THEMATIC GROUPS

EDITORIAL : Marketplaces as an Urban Development Strategy

by FREEK JANSSENS and CEREN SEZER (October 2013)

Marketplaces are much more than the commercial gathering places that city authorities sometimes take them to be. They are flexible spatial and temporal organizations that provide vivid and inclusive public spaces. As sites of interactions of flows of people, goods and information, marketplaces facilitate an improvised and spontaneous synergy of people and communities, which is at the core of everyday life of the city. Marketplaces, furthermore, provide fresh and affordable food for residents, economic opportunities for those with less access to the labour market, and places to mingle and socialize in areas that lack such facilities.

Historically, marketplaces have been important engines for urban growth, while also providing sustainable solutions to accommodate this growth. But today marketplaces can also be important sites when we want to get a sense of the ‘life’ and ‘heart beat’ of a city that we visit for the first time. In a marketplace, we feel the pulse, the energy, and the potential that cities offer  an urban quality that appeals both to tourists and to local residents.

However, marketplaces are also domains of public discontent and dispute. Conflicting interests, for example public benefit versus private entrepreneurship, frustrate ambitious city agendas that aspire to profit from the strategic qualities of marketplaces. This often results in a lack of confidence that cities worldwide, whether Amsterdam, London or Istanbul, have in the benefit of public marketplaces. This is even more important today, as markets are under growing pressure. Increasingly, city officials characterize them as a problem in terms of health and safety, traffic congestion, chaos, and in general illegality, and propose different uses for their often prime locations in the city. This narrative is fed by the international chain store lobby whose spread is not just the global North, but increasingly in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Meanwhile, late capitalist society has paradoxically snatched the romantic image of the marketplace as a tool for urban branding and place-making. Such has been the fate of downtown Boston’s Quincy Market and New York City’s South Street Seaport, for example. However, the revitalization that is being pursued in these practises is commonly linked to exclusive private housing and retail projects. In other words, the romantic image of the marketplace serves in many cases as a catalyst for gentrifying neighbourhoods, rather than improving them in an inclusive way that benefits vulnerable groups in society. In the light of these developments, marketplaces risk losing their qualities as generators of vital public spaces in the city.

Yet, not all is doom and gloom. In parallel to the developments above, marketplaces also emerge as a part of social movements and grassroots initiatives in the city. Recent examples are Sofia’s free food markets and Istanbul’s ‘Solidarity Markets’ that have grown out of neighbourhood initiatives in response to government-led commodification of public spaces, in particular the surrender of a popular square to a shopping mall, in the city.

These issues call for the attention of professionals who put marketplaces onto the urban agenda, this time not as places of exclusion and gentrification, but as creative strategies to improve the lives of all people in the neighborhood. The main question addressed in this special issue is therefore:

How can marketplaces function as urban development strategies that facilitate the interaction among different people and groups in the public space of the city, and hereby support inclusive city life?

We asked our contributors to approach this question from three different angles:

1.Marketplaces and Communities. How can marketplaces support communities? What are the qualities of marketplaces that set them apart from other public spaces?

2.Marketplaces and Governance. How can local governments manage their markets? How can regulation be improved to reflect the adaptability of marketplaces?

3.Marketplaces and Design. What kind of creative spatial and temporal strategies can balance both the needs and restrictions of the communities and governance?

None of these three angles alone can provide an answer to the main question. However, we have taken a bold step in the organization of this special issue when we explicitly asked yes, even poked the authors to look beyond the traditional boundaries of their respective backgrounds and expertise. Indeed, only a bridging of the disciplinary cliffs from social science, to policy, to planning, and to design and all the other routes possible will provide us with a thorough understanding of the potential of marketplaces. The result, that we present in this special issue, is a fascinating set of conversations between various professionals that not only helps us to enhance our understanding of marketplaces, but also generates an exchange between these different ideas grounded in a variety of temporal and geographical settings and situated in both theoretical discussion and actual design.

First, Yolande Pottie-Sherman picks up the sub-theme of marketplaces and communities by discussing gentrification and consumption of cultural differences in Vancouver’s Chinatown Night Market. Following this, Eda Ünlü- Yücesoy’s paper puts the market as a space for social and cultural boundary marking in a historical perspective by analysing historical documents such as travellers’ diaries and memoirs to understand Istanbul’s current government’s effort to close down or relocate its marketplaces. Political power structures and mechanisms of control are also taken up by Linda Seligmann and Daniel Guevara who, when discussing market vendor–police relationships in the marketplaces of Cusco, Peru, pave the way for the next sub-theme.

Chin Ling Pang and Sara Sterling approach marketplaces from the angle of governance as they question the city’s role in the transformation of Beijing’s Silk Market. James Filipi, similarly, discusses gentrification and the aesthetics of inclusion and exclusion in a newly constructed marketplace in Midtown Crossing in Omaha, Nebraska. Freek Janssens and Ceren Sezer, then, lay the first stone for the third focus area of this special issue  marketplaces and design  by elaborating on the local government’s attitude towards marketplaces in Amsterdam and by proposing an alternative design for small scale, flexible markets that can act as urban development strategies.

