Contested Markets, Contested Cities

Gentrification and Urban Justice in Retail Spaces

Sara González

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367878443
• eBook ISBN: 9781315440347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Markets are at the origin of urban life as places for social, cultural and economic encounter evolving over centuries. Today, they have a particular value as mostly independent, non-corporate and often informal work spaces serving millions of the most vulnerable communities across the world. At the same time, markets have become fashionable destinations for 'foodies' and middle class consumers and tourists looking for authenticity and heritage. The confluence of these potentially contradictory actors and their interests turns markets into "contested spaces".

Contested Markets, Contested Cities provides an analytical and multidisciplinary framework within which specific markets from Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Quito, Sofia, Madrid, London and Leeds (UK) are explored. This pioneering and highly original work examines public markets from a perspective of contestation looking at their role in processes of gentrification but also in political mobilisation and urban justice.

1 Introduction

Studying markets as spaces of contestation

Sara González

Traditional markets, where food and other goods are sold on the streets, in covered regulated spaces or in informal settings, are still serving millions of people across the world despite the advance of corporate and globalised supermarkets. They are not only important spaces for exchange in the local economy but also for social interaction, and in particular they are essential to the most vulnerable communities in our cities, from migrant workers, ethnic minorities, the elderly and the poor. At the same time, in recent decades many markets across the world have been rediscovered as tourist attractions, food meccas and even regeneration flagships. Examples of this are La Boqueria Market in Barcelona, Rotterdam’s Market Hall, Borough Market in London, wet markets in Hong Kong or the Port Market in Montevideo. They are ‘must visit’ locations for international travellers looking for something different and authentic. But these transformations are clashing with markets’ important role as public meeting places and ordinary everyday life places for the most vulnerable. The confluence of these potentially contradictory trends and processes turns markets into ‘contested spaces’.

Throughout this book we will show markets as important spaces in the complex fabric and rhythm of our cities today. Markets come and go; sometimes they are fixed, sometimes they are itinerant; they can be regulated or informal. Traders and customers might be displaced from central cities only to re-emerge somewhere else. Sometimes markets are redeveloped and reimagined as gentrified or touristified spaces. Other times they are part of a resistance against this very same gentrification; and they can create opportunities for fairer forms of consumption in the face of unethical practices by multi-national corporations. We therefore conceptualise markets as spaces of contestation between different practices and discourses of city-making. What is clear is that markets are always evolving, changing, in flux and transformation.

There is growing interest in cities as global spaces for the contestation over processes of urban neoliberalisation, the effects of gentrification and inequalities, and also as incubators of just and fairer alternative ways of living (Harvey, 2012). Our book extends in an original way the analysis of these issues to retail spaces, which are generally marginalised within critical urban studies. In particular, we look at the traditional indoor or street markets in cities across the global North and South as new spaces for contestation.

It is impossible to define markets. There is an immense variety of markets throughout the world and across history and there is no comprehensive study of them, as no discipline has particularly analysed markets. In this book we discuss covered and indoor markets, some owned and managed by the state but also those which are managed and owned privately. We also discuss street markets and touch on informal and unregulated markets. Our aim is not to provide a typology or a fixed definition of markets, but to let the variety and geographical variegation flow and enrich our analysis. Seale (2016, p. 12) in her introduction to the book Markets, Places, Cities conceptualises markets as nodes, ‘where material and intangible flows – of people, goods, times, senses, affect – come to rest, terminate, emerge, merge, mutate and/or merely pass through, and are contingent and relational to each other’. Following this view, we find it useful to think of markets in terms of social relations rather than fixed or bounded spaces. Indeed, if there is one common element to all different types and forms of markets is that they bring people together; they connect them in relationships of economic and extra-economic exchange. Reflecting this diversity and fluidity we do not use a uniform terminology across the book when referring to markets; some chapters use ‘public markets’, others ‘traditional markets’ and others use vernacular terms such as tianguis for the outdoor stalls in Mexico.

Street or informal markets and covered, municipal, indoor markets have not often been studied together. Street and informal markets and vendors have been studied profusely, particularly from an economic anthropology and urban informality studies perspective (Bhowmik, 2012; Bostic et al., 2016; Cross and Morales, 2007; Graaff and Ha, 2015; Seale and Evers, 2014). In contrast, research on covered and regulated markets is sparse and spread out across disciplines and geographies. In this book we look at them together. Most of our chapters look at covered and indoor market halls, but several chapters analyse the situation of street markets, though mainly formal and legal ones. Bringing all these kinds of markets together in one book is innovative in itself and our aim in gathering them is to show why and how, despite their variety, they can all become contested spaces in cities today.

