Markets, Places, Cities

Kirsten Seale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317557357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Using a transnational analytical framework, this book provides a comprehensive overview of formal and informal markets and place in globalised cities. It examines how urban markets are situated within social, cultural and media discourses, and within material and symbolic economies. The book addresses four key narratives – redevelopment and relocation; privatization of public space; urban renewal; and urbanism and sustainability – to investigate shared and individual attributes of markets and place in diverse, international urban contexts. With case studies in Sydney, Hong Kong, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, London, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris and San Francisco, experiences of market, place and city are explored through interdisciplinary and multimodal perspectives of visual culture, spatial practice, urban design and textual analysis.

1What is a market?

Many people have been to a street, open-air, covered, farmers’ or second-hand market, or have at least seen one. Every culture has them (Slater and Tonkiss, 2001). They are accessed by and accessible to every sector of society, which is a singular trait in a segmented global consumer landscape. Markets have a ubiquitous universality in spite of their many particularities. When I posed the question I ask in this chapter – ‘What is a market?’ – to one of my students, she answered, ‘I don’t know, but I know what it looks like in my mind’. How, then, do we determine that a collection of informal vendors selling ceviche out of shopping trolleys on a pedestrian bridge in Santiago is a market, whereas a converted turn-of-the-century tram shed selling street food in Amsterdam is not?

In trying to pin down what a market is, or is not, it is not helpful that some markets are outdoors and some are indoors. Some have permanent infrastructure, while others are itinerant. They can sell expensive vintage objects, or junk. They can be licensed, or unlicensed, or both. The range of variables and contingencies at work in markets is vast and almost unnavigable. Even within consumer ecologies, the position of markets is uncertain, as Pierre Mayol notes:

At the same time as it is a place of business, it is a place of festival (in small provincial towns, the ‘pompom of music’ frequently accompanies the weekly markets), halfway between the small shops on the street and the department store, or the supermarket, without the elements that constitute it being reabsorbed in one or the other of these terms. It offers a profusion of consumer goods surpassing what a shopkeeper offers, but without falling into the ‘distributionalism’ of supermarkets.

(de Certeau et al., 1998, p. 107)

Furthermore, markets as a signifier mean different things depending on our subject placement or orientation. They can engender mixophilia or mixophobia (Bauman, 2011). Some people might enjoy the ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005, p. 151) that occurs at markets. Others might find their jumble of heterogeneous flows and matter viscerally confronting, and even disgusting. For some, an everyday market in an ungentrified neighbourhood is to be avoided because they dislike the sounds, smells, sights and tastes encountered there, whereas others might actively seek out this market as an authentic representation of place in the city. In some cities, where affluent urban consumers are embracing the ethos of localism, ethical consumption and sustainability, farmers’ markets are resurgent (Lewis and Potter, 2011). In other cities, farmers’ markets are a valuable resource for marginalized communities who would not otherwise have access to affordable and healthy fresh produce. Depending on your perspective, art, craft and maker markets are a mode of consumption that communicates individualism and evades the standardization of mass production, or, they are a showcase for the ubiquity of globalized Creative City discourse (Mould, 2015). Urban flea markets are a source of livelihood and inexpensive goods for those on the social and spatial periphery, or, they are instruments for the accumulation of cultural capital, thanks to the fetishization of vintage aesthetics.

The transdisciplinary and geographic breadth of existing research on markets also indicates their complexity as an object of inquiry. A sample of the literature reveals research coming out of sociology (Watson, 2006, 2009; Watson and Studdert, 2006; Watson and Wells, 2005); anthropology (Black, 2012; Lyon and Back, 2012); gender studies (Clark, 2010); urban studies (Dines and Cattell, 2006; Janssens and Sezer, 2013); cultural geography (Bubinas, 2011; Coles and Crang, 2011; Law, 2011); urban design and architecture (Franck, 2005; Parham, 2012, 2015); and marketing (Visconti et al., 2014).

Markets and the market

One aspect that has been largely overlooked in the literature, and a challenge I have taken up in this book, is the need for a conceptual framework to distinguish the types of markets that exist in cities from the overweening concept of ‘the market’ that is forefront in neo-liberal capitalist political economies. ‘Market’ as a word and as a concept is polyvalent. Nonetheless, Ellen Meiksins Wood in her study of the origin of capitalism declares market ‘the word that lies at the very heart of capitalism’ (2002, p. 6). Patrik Aspers (2011) states that the market is forefront and central in capitalist political, economic and social systems. Wood and Aspers are talking about what Slater and Tonkiss (2001) call ‘market society’, where the logic of the capitalist market has superseded all other economies, dictating and co-opting many individual and collective social transactions. Slater and Tonkiss are noteworthy in drawing attention to the difference between markets and market society: ‘“Market-places” are visible public events that happen at a regular time and place, with buildings, rules, governing institutions and other social structures… The spatial and temporal location of marketplaces is a crucial feature’ (2001, p. 9). Wood, too, draws a distinction between a market that might be run as a capitalist enterprise and capitalist society where everything is run according to market logic:

Markets of various kinds have existed throughout recorded history and no doubt before, as people have exchanged and sold their surpluses in many different ways and for many different purposes. But the market in capitalism has a distinctive, unprecedented function. Virtually everything in capitalist society is a commodity produced for the market… This market dependence gives the market an unprecedented role in capitalist societies, as not only a simple mechanism of exchange or distribution but the principal determinant and regulator of social reproduction.

