28 - Retail Market Futures: Retail Geographies from and for the Margins

Summary

Introduction

This chapter argues that by engaging with feminist and postcolonial perspectives and collaborative methods, retail geographies can be a powerful and critical subdiscipline to challenge dominant understandings of economic and urban development. Drawing on our research on UK traditional retail markets – markets selling a wide range of relatively low-cost food, other goods and services to predominately low-income communities – we outline a new trajectory for retail geographies from and for the margins, contributing to socially just and inclusive urban and retail policy agendas.

Markets are indoor or outdoor spaces where people gather to sell and buy a variety of products and services. They are one of the oldest forms of exchange and trade found all over the world serving millions of people and are often operated by public authorities. Despite markets being all about locally situated economic interaction, economic geography and mainstream retail or economics research has paid little attention to them although there is recent interest from urban scholars (Seale, 2016; Gonzalez, 2018; Van Melik and Sezen, forthcoming).

Outside the academy, markets are caught up in complex and contradictory tendencies: sometimes neglected, actively dismantled or evicted by authorities but at the same time celebrated as ‘authentic’ destinations (Gonzalez, 2020). In the UK, where both authors are based, markets account for a small proportion of the grocery shopping and tend to be seen in decline, their future cast narrowly as redeveloped shopping destinations for higher-income consumers (Taylor et al, 2019). The marginalization and redevelopment of markets has a major impact on the low-income, elderly, migrant and ethnically diverse communities they serve (see also Chapter 21 in this volume).

Our collaborative research project, Markets4People, challenges these views and reframes markets as inclusive community spaces making visible the multiple benefits they generate for low-income, minoritized and disadvantaged groups, pointing to an alternative policy agenda based on valuing and supporting these functions. Drawing on our research, this chapter calls for retail geographers to contribute to more socially just and inclusive retail policy agendas by collaborating with those who make, use and value markets and other marginalized retail spaces (compare also Chapters 11, 14 and 20 in this volume).