This introductory chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the book which are then taken up, expanded and illustrated by the case study chapters. It provides a broad look at markets and ways of understanding their past and current role and situation. I offer a critical review of the global history of markets in order to help us situate their contemporary contested nature, particularly in relationship to notions of modernity. Following from this, I develop the three main analytical frameworks that will be broadly used by the rest of the case study chapters: markets as the frontier for processes of gentrification; markets as spaces for resistance and political mobilisation and markets as spaces for the development of alternative practices of production and consumption. Here I review various concepts and case studies drawn from existing literature gathered together from across various disciplines from retail studies to ethnography, geography, urban planning and sociology. The catalogue of theoretical and analytical concepts presented here will be picked up later by the case study chapters. In the final section of the introduction I present the structure of the book and briefly refer to our case study markets. All the markets discussed in this book are conceptualised as contested spaces but they do not all show the same features or processes. Therefore, not all case studies develop the three analytical frameworks equally; some are highlighted more than others, building and expanding on some concepts without necessarily developing others. As markets are incredibly variable and diverse, so is their analysis.

The book draws on original work carried out by researchers in the international network ‘Contested Cities’, which received funding from the European Union between 2012 and 2016 to explore processes of urban neoliberalisation and resistance in European and Latin American cities. Researchers from the network were based in the UK, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. As explained in more detail in the Preface of this book, the network developed a sub-group to research the transformation of traditional markets that we were all witnessing in our cities and which we report on in this book.

Markets in the modern city narrative

In this section I provide a brief international history of markets, directly linking their transformations to ideas, notions and narratives of modernity. Through this short history we will see that markets have been, and continue to be, contested spaces because they are linked to disputed notions of modernity, formality and informality that continue until today. Cross (2000) has already advanced this discussion by exploring the changes in public discourse and policy on informal street vending in relation to the notions of modernity and postmodernity, and we are now extending some of these arguments to regular and formal markets.

Markets were, of course, key spaces in the pre-modern and the pre-colonial city as places for the exchange of produce and where the urban and the rural met. Markets both fed cities and were places of encounter between many different ethnicities and cultures. Stobart and Van Damme (2016) show how urban historiography has dedicated a great deal of attention to the role of marketplaces in European medieval history; markets made cities. Beyond Europe, in pre-colonial and pre-industrial cities, markets were also central as points of encounter in long-distance trade networks, where a variety of produce and ethnicities in customers and traders could be seen (Beeckmans and Bigon, 2016; Bromley et al., 1975; Guyer, 2015).

The onset of modernity and ideas of planning and building cities in a rational way interfered with how small retail was organised in cities. Two main processes seem to have affected markets. On the one hand, to make cities more efficient and aesthetically pleasing from a bourgeois perspective, informal and apparently disorganised and messy trade had to be tamed and tidied up (see Guàrdia and Oyón, 2015, for markets in Europe). According to Cross (2000, p. 40) ‘street vending thus came under savage attack throughout the modernist era’. Shopkeepers and established formal traders also lobbied to eradicate this unfair competition, as street traders did not always pay taxes (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999). On the other hand, from the mid-nineteenth century, the state became more involved in food provisioning, alongside other public functions, in response to the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of big cities (Guàrdia and Oyón, 2015) and there was a programme of building municipal market halls in many cities around the world. These two related processes, which I elaborate below, challenged informal street trading and aimed to establish carefully-regulated markets as commercial spaces for the middle and upper classes. These processes, however, were never complete, as we will see.

Modern efforts to tame and regularise markets

In London throughout the nineteenth century, informal street markets were abundant and fed the rapidly-growing population, especially the poorest (Kelley, 2016). However, they were regarded by the authorities as insanitary and traders were often persecuted and displaced to the peripheries (Jones, 2016). In the UK, the removal of informal markets was part of Victorian urban improvement initiatives (Jones, 2016). Covered market halls were built as an educational and moral tool to reform ‘the most offensive kind of lower class street culture and people […] who often made the old market their home’ (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999, p. 55). The policy did not always work and, in London, informal street traders did not necessarily move in these new market halls as they found them too expensive and inconvenient for their customer base (Jones, 2016). The dream of the middle class and sanitised public market hall also failed as middle and upper class consumers favoured the newly-developed department stores such as Harrods or Selfridges, and by 1890s the ‘market hall had become a working class department store’ (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999, p. 193). Similarly, in Paris by the mid-1800s street vendors and street markets were also becoming a concern for the state. In particular, the central markets of Les Halles became a target as an insanitary and crowded space inundated by street traders not suitable for a modern imperial city (Thompson, 1997). Their redevelopment became part of the 1850s ‘Haussmannisation’ project to bring what was until then a dangerous, unruly and filthy space into the realm of the bourgeois city, not without resistance and protests from the traders (ibid).

In the global South, the relationship between markets, urbanisation and modernisation has parallels but also many differences. The building of markets in colonial cities was part of the ‘urban civilisation’ project of colonial powers. Markets were an important part of the rational plans for cities but, as shown above, modernity could not obliterate their informality and messiness. Beeckmans and Bigon (2016) show how markets built in Dakar and Kinshasa by French and Belgian authorities in late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were very cosmopolitan, which later became a concern for the colonial authorities worried about the sanitary consequences of ethnic mixing. In Latin America, street trading has always been part of street life from pre-colonial times, often with a conflictual relationship with state authorities (Bromley, 1998). In Rio de Janeiro, the first attempts to impose some regularity and symmetry onto a sprawling street trade goes back the colonial Portuguese authorities in 1789, supported by the upper and middle classes and influenced by hygienist discourses (Antunes Maciel and Leandro de Souza, 2012). By 1841, La Candelária covered market had been built to clean up some of this street trade; However, with the rapid growth of the city this area around the market soon became again a meeting place for the poorest in the city. Later in 1907 a new market was opened, hoping again to cleanse the area of undesirables (Antunes Maciel and Leandro de Souza, 2012, p. 67).

