In the discipline of sociology, tangible markets are conceptualised as accessible spaces that offer insight into the social and material relations of the community where they operate. In political economy, a street market is a place where goods, services, and currencies are exchanged; like the abstract location known currently as 'the market', a street market is a price mechanism that allows buyers and sellers to negotiate price. In urban planning, these markets are typically public spaces targeted by gentrification schemes. In policy terms, governments configure street markets as places to be managed for consumer protection, to reduce deviant behaviour such as fraud, and address public health issues.
Street markets came to be identified with working class neighbourhoods in wealthy countries in North America and Europe across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as city centres were, increasingly, designed as commercial centres. Retail shopping also became a 'cultured' indoor activity in that era. Historically, however, open street markets served several key roles: producers could unload surplus commodities, traders could earn subsistence incomes, and consumers who could not afford shop prices could purchase affordable necessities. Historically, street trading had been the domain of women who needed to earn a subsistence income to support themselves and their families when the macroeconomy failed to provide sustainable work, when policy makers failed to provide programmes to assist the poor, and access to waged labour had gendered boundaries.
In debtor nations in the twenty-first century, street markets continue to serve these roles for the urban poor. However, with the embrace of neoliberal, global capitalism, governments in debtor nations are positioning their cities as global financial centres, and their citizens as 'conspicuous' consumers. As has been the case historically and universally, gentrification is positioned as a well-intentioned, middle-class process that embodies progress, prosperity, and urban renewal. A 'modern' urban landscape that appears prosperous, is embodied in wide streets to facilitate the movement of goods and people, tidy retail districts, and the power of private interests to articulate the use of public space.
Modernity, as a process, thrives on the notion of progress as a ubiquitous, politically neutral force, and one that is deemed necessary and inevitable, even if thought undesirable initially. In the long term, then, gentrification promises to act as a social leveller. However, these narratives and processes intersect with class. Privileged interests typically initiate and fuel gentrification efforts, and the urban poor and the life of their communities in targeted districts quickly become casualties of regeneration.
Street traders are typically erased through gentrification because their work is characterised as anachronistic and even deviant. On an urban landscape where significant numbers of a city's urban poor compete as petty traders for subsistence earnings, their presence is a visible indication of both the state's failure to provide adequate programmes to support that population, and the failure of the larger economy to provide sustainable employment. The result is not only the gentrification of the city, but the gentrification of that population. Regulations criminalising their activities in city centres, and the creation of sanctioned market districts far from viable consumer bases, isolate them socially and morally in a solitude outside the prescribed norm.
Sadly, the process is coming full circle again. As economies of wealthier nations in the United States, Canada, and Europe fail to provide sustainable employment, many of the unemployed are turning to this historic means to earn under the global economic downturn. Their increased visibility means that they, like their 'colleagues' across time and space, are locked in the regulatory sights of elected officials and municipal administrators responding to complaints from propertied 'bricks and mortar' traders, and amalgamated business interests.
Street markets came to be identified with working class neighbourhoods in wealthy countries in North America and Europe across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as city centres were, increasingly, designed as commercial centres. Retail shopping also became a 'cultured' indoor activity in that era. Historically, however, open street markets served several key roles: producers could unload surplus commodities, traders could earn subsistence incomes, and consumers who could not afford shop prices could purchase affordable necessities. Historically, street trading had been the domain of women who needed to earn a subsistence income to support themselves and their families when the macroeconomy failed to provide sustainable work, when policy makers failed to provide programmes to assist the poor, and access to waged labour had gendered boundaries.
In debtor nations in the twenty-first century, street markets continue to serve these roles for the urban poor. However, with the embrace of neoliberal, global capitalism, governments in debtor nations are positioning their cities as global financial centres, and their citizens as 'conspicuous' consumers. As has been the case historically and universally, gentrification is positioned as a well-intentioned, middle-class process that embodies progress, prosperity, and urban renewal. A 'modern' urban landscape that appears prosperous, is embodied in wide streets to facilitate the movement of goods and people, tidy retail districts, and the power of private interests to articulate the use of public space.
Modernity, as a process, thrives on the notion of progress as a ubiquitous, politically neutral force, and one that is deemed necessary and inevitable, even if thought undesirable initially. In the long term, then, gentrification promises to act as a social leveller. However, these narratives and processes intersect with class. Privileged interests typically initiate and fuel gentrification efforts, and the urban poor and the life of their communities in targeted districts quickly become casualties of regeneration.
Street traders are typically erased through gentrification because their work is characterised as anachronistic and even deviant. On an urban landscape where significant numbers of a city's urban poor compete as petty traders for subsistence earnings, their presence is a visible indication of both the state's failure to provide adequate programmes to support that population, and the failure of the larger economy to provide sustainable employment. The result is not only the gentrification of the city, but the gentrification of that population. Regulations criminalising their activities in city centres, and the creation of sanctioned market districts far from viable consumer bases, isolate them socially and morally in a solitude outside the prescribed norm.
Sadly, the process is coming full circle again. As economies of wealthier nations in the United States, Canada, and Europe fail to provide sustainable employment, many of the unemployed are turning to this historic means to earn under the global economic downturn. Their increased visibility means that they, like their 'colleagues' across time and space, are locked in the regulatory sights of elected officials and municipal administrators responding to complaints from propertied 'bricks and mortar' traders, and amalgamated business interests.
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