Keep your head up when you shop: How public markets make great cities.
- The Friendly Urbanist
- Nov 20, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 23, 2023
I can't tell you how much I love public markets! So much action, sights, sounds, smells. It's like walking through an amusement park, but for adult stuff. I had always wondered why they are not more common, especially in North America. Having lived in Europe for a time, public markets were more common. I took the time to read up more on public markets for you, so I can share with you why they're so great and how they can improve urban life. Enjoy!
The holidays are right around the corner and the usual excitement around gift giving, parties and general merrymaking is ramping up. While holiday shopping has transformed over the years, increasingly happening online rather than at brick-and-mortar stores, pop-up holiday markets especially in city centres, tend to appear during this season in cities and towns around the world. These are certainly not the only kinds of public markets to run in cities. This week’s blog will discuss the benefits of public markets and how they contribute to a vibrant, healthy city centre.
What happened?
For millennia, public markets in cities were the primary node of distribution of goods, especially food, to inhabitants. They served as a central location where producers were able to sell directly to consumers efficiently. In fact, markets were often found in the most densely occupied urban spaces, near important government buildings or principal places of worship. Due to the universal need for the healthy supply of food to residents, governments became the primary actors in the provision of public markets. With the rapid urbanization of the early 20th century, especially in the USA, public markets became a focal point of government interest. Helen Tangires, the foremost expert on the history of American public markets writes that “public markets were everyone's business and important “thermometers” from which to gauge a city's health and well-being”. At the time, different levels of government in the US were primarily interested in making sure rapidly growing cities had all the tools necessary to combat what Tangires called “the urban “evils” of high food costs, lack of fresh food, traffic congestion, and unsanitary conditions”. Public markets, by definition, were a solution to these issues, allowing for the reduction if not elimination of the intermediaries between the producer and the consumer, reducing time to market, allowing for centralized health and safety checks and reducing distances between homes and market. Public markets were largely replaced by supermarkets and corporate grocery stores by the 70s in North America, and those that survived did so through community engagement and rebranding. Pike Place market in Seattle for example was only barely saved from redevelopment. Today, although public markets still exist in North America, their scope and nature has changed dramatically, a transition that has significantly affected our relationship with food and retail consumption.
What makes public markets special?
Retail consumption is at the centre of urban life today as it has been for hundreds of years. How we choose to make our purchases changes largely how we perceive the urban environment in which we live. What was generally a very public and social part of our daily lives, in today’s world, has the risk of becoming an entirely private and individual errand. This may be desirable to some, as we often live fast paced lives and lack the time to scour the world for sustenance like our ancestors did, but looking at it from a friendly urbanism point of view, the public activity of shopping can not only have a beneficial impact on the individual but also on the community. Looking specifically at public markets in New York and London, Will Fulford uses concepts of earlier researchers (W.H. Whyte and J. Gehl) to analyse how public markets change how people interact with their environment. He concludes that food shopping in supermarkets is a “heads-down” individualistic experience, where one is primarily concerned with the purchase and the transaction. However, he describes his observations of people shopping at public markets as a “heads-up” experience. The distinction is in how people observe the environment surrounding the transaction. This means that in public markets, it is much more likely that people will take in the sights, the sounds and the smells of each stall and interact with others around them. This increases the chances of positive social interaction and the creation of community, things that are missing in the supermarket setting. Helping bring people together in this manner can help to create an urban environment that is more welcoming, tolerant, open and convivial, potentially leading to lower crime, poverty and social isolation. The sense of belonging this can generate transcends the simple transaction of shopping for food.
The bottom line!
The bottom line is that public markets, having become a niche, even bourgeois, location for our food shopping needs, have mostly been replaced by large-chain corporate supermarkets. Though there are certainly advantages to supermarkets, they lack the centralization, cost reduction and public benefit attributes of their older cousin, attributes which had motivated governments to codify and multiply public markets in the early 20th century. Furthermore, the type of interactions that public markets create enhance the urban experience. Shoppers tend to be more observant and appreciative of their surroundings as well as the people in them, leading to better social cohesions and more welcoming cities. Policy makers who are interested in building communities centred around inclusive and welcoming spaces would do well to have a clear understanding of the potential of public markets in their cities and work towards making them as accessible and fundamental to urban life as possible.
Comments