For a moment, it seemed like Bangkok was going to lose the very street food culture that’s defined the city for decades. Local newspaper The Nation reported last Tuesday that the city was planning to ban food stalls in all 50 of its districts as part of an effort to “clean up” the streets and “return the pavements to the pedestrians.” All would disappear by end of this year—the sweet and sticky aroma of coconut (a staple Thai ingredient), the sizzle of noodles hitting the wok as vendors fire up an order of pad thai, and the chaotic charm that draws some 20 to 30 million international tourists to the city each year.

After a public outcry, garnering media attention across the globe, Thailand’s chief of tourism was quick to clarify. Vendors wouldn’t be totally barred from the streets, Uthasak Supasorn, the head of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, told Agence France-Presse. “Bangkok has some of the best street food in the world, [and] you cannot take it away from the people of the world,” he said. Instead, Bangkok Metropolitan Authority will set more regulations to improve food safety and waste management while enforcing measures to unclog sidewalks from “obstructions” like food carts, chairs, and umbrellas. Already, according to AFP, almost two-thirds of the city’s 30,000 street vendors have been removed or relocated to open up space.

“These are real planning problems for cities,” says Krishnendu Ray, a food studies professor at New York University who’s currently researching the legal and cultural aspects of the global street food scene. “They often emerge from dealing with overcrowding in cities [as a result of] population growth and a boom in car ownership—which is putting a squeeze on the street.”

Yet food hawkers aren’t the enemies of public space, at least not according to a 2015 survey on the walkability of Bangkok. Most of the 1,000-plus respondents said bulky advertisements, construction materials, and broken sidewalks were the major obstacles to walking.

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Then there’s the question of Bangkok’s frenzied charm, which grew organically out of the need to give lower-income families a source of livelihood and to get people fed. That charm disappears, though, if the government takes too much control of the space, dictating which stalls should open where and what kind of stalls should populate an area. "If so much attention is paid to curation and not enough to the livelihood and lives or poor people, it becomes kind of a sanitized space that I find mostly uninteresting,” Ray says. “And then we will develop a kind of nostalgia about street life.”