(Wood, 2002, pp. 96–97)

More often than not in discussions of markets, abstract and actualized forms tend to get lumped together (Aspers, 2011; Calabi, 2004; Casson and Lee, 2011; Fligstein and Dauter, 2007). This conflation is compounded by a historical consequence whereby the abstract manifestations of the market promulgated by capitalist discourse (Mackenzie et al., 2007) are derived from markets as an actualized place. As a number of historians have documented (Braudel, 1982; Calabi, 2004; Pirenne, 2014 [1925]) marketplaces played a crucial role in the development and emergence of modern capitalism.

The opportunity for trade may be their raison d’être, yet this is not what renders markets an important urban site. After all, the exchange function of markets is hardly exceptional in a global political economy dominated by the hegemony of the market. As Slater and Tonkiss recognize, ‘A marketplace… is never simply a meeting of buyers and sellers. Being an embodied event, it always has a specific cultural character, and involves a multitude of social actions and relations. The social density and richness of the marketplace unfolds on a number of levels’ (2001, p. 10). Markets produce cultural, social and knowledge capital. They can be iterated as a site of/for consumption; a location of the everyday; an expression of cultural ‘authenticity’; a public space; and much more. Jean-Christophe Agnew (1986) argues that it is this very lack of ontological clarity that led to the ‘naturalization’ of market processes and their infiltration into all aspects of culture and society. ‘As a threshold of exchange, the market drew on earlier rituals of passage to distance itself from the many worlds that were indiscriminately mixed within it’ (Agnew, 1986, p. 25), and from these multiple ontologies, of which one was place, the exchange aspect of markets was extricated and launched on its own trajectory, leaving a heterogeneous remainder.

Unless otherwise specified, I am referring to an actualized place and the ‘embodied event’ (Slater and Tonkiss, 2011, p. 10) when I say ‘market’ or ‘markets’ in this book. They may also be referred to as a ‘marketplace’, or sometimes a variation upon this, such as ‘bazaar’. Even so, it seems hardly sufficient to say that markets are a place, or that they are emplaced. J. Nicholas Entrikin positions our relationships with place as more than spatial and material. They are ontological and phenomenological as well. Entrikin writes, ‘Place presents itself to us as a condition of human experience. As agents in the world we are always “in place”, much as we are always “in culture”. For this reason our relations to place and culture become elements in the construction of our individual and collective identities’ (1990, p. 1). This suggests that discussion about ‘What is a market?’ – to which one answer is, ‘it is a place’ – might also need to address ‘What is the experience of place in the market?’ It is through studying the phenomenology of place in markets that we can come closer to identifying or locating the distinctive qualities of markets.

Making place in markets

‘The study of the city is the study of what things emerge in the city’, writes Peter Langer (1984, p. 99). I want to apply this formulation to the study of markets, and one of the things to emerge from markets is place. Place is a crucial co-efficient for the markets that I am talking about here – as is acknowledged in that word, marketplace. As Aspers points out, the connections between markets and place are ‘observed not only if we trace the phenomenon… but also in its Latin etymology, mercatus, which refers to trade, but also place’ (2011, p. 4). Agnew (1986) also identifies an interdependence between market and place that has material, located dimensions.

Certainly, place has spatial dimensions, but it also emerges phenomenologically from the space of the market through making. The understanding of making that I am using here comes from Tim Ingold:

Making, then, is a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming. In the phenomenal world, every material is such a becoming, one path or trajectory through a maze of trajectories.

(Ingold, 2011, p. 31)

When Ingold talks about making, he says ‘we learn by doing’ (2011, p. 13). Doing is the phenomenological counterpart to the epistemological ‘knowing from the inside: a correspondence between mindful attention and lively materials’ (Ingold, 2011, p. 11). Much of what I know and what I have learnt about markets is through doing: buying, selling, looking, chatting, eating, touching, smelling, moving about, meeting up, hanging around, observing, documenting, taking photographs. This doing is a form of making in the market, but it is also the making of the market, and making that happens through and with the market. What I am making is different (but not separate) to other making in, through and with the market. Through correspondence and entanglement, making is infinitely generative, as Ingold explains,

I want to think of making, instead, as a process of growth. This is to place the maker from the outset as a participant in amongst a world of active materials. These materials are what he has to work with, and in the process of making he ‘joins forces’ with them, bringing them together or splitting them apart, synthesizing and distilling, in anticipation of what might emerge. The maker’s ambitions, in this understanding, are altogether more humble than those implied by the hylomorphic model. Far from standing aloof, imposing his designs on a world that is ready and waiting to receive them, the most he can do is to intervene in worldly processes that are already going on.