The third cluster of papers approaches marketplaces from the perspective of design. Pınar Balat stresses the importance of the physical and administrative design of the marketplace when discussing the future of Amsterdam’s Albert Cuyp Market. Rushank Mehta and Chintan Gohil explicitly link the policy agendas of the city of Ahmedabad to the spatial characteristics of the Jamalpur Natural Market. This special issue ends with a paper by Qiang Sheng, who closes the circle by mapping Beijing’s marketplaces in relation to scale structures of the city to support the creation of local government policy on urban revitalization.

Content of the issue

‘BECOMING LOCAL’ – CALL FOR INTEREST
The Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP)

The Thematic Group ‘Public Spaces and Urban Cultures’ (TG PS-UC) / May 2013

The AESOP Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Cultures hereby opens a call to different partner institutions, in Europe and beyond, to host the group’s future meetings in the years 2013 to 2015. After having dealt with the subject of “Conviviality” during the group’s meetings in Vienna, Ljubljana, Naples, Brussels and Lisbon, which took place in the period between 2010 and 2012, the new topic BECOMING LOCAL has been initially developed during the group’s meeting in Lisbon in December 2012. This umbrella topic complements the group’s preceding approaches and activities aimed at critically reflecting, analysing and discussing current trends and tendencies pertaining to public spaces and urban cultures in the field of urban research, design and planning. If you are interested in hosting an upcoming group meeting, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. until 21st June 2013.

BECOMING LOCAL – The working topic

We propose to approach the working topic ‘Becoming Local’ from the following perspectives:

Firstly, BECOMING LOCAL is understood as a series of manifold enquiries into the set of practices and values that intermingle at the urban scale as facets of both global and local processes. The focus rests on the hypothesis that in urban public space, empirical enquiries into the palpable materiality of everyday life can be productively connected to the insights of abstract theory, thus rendering the latter relevant for practical endeavours. In this sense the palpable local scale itself is considered as a ‘relational space’ where global tendencies ‘sediment’ and are being ‘translated’ and ‘transformed’ in a particular local cultural, social and political context.

Secondly, by BECOMING LOCAL we refer to the processes of construction of meaningful ‘place’, which can be empirically observed, analysed and mapped in the material space of the lived streets, parks and squares of the city and beyond. Yet globalized design trends -accompanied by neoliberal “safe and clean” policies- often seek to provide sanitized and controlled urban spaces that lack any deeper notion of history, political struggle and social conflict. BECOMING LOCAL thus can be understood as a plea against such trends and stands in support of a critical investigation of the socio-historic ‘patina’ of relational public space as a very important mirror of changing patterns of everyday life, of collective memory and processes of shaping local identities.

Thirdly, by BECOMING LOCAL we investigate material and immaterial dimensions of public spaces and cultural practices thus paving the path towards critical understanding and interpretation of post-Fordist commodification strategies, and main actors who fuel them. The production of meaningful places is challenged by new rationales that strategically try to enhance the multiple immaterial layers of public spaces in the course of postFordist transformations, where symbolic, cultural and social capital is embraced by newly emerging economies. These changes carry certain impacts and call for revisiting the role of state, market and civil society actors, as well as the changing role of ‘experts’ involved in place making and in shaping the material arrangements of public space.

The underlying rationale for multifaceted aspects of public spaces is that the local character of different processes of urban development is nothing static or fixed, rather, it shows a plethora of permanent dynamics and flows. International mobility and migration, which accompany and are impacted by the global financial crisis and changing labour markets, can be grasped through

thick analysis in public space where changing cultural values and rituals are displayed, contested, managed, negotiated and commodified. Cultural practices eventually coalesce into processes of BECOMING LOCAL, yet they might as well confront, counteract or thwart each other in a steady ambivalence. Public spaces are understood as arenas of conflict, negotiation and consensus among different actors that should allow for vulnerable and marginalized parts of the society (beyond the so-called mainstream society) to also take part through individual or collective strategies within the course of everyday life.

The AESOP Thematic Group on Public Spaces and Urban Cultures values a critical and constructive dialogue on the processes of BECOMING LOCAL which equally involves researchers and practitioners, locals and internationals. The proposed umbrella topic aims at exploring and rethinking relations among different concepts and meanings related to (local) spaces and places, policies and practices, and everyday life. Already in its conceptual phase, the topic has been addressed in a dialectical manner, thus setting up a dynamic framework that allows for an exploration of various (relational) aspects of public spaces and urban cultures, as well as epistemological approaches to their investigation and shaping.

Authors: Sabine Knierbein (Vienna University of Technology), Matej Niksic (Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia), Nikolai Roskamm (Technical University of Berlin), Ceren Sezer (Delft University of Technology, Urban4) and Tihomir Viderman (Vienna University of Technology)