Chapter 1 – Topo/graphic Introductions: Place, Markets and Marketplaces
What is it about markets and marketplaces in the city? Beginning with a ‘topo/graphic’ reflection on the recent London Bridge attacks, and the cultures of consumption that some commentators suggest motivated them, this chapter sets the stage for the book. It sketches out the ways in which urban markets and marketplaces are becoming increasingly visible in academic and lay debates about cities, and outlines why this book’s conceptual and methodological attention to place and place-making is necessary to frame markets and marketplaces and offers critical insights into the changing roles that they play in a city’s political and cultural economy. Critically, along with introducing the book’s main arguments, this chapter argues that current scholarship in which markets and marketplaces feature tends to overlook the geographies of the marketplace, and the internal and external dynamics of place that constitute the marketplace, focusing instead on their political-economic or social-culture dimensions. It argues further that topo/graphy is one way to examine these geographies, interrogate their constituent relations and examine their effects. The chapter closes by briefly outlining the book’s topo/graphic logic, followed by a brief overview of the chapters and their organisation.
Key words: markets, marketplaces, urban cultural economy, place, consumer culture
Chapter 2 – Positioning Borough Market as Market and Marketplace: Under the Arches
This chapter introduces the case study through which the arguments of this book are developed: London’s Borough Market. It explains the relevance of this particular example in examining the complex dynamics between market and marketplace, and explains the importance of understanding these dynamics through the lenses of place and place-making, which highlight the material, social-spatial, temporal and imaginative practices that reproduce such marketplaces and markets. Urban marketplaces such as Borough Market once played an important role in food provisioning for the City. Typically occupying positions on the urban periphery, they served as a key interface between urban and rural economies. With changing systems of food provision and urban political and cultural economies more generally, as well broader shifts in the tastes and expectations of urban residents and consumers, such marketplaces are increasingly valued for the consumer culture and experiences of consumption they seemingly engender, rather than for their roles in food provision. This chapter details the history of Borough Market and contextualises it as part of broader economic, social and cultural change within the city. It charts the marketplaces history as a key food market for London, and its decline in the last half of the 20th century. It also presents the marketplaces re-emergence as a fine and alternative food market in parallel to new and emergent forms of ‘alternative’ food production and consumption, and the ways which they have transformed marketplaces as sites of urban
consumer culture increasingly orientated towards conspicuous consumption.
Key Words: Borough Market, alternative food, urban retail, marketplace
Chapter 3 Commodities and commodity culture: Following the Market
At their heart, markets and marketplaces are about the negotiation, valuation and exchange of things – commodities. Generating the space of the market – a market-space (Bestor 2004), these things have geographies that extend the marketplace to a constellation of other places associated with their production. Yet in Borough Market, these geographies only become important when they are reproduced and performed vis a vis their discursive production and consumption in the marketplace. Adopting a ‘following’ approach (Marcus 199X), this chapter follows the thing(s) (Cook 2004), as well as the place(s) and geography(ies) (Coles 2013) of objects that become commodities in the marketplace. Specifically, it follows coffee, a staple commodity of Borough Market from its places of origin, where specialist buyers seek out coffees of distinctive provenance, to the roasting facilities where the qualities of such provenance are physically inscribed into the materiality of the coffee, to the point of retail and consumption in the marketplace where these qualities are translated into value(s), and ultimately realised. The chapter uses this example of coffee to argue that as important as these material geographies are to value of commodities in the marketplace, they matter only in so far as they are made apparent, and thus realisable through negotiation and exchange.
Key Words: Coffee, commodities, body, consumption, commodity culture
Chapter 4 Imagined Geographies of the Marketplace: Fashioned Materialities
Following on from the previous, this chapter examines the meanings embedded both in the material culture of the marketplace (as visible in Borough Market’s built environment and specialised stall displays). It argues that a market-wide system of meanings (e.g. semiotics) emerge as individual elements of material culture assemble together. This material-semiotic shapes meanings about foods’ production and consumption and comes bracket consumption in the marketplace, providing the backdrop to the marketplaces social-sensuality characterises, and ultimately governing commodity exchange. Like many such marketplaces, Borough Market has a distinctive visual aesthetic. Derived from a material culture that incorporates objects, signage, and photography as well as timeworn building materials, and coupled with an architecturally notable and historic built environment, this material culture mobilises individual temporal and spatial, and otherwise geographical meanings and imaginations about foods’ provenance. As these are drawn together within the space of the marketplace, however, these meanings and imaginations slip, becoming generalised to the marketplace and its cultures of consumption. Drawing from literatures concerned with materiality and the material ‘turn’, this chapter traces the disparate meanings of the marketplace embedded in its material culture, interrogates the ways in which various forms of social sensuality emerge from their assembly into a material-semiotic, and examines the ways in which these materialities and meanings combine to provide the ‘architecture’ from which commodities are valued and the market is made.
Key Words: Geographical Imagination, material-semiotics; material culture, marketplace; meanings
Chapter 5 Vibrancy, Conviviality and Buzz: Reproducing Market and Marketplace
If commodities are at the heart of the marketplace, then buying and selling them makes the market. This chapter brings literatures associated with puissance (Maffesoli 1996), the sensual turns in social-sciences, and embodiment, ingestion and consumption (Abbots 2017) together to illustrate how social-sensual relations fashioned through buying and selling transform consumption the marketplace into a multi-sensory experience of place in which the marketplace is consumed alongside its commodities. In particular, this chapter interrogates the ways in which vendors develop social-sensual relationships with customers to facilitate the commodity transactions that make the marketplace a market. It explores how this social-sensuality in the marketplace combines with the marketplace’s material semiotic to spread throughout the marketplace, transforming it into a consumptive experience, and it examines the ways in which this experi