(Ingold, 2011, p. 22)

This distinction that Ingold draws between making as ‘a process of growth’, where the maker is ‘a participant in amongst a world of active materials’ and making as imposing design on the world, is the distinction, I would suggest, between making place and placemaking. The former, in the context of markets, is an open-ended process of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), where place in the market is made through ongoing participation, intervention and improvisation in, and with, the materiality and phenomena of the market. These are micro-processes, intimate in scale, involving close relationships between senses, bodies, space and materials: the situating and setting up of a stall, the arranging of merchandise, the feel of something as we pick it up to examine it, the limited or extended exchange between vendor and (potential) customer, the movement and the path of our bodies as we negotiate the space of the market. Place here is emergent. Placemaking, on the other hand, is an imposition, a model where space and the social uses to which it is put are manipulated or shaped to produce place. In other words, place is a product.

Atmosphere and markets

In the basement of Market City, a 1990s shopping centre hulking behind the residual façade of Sydney’s former central produce market, is Paddy’s Market. Paddy’s has been operating in Sydney, in one form or another, for almost two centuries. The concrete floors and walls, exposed pipes, and ‘clearance height’ signs in the space where it is now located communicate the aesthetics and practicalities of a parking station. It is hard to conceive of a market space more antithetical to the lofty iron and glass pavilions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century market halls still standing in many cities around the world, or to the conviviality of an urban street market (Mehta, 2013). Michael Christie reports that the inauspicious situating of the current Paddy’s was not popular when first proposed as part of redevelopment plans of its former site, yet anticipated that even though ‘critics will again bemoan the lack of atmosphere,… that is something that [the market] will recreate in time, irrespective of the space it occupies’ (1988, p. 149).

Christie’s prediction was correct. When you visit the basement today, the atmosphere is lively and sensorially rich. Sections of the walls have been covered with bright green paint and red lanterns have been strung up between stalls, but the contribution of these basic concessions to aesthetics is minimal. Through the correspondences generated between senses, bodies and materials, making in, with and through the market has transformed an unwelcoming and functionalist space into place.

Figure 1.1Paddy’s Market, Sydney

Sights, smells, sounds, tastes and touch are crucial to the experience of markets. Luce Giard captures the phenomenological link here:

The visit to the market was the time for a marvellous gestural ballet, for winks and funny faces: the outstretched index finger lightly touched the flesh of fruits to determine their degree of ripeness, the thumb tested the firmness of the radishes, a circumspect glance detected the presence of bruises on the apples, one smelled the scent of melons at length as well as the odor of chevre cheeses, one muttered comments about the relationship between quality and price.

(de Certeau et al., 1998, p. 205)

For this reason, many mimetic, artistic and discursive representations of markets are construed through the senses. They range from Emile Zola’s nineteenth-century literary depiction of Les Halles –

Florent kept bumping against hundreds of obstacles – porters taking up their loads, saleswomen arguing in loud voices. He slipped on the thick bed of stumps and peelings that covered the footpath and was almost suffocated by the smell. At last he halted, in a sort of confused stupor, and surrendered to the pushing and insults of the crowd; he was nothing but a piece of flotsam tossed about by the incoming tide.

(Zola, 2007 [1883], p. 30)

– to quotidian experiences reported in a British food magazine:

‘I still go to Waitrose or Sainsbury’s [supermarkets] for basics and canned goods, but I wouldn’t think of buying fresh food there,’ she says. ‘I love to touch and smell the food in the market, and then go home and cook up something seasonal; there’s nothing better.’

(Baldwin, 2011, p. 53)

Place and sense go hand-in-hand, as Steven Feld recognizes: ‘As place is sensed, senses are placed; as places make sense, senses make place’ (1996, p. 91). It is through the interrelation between place and sense that atmospheres in markets come into being. Christian Norberg-Schulz’s (1980) theories on the phenomenology of place were based on a typology of constitutive elements for genius loci. Genius loci is a concept that Norberg-Schulz ‘described as representing the sense people have of a place, understood as the sum of all physical as well as symbolic values in nature and the human environment’ (Jivén and Larkham, 2003, p. 70). According to Norberg-Schulz’s typology, atmosphere is ‘the most comprehensive property of any place’ (1980, p. 11).

To talk about ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is a market?
• 2 Markets as metonyms of urban transformation: East London
• 3 Markets and place-image: Rio de Janeiro
• 4 Markets as unremarkable and remarkable places: Paris, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Beijing
• 5 Dis/placing markets through urban renewal: Sydney
• 6 The right to the city in a downtown farmers’ market: San Francisco
• 7 Markets and urbanism: Antwerp
• Bibliography
• Index