The building of the modern Western and colonial city was supposed to eradicate primitive forms of trade by bringing them into regularised markets, which would become exemplars of clean and orderly behaviour. The reality, of course, is that poor people did not go away and still needed cheap access to food and easy business start-ups provided by informal street markets. These kinds of markets, therefore, persisted in many cities of the global North well into the nineteenth century, and of course are still very much present in many other cities particularly in the global South. Indoor and regulated markets, although initially established in contrast to informal markets eventually acquired many of the same characteristics and stigmatisation as they attracted the poorest in cities. What we see is a continual effort by the modern state to tame not only street and informal trading but also any formal regular and indoor markets which challenge the modern values of order, standardisation, separation of functions and hygiene.

The rise and fall of the municipal markets as public assets

With the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation of cities through the nineteenth century, feeding the rising population became a major concern of the state, which was becoming by now a central form of organising modern society. In many countries, one way of dealing with this issue was to rein in markets under state control and turn them into key public services. The regulation of food provision and distribution became one of the most important roles of the incipient local governments in Europe. In France, the French Revolution saw the abolition of all feudal rights related to markets and these became now part of the municipal responsibility like hospitals, schools or jails (Guàrdia and Oyón, 2007). The role of these municipal markets in the spatial configuration of the city differed across countries (Guàrdia and Oyón, 2015). In the UK, iron-wrought central indoor markets were built at the heart of cities, particularly in northern England, although London continued the tradition of street markets (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999). This was followed to some extent in the Scandinavian countries although with less development of the municipal market. In contrast, a more polycentric model was adopted in Paris and then followed in Barcelona, Madrid, Turin or Berlin, cities with higher urban density where neighbourhood markets were built to serve the local population of the district (Fava, Guàrdia and Oyón, 2016). In Mexico City, a city which features prominently in our book, local authorities started to get more involved in the regulation of markets from the beginning of the nineteenth century and by 1850s the first municipal covered market was built (González, 2016). In the USA a tightly-regulated system of municipal food provision was developed through a network of public markets from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. In New York, for example, there was a political consensus that the municipal model served to ensure the public good of citizens’ access to food (Baics, 2016). But by around the 1820s, the council was struggling to keep up their investment in public markets in relation to urban growth; This coincided with trends to deregulate food provisioning at a national level and from then on the idea of the public market entered in a decline (Baics, 2016).

This decline of the municipal market model in New York was mirrored in Europe, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the model was in crisis. The UK, which had been a pioneer of the covered market hall, was the first to move to a new food retailing system with large wholesalers and food chains, according to Guàrdia and Oyón (2015). These two authors mark the ‘definitive crisis’ of the covered municipal market after the Second World War with a convergence of several factors: destruction of the physical infrastructure, individual car ownership, the dispersion of the population and the supermarket revolution. We can add to these factors the shift in the role that local authorities would play, particularly from the 1970s, as they moved from being predominantly managers and deliverers of public services to being urban entrepreneurs as well (Harvey, 1989). Local authorities, particularly in the North Atlantic zone, became increasingly under pressure to generate income; central government funds would start to withdraw, so cities had to attract and compete for external private investment (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). In this new phase, public markets, often serving the poorest in cities were a hindrance to the neoliberalising spirit of many local leaders.

Narratives of decline, resurgence and commodification

As I have already suggested above, the modern narrative was for informal and street trading to disappear. The story went that market halls in Europe and in Latin America, the focus of our book, were the natural evolution that would formalise, dignify and impose order in small street retail. The next step with globalisation was for market halls to be superseded by supermarkets and similar multi-chain retailers. However, this modern narrative has not fully become reality (Cross, 2000). Stre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Studying markets as spaces of contestation
• 2. Markets of La Merced: New frontiers of gentrification in the historic centre of Mexico City
• 3. Learning from La Vega Central: Challenges to the survival of a publicly used (private) marketplace
• 4. Resisting gentrification in traditional public markets: Lessons from London
• 5. The contested public space of the tianguis street markets of Mexico City
• 6. Gourmet markets as a commercial gentrification model: The cases of Mexico City and Madrid
• 7. Neighbourhoods and markets in Madrid: An uneven process of selective transformation
• 8. Mercado Bonpland and solidarity production networks in Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 9. Public markets: Spaces for sociability under threat? The case of Leeds’ Kirkgate Market
• 10. Contested identities and ethnicities in the marketplace: Sofia’s city centre between the East and the West of Europe
• 11. Popular culture and heritage in San Roque Market, Quito
• 12. Conclusions: International perspectives on the transformation of markets
• Index