Multicultural Urban Context, op. cit., p. 4.

54 Ibid.

55 National Environment Agency, Information for Stallholders, op. cit., p. 10.

56 Beng Huat Chua, “Taking the Street out of Street Food”, art. cit., p. 3.

57 Daniel Bender, “Dipping in the Common Sauce Pot: Satay Vending and Good Taste Politics in Colonial and Post-Colonial Singapore”, Food, Culture and Society, vol. 24, no 1, p. 66-83.

58 The origins of nasi lemak are contested by Malaysia which claims it as their national dish, both in terms of recipe as well as in place of origin (nasi lemak, coconut-flavored rice with an accompaniment of local side dishes in Malay cuisine, is mainly eaten as street food). In 2024, nasi lemak was nominated by the Malaysian government for UNESCO ICH status.

59 Joan C. Henderson, Ong Si Yun, Priscilla Poon and Xu Biwei, “Hawker Centres as Tourist Attractions: The Case of Singapore”, p. 52.

60 Bryan Wee et al., Evolving Foodscapes, op. cit., p. 6.

61 Can Seng Ooi and Nicole Tarulevicz, “From Third World to First World: Tourism, Food Safety and the Making of Modern Singapore”, art. cité. p. 7.

62 Vineeta Sinha, “Mapping Singapore’s Culinary Landscape”, art. cit., p. 8.

63 Nasheen Naidoo, Rob M. van Dam, Sheryl Ng, Chuen Seng Tan, Shiqi Chen, Jia Yi Lim, Mei Fen Chan, Ling Chew and Salome A. Rebello, “Determinants of eating at local and western fast-food venues in an urban Asian population: A mixed methods approach”, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, vol. 14, no 69, 2017, p. 1-12.

64 Department of Statistics, Population Trends, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Singapore. 2019.

65 Tan Shin Bin, Keeping the Char Kway Teow Cheap-At What Price, ScholarBank@NUS Repository, 2015, p. 1-22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25818/zkea-mypp.

66 Can Seng Ooi and Nicole Tarulevicz, “From Third World to First World: Tourism, Food Safety and the Making of Modern Singapore”, art. cit., p. 7.

67 The Straits Times, All Hawker Centres to be Upgraded, 19 February 2001.

68 Lim Tin Seng, “Hawkers: From public nuisance to national icons”, art. cit., p. 12.

69 Clare A. Sammells, “Haute Traditional Cuisines: How UNESCO’s List of Intangible Heritage Links the Cosmopolitan to the Local”, in Michael Di Giovine and Ronda Brulotte (dir.), Edible Identities, op. cit., p. 145.

70 The Business Times, Makan in the USA, 2015, October 24.

71 Urban Hawker, The Hawker Story, 2024. Online: https://www.urbanhawker.com/about.

72 Jean Duruz, “The Taste of Retro: Nostalgia, Sensory Landscapes and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore”, art. cit., p. 3.

73 The Straits Times, Changi Food Street Stalls Renamed, 10 August 2014.

74 Michelin Guide, All Restaurants in Singapore, 2024. Online: https://guide.michelin.com/ie/en/selection/singapore/restaurants.

75 Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation”, op. cit., p. 25.

76 Rachel Ng, Singapore’s iconic but endangered street food now has UNESCO status, National Geographic, 1 February 2021. National Geographic magazine is an important marker for how the question of hawker food and hawker heritage is now featured on the global stage.

77 Julia Csergo, “Food as a Collective Heritage Brand in the Era of Globalisation”, art. cit., p. 461.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Ill. 1. Most hawker centres in Singapore were constructed in the 1970’s and 1980’s to confine street hawkers in fixed locations. These facilities were later upgraded.
Légende A food hawker (left) and a line of people waiting their turn to order char kway teow (fried noodles) from him (right), Whampoa Hawker Centre, Singapore.
Crédits Source: Bryan Wee.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1340/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 963k
Titre Ill. 2. Lau Pa Sat in Singapore’s Central Business District (left) and food vendors re-enacting street hawking by preparing satay (grilled meat skewers) outside Lau Pa Sat (right).
Crédits Source: Bryan Wee.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1340/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,4M
Titre Ill. 3. Aging hawkers in Singapore, where social stigmatisation and low wages have led to hawking becoming an endangered profession.
Légende Inset: Hawker centre at Chinatown Complex, located among high-rise HDB flats.
Crédits Source: Bryan Wee.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1340/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,0M
Titre Ill. 4. Different types of hawker food in Singapore.
Légende From left to right (clockwise): Laksa (spicy coconut milk-based soup, a Peranakan-influenced dish), Mee Rebus (boiled noodles in gravy, a Malay dish), Chwee Kueh (steamed rice cakes topped with pickled radish, a Teochew dish), Wonton Soup (meat dumplings in broth, a Chinese dish)
Crédits Source: Bryan Wee.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1340/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 456k
Titre Ill. 5. A food court in the basement of the shopping mall at Marina Bay, Singapore.
Crédits Source: Bryan Wee.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1340/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,0M
Titre Ill. 6. Changing foodways result in different dining experiences, food memories and an evolving cultural heritage in Singapore.
Légende From top left (clockwise): mobile street hawkers (source: National Heritage Board), Old Airport Road hawker centre, Food court at Takashimaya shopping mall.
Crédits Source: Bryan Wee.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1340/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,5M
Titre Ill. 7. Map of integrated development: HDB flats, hawker centres, food courts, Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) network.
Crédits Source: map created by Amy DePierre with data from data.gov.sg.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1340/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,2M
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Bryan Wee, Brian Page et Amy DePierre, « Tensions with Intangible Cultural Heritage in Urban Foodways: Cooking, Eating and Sharing Hawker Food in Singapore »Sociétés & représentations, 60 | -0001, 157-179.

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Bryan Wee, Brian Page et Amy DePierre, « Tensions with Intangible Cultural Heritage in Urban Foodways: Cooking, Eating and Sharing Hawker Food in Singapore »Sociétés & représentations [En ligne], 60 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 décembre 2025, consulté le 07 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/1340 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15dhd

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Auteurs

Bryan Wee

Dr. Bryan Wee is an Associate Professor in, and Chair of, the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. He is a geographer whose research and teaching focuses on the cultural dimensions of human-environment interactions. Using visual methodologies, Bryan’s research investigates social and spatial relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit. For example: how does the transformation of landscapes shape place attachments for diverse groups of people, specifically their experiences, memories and meanings of places? Bryan utilises this knowledge to promote inclusive and livable cities. Recent research programs include the use of interactive story maps to visualise hawker history, identity, and place-making in Singapore’s evolving foodscape.

Brian Page

Dr. Brian Page is a Research Professor / Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. He is a geographer who specialises in research on the historical development of cities. His research program is situated within the fields of urban political economy, historical geography, food studies, and digital humanities. Brian’s work is supported by expertise in archival methods, visual methods, field research methods, and geographical information science (GIS). Regionally, Brian’s research focuses on Denver spatial history. It combines historic map digitisation, historic images, archival data sources, and GIS methods to document and visualise urban landscape change. In Asia, his research concentrates on landscape history in China and Singapore.

Amy DePierre

Amy DePierre is a doctoral candidate in the PhD program in Geography, Planning and Design in the College of Architecture and Planning/Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. With a professional background in marketing and sustainability for the built environment, her interdisciplinary research incorporates elements of geography, environmental science, psychology, and urban planning to build climate-positive and socially equitable opportunities for learning. As a digital humanities researcher utilising geospatial methodologies, Amy seeks to provide an enhanced understanding of the ecological, political, and social complexities inherent in local food systems uniquely situated in different global contexts.

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