Curating and co-producing atmospheres in street food markets: Exploring the roles and interplay between people, food and spaces.

This article examines how street food market organisers in London curate and stage "affective atmospheres"—the sensory and emotional environments shaped by the interplay of spaces, food, and people—to create attractive consumption experiences. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research, it argues that organisers strategically select appropriate physical locations, food offerings, and participants (traders, support staff, and consumers) to align with commercial goals, thereby partially staging these atmospheres in advance while also allowing dynamic co-production during market events. The study highlights how spaces both contain and shape these atmospheres, food acts as an active agent in the experience, and people perform roles that contribute to the market's social and economic dynamics. It also discusses how commercial motivations influence curation practices, often producing exclusion, inequality, and precarity among traders and consumers. This research contributes to broader understandings of affective atmospheres and curation by detailing the actors, elements, and processes involved in a novel commercial setting.