Marketplaces : Movements, Representations and Practices

This edited volume portrays marketplaces from a mobility perspective as dynamic and open entities consisting of flows of people, goods and ideas.

There is a renewed interest in research and policy arenas in marketplaces as the core of cities’ spatial and economic development and sociocultural life, as incubators of urban renewal and platforms of alternative consumption models and as source of livelihood for many people worldwide. Contributions of this book draw on notions of movements, representations and practices to illustrate that markets have physical reality but are also culturally and socially encoded, and experienced through practice. It brings together empirically evidenced scholarly and practice-based works from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, South Africa and India.

This book is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students of urban geography, urban design and planning, sociology, anthropology, who are interested in the relation between place and mobility in general, and markets as ‘knots’ in the city, in particular. It also informs policy-makers how urban planning policies and design interventions for marketplaces may foster more socially inclusive and environmentally just cities.

Chapters 1, 12, and 13 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Ceren Sezer is a Research Associate at the Institute for Urban Design and European Urbanism of Aachen University, Germany. She is joint editor of Marketplaces as an Urban Development Strategy (2013), Public Space and Urban Justice (2017) and the author of Visibility, Democratic Public Space and Socially Inclusive Cities (2020).

Rianne van Melik is an Associate Professor in Urban Geography at the Institute of Management Research at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on contemporary cities and their public spaces, with specific interests in the design, management, use and perception of different kinds of public spaces. She is principal investigator of the Moving Marketplaces (MMP) project.