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 produc
