Markets in modernisation: transformations in urban market space and practice, c.

1800-c. 1970

Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme

Introduction

This special issue addresses the changing role and later history of physical, face-to-face
markets for goods, which in modern cities all over the world are mainly or wholly used by
individuals and families for consumption purposes. Our focus is on the urban market as a
specific urban place and its shifting relationship with important alterations in the governance,
society and economy of modern, industrial cities (until c. 1970). The main intention of this
collection is to move beyond traditional (western) views of the so-called ‘decline’ of these
urban marketplaces. In the history and theorisation of the type of cities that came into being
all over the world in the wake of economic and political transformations in the nineteenth and
twentieth-centuries, ‘markets’ are usually thought of in terms of their institutional meaning.
They are referred to as abstract notions of commerce and exchange, be it in commodities,
labour, cash or shares. Seldom are they studied as real, physical marketplaces within cities; as
entities that take up space; function in changing production and distribution chains, and
evolve as a result of changes in wholesaling, retailing, consumption and the political
regulation of urban space, society and economy. Indeed, it is often argued that ‘marketplaces’
in this spatially delimited and concrete sense, ceased to be of importance once modernisation
took hold of urban landscapes all over the world. That this is not the case, is amply
demonstrated by the papers gathered here: markets continued to be vibrant parts of a wide
variety of towns and cities across the globe.

Any attempt to offer a broadly applicable definition of the marketplace quickly becomes
mired in the specificities of time and space: manifestations of markets as physical urban
places of interaction between buyers and sellers are simply too diverse and place-specific.
Victoria Kelley defines markets in this issue as having to do with buyers, sellers,
commodities, place and time (see Kelley in this volume). However, cooking a general
‘formula’ with these ingredients – producing a typology or model of some sort – would not
only mask the important diversity of markets, but also obscure the sort of historical changes

1
that are precisely at stake in this collection of essays. It is a cliché, but one market is, indeed,
not the other. They might be located in the centre or in the suburban belt of a city or
somewhere in between in a specific neighbourhood; they might take place on a public square,
on a street or in semi-open or covered market hall (or, for that matter, on boats, as still
happens in some waterborne cities in Asia); they might sell a mixture of produce or specialise
in a specific commodity like fish or fruit; they might cater for specific consumer-groups or for
the urban masses; they might (or might not) be eventually eclipsed by, for instance,
supermarkets or change from being a retail to a wholesale market (or vice versa). The
worldwide and even local diversity in market space and practice is precisely what is discussed
in the following pages; it needs to be further developed and explored, time and time again, for
the different and often unique empirical cases assembled here.

Taking this diversity in urban market space and practice as the starting point – and focusing
on a subject that defies definition and categorisation – runs the risk of loosing any sort of
intellectual coherence and structure from this collection. To avoid such a pitfall, we develop
three overarching questions that tie together these empirical studies. Therefore, in the
remainder of this introduction, we will firstly delve deeper in the reasons why urban
marketplaces have failed for to attract the attention of urban historians and theorists working
on the modern city (in stark contrast to those working on the medieval and early-modern
periods). Next, we justify the approach taken and outline what there it to learn by pursuing
historical comparisons of urban market space and practice in the modern world. Finally, we
outline some of the general themes that emerge from and draw together the various essays
presented here – linking unique cases in a meaningful historical and conceptual dialogue.

The market as physical place of urban interaction: from all pervasive to all invisible

Marketplaces and cities are closely entangled concepts, especially in urban history where their
relationship is often considered self-evident, to the point that it goes unquestioned. The
existence of a ‘central market’ – a physical core of exchange of goods between buyers and
sellers – becomes so closely linked to an explanation of the origins and functioning of