Shopping with each other: Liminal exchanges on the Northcote Road

Contested Markets, Contested Cities, 2017

Learning from La Vega Central: Challenges to the survival of a publicly used (private) marketplace. In González, S (Ed.): Contested Markets Contested Cities. Gentrification and urban justice in retail spaces, London: Routledge, pp. 36-53. The author's version is broadly the same as the published one although it may have minor typographical and bibliographical errors, and it lacks any images. The final published version can be purchased here.

2022

This report compiles nine original contributions concerning grassroots strategies to preserve and improve marketplaces. Each contribution analyses strategies developed by market trader communities in Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bulgaria, Spain, and the UK to foreground the critical work trader organisations have done to protect and enhance marketplaces. These contributions draw on original research conducted by their authors in recent years. The report has been devised as a knowledge exchange and dissemination output of the ESRC postdoctoral project Popular infrastructural politics: Connecting grassroots knowledge and practice on marketplace governance (ES/W005476/1). This output responds to the stakeholders' expressed interest that the project provides them with useful materials to inform their actions. An English and a Spanish version of this output have been produced.

Approaching processes of capitalist market exchange from a cultural economic perspective, we identify three strands of research that are all part of a widespread ‘pragmatic turn’ in the study of economic activities: (1) the conceptualization of markets as heterogeneous arrangements of people, things and sociotechnical devices; (2) the insight that multiple frames of reference are mobilized in everyday market activities in addition to instrumental rationality; and (3) approaches that combine an interest in the performance of diversity and difference in concrete market contexts with an attention to mobility in network capitalism. Keywords: conventions, dispositif, markets, performativity, value chains.

Royal College of Art, MRes Architecture dissertation, 2019

Recent years have seen the rapid growth of cities. With it the distribution of resources, capital, and power also becoming part of the ever-changing landscapes. In an urban centre-peripheries scheme, the fluctuations of the cost of land and the agendas of development create inequalities. The access to decision making processes between marginalised communities and developers regarding construction and investment are highly polarised. However, whilst being exposed to the immediacy of everyday life, we can understand how alternative structures of governance emerge, from practicing common spatialities within some sort of public space. When public space is a space for sustained representations of the diverse layers that we encounter in the urban landscape: we can foresee its various roles underpinning the intersection between socio-political, economic and spatial configurations in perpetual negotiation. This research takes an interest in the tension between the endurance of physical space, and the ways in which social capital unravels, shifting from micro to macro structures of power and layers of infrastructure. Through the lens of social theory and empirical research, this project studies (street) markets of London at risk of disappearance, relocation or undergoing processes of redevelopment. It touches upon the cases of RRM and Brixton Markets, and takes a closer look into north-London’s Seven Sisters Market (SSIM), with the aim of identifying tactics of resistance and guidelines to safeguarding social value in the everyday, within the current political and urban development drivers. As the SSIM has become a battleground for competing visions of city-making, what other forms of architecture are the social relationship and governance structures shaping? As small-scale spaces like the market become social, spatial and economic alternatives in a city like London, how are they confronting opposite realities from the urban fabric in which they are embedded? And, how can community architecture be a tool for resilience against erasure? Because of major economic drivers and the access that different groups have to reshaping the city, the notions of what is of value and what counts as heritage become uneven. Those who have agency to decide how a place will change or be reshaped are not necessarily the same people who recognise value in them; or at least not the same value. This raises the question of where and what is of value in processes of urban transformation. Value for whom? What kind of values are at stake of being lost or kept? The SSIM is not only a market, but a community centre, a solid economic structure and platform, an enclave of nostalgia of another home, Colombian in the most part. What can we learn from within its surface, its physicality, its materiality? In a triangulation between resistance, value, and the physicality of the market, this research focuses on how its everyday activity translates into the form of bridges, bonds, games, frictions, and relationships of care, as a response to the 16-year-long struggle that the market has put up to fight back the CPO and stop the Grainger’s project that would demolish the site. This project looks to understand what the social value of the market is, where it can it be found, and how it is related to the process of evolving resistance into an alternative for the struggle.

2012

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dimensions and consequences of the fast life through the issues that the agricultural producers and the fresh food market are facing in the urban environment. What is more, it initiates to examine the possibility of the Fresh Food Market being a medium for strengthening the relationship between diverse communities through the alternately sequence of various mix use proposals as to alter the public’s need to spend more time at the Market . With the support of the analysis, the goal is to deliver a clear understanding of the role of the markets in historical and contemporary context, re-establish the relationship, value and meaning of the economic, environmental and social frame of the Fresh Food Market, present a clearer relationship with the city by revitalizing public urban spaces in order to transform it into a central meeting point. Markets are vital elements of a city’s environment, with greater importance than only consumerism and by encouraging and supporting local farmers and production we automatically make positive impact on the environment but also we enhance the local agricultural economy, community health and our quality of life as well. The New establishment of the Fresh Food Market aims to encourage local small business (café, restaurants, bars) to shop locally but most importantly to be informed on why such actions are important to all parties involved (farmers, owners, consumers, environment) and how they could all benefit from such transactions. Such an exchange can establish a stronger relationship between producers and owners but also to minimize the demand for food import, which automatically places us on a lower position on the global food chain. What is more with global competition, industrial food chains and the related health concerns along with the global environmental concerns, markets can contribute to decrease the negative impacts both on public health, local economy and environment. These and other aspects will be further analysed as to understand why a market is not just a market but that behind a banal name underlies a place of bigger symbolism with general contribution to our society. The current farmers issue has proved to be only the pretext to what might be a general problem of the urban reality that Nicosia faces nowadays.