C. Sezer & R. van Melik (eds.), Marketplaces : Movements, Representations and Practices, London and New York, Routledge, 2022, 186 p.
- There is a renewed interest in research and policy arenas in marketplaces as the core of cities’ spatial and economic development and sociocultural life, as incubators of urban renewal and platforms of alternative consumption models and as source of livelihood for many people worldwide. Contributions of this book draw on notions of movements, representations and practices to illustrate that markets have physical reality but are also culturally and socially encoded, and experienced through practice. It brings together empirically evidenced scholarly and practice-based works from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, South Africa and India.
This book is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students of urban geography, urban design and planning, sociology, anthropology, who are interested in the relation between place and mobility in general, and markets as ‘knots’ in the city, in particular. It also informs policy-makers how urban planning policies and design interventions for marketplaces may foster more socially inclusive and environmentally just cities.
- Ceren Sezer is a Research Associate at the Institute for Urban Design and European Urbanism of Aachen University, Germany. She is joint editor of Marketplaces as an Urban Development Strategy (2013), Public Space and Urban Justice (2017) and the author of Visibility, Democratic Public Space and Socially Inclusive Cities (2020) – Rianne van Melik is an Associate Professor in Urban Geography at the Institute of Management Research at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on contemporary cities and their public spaces, with specific interests in the design, management, use and perception of different kinds of public spaces. She is principal investigator of the Moving Marketplaces (MMP) project.
- Excerpt from the introduction : We invited our contributors to empirically investigate not just the ‘here-and now’ of their cases (for example, focusing on their use or design) but also the ‘there-and-then’, making links to other places or times. This approach resulted in researchers employing ‘go-along’ methods, among others, acknowledging the flexible and itinerant nature of trading, such as following research participants during their trading activities (Chapters 2 and 3). Other contributors have not followed traders but traced back where market legislation or market goods come from (Chapters 12 and 13). These chapters show how markets are often portrayed as local entities, yet are part and parcel of global networks of policies and goods. Another group of contributors has taken the temporal dynamics of markets into account, showing the changing rhythms of the market during the day or even the decade (Chapters 3, 4 and 8). Whatever their specific methodology, these contributions all acknowledge markets as unbounded, fluid entities.
Chapter 2 by Celia Zuberec and Sarah Turner focuses on vending strategies and mobility patterns of street vendors in Hanoi, Vietnam. Drawing on interviews with 35 migrant traders, including ‘walking (or riding) while talking interviews’, they show how mobility is differentially accessed, experienced and embodied. The traders draw on a range of dynamic strategies and everyday practices to reach potential customers while avoiding state sanctions simultaneously. Vendors exactly know where and when (not) to trade, and inform each other through social networks. Different narrative maps illustrate that being on the move—while perhaps suggesting flexibility and irregularity—can nevertheless result in dominant routes and rhythms.
In Chapter 3, Kiran Keswani uses the notion of rhythmanalysis, drawing on the work of philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Her study of Bhadra Plaza in Ahmedabad in India portrays the (im)mobility patterns of push-cart vendors selling chai tea and their ‘runners’ delivering the kettles and cups to customers. Biological and social rhythms influence the movement of the chai runners ; thirst and work breaks result in peaks of flows of people (runners) and goods (tea). Hence, the chapter illustrates the spatial and temporal relation between social interaction, time and movement in the marketplace.
In a similar vein, Nihan Oya Memlük-Çobanoğlu and Bilge Beril Kapusuz-Balcı visualise a day in the Esat Marketplace in Ankara (Turkey) in Chapter 4. In their spectral analysis, the authors show that there is a variety of rhythms and actors/actants producing them, including regular patterns (eurythmia), as well as moments of contingent rhythms (arrhythmia). Taking Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis as a starting point, they argue that we should not just study marketplaces as important urban spaces but also as timespaces or rhythmic fields.
- Free download of this introduction available at DOI : 10.4324/9781003197058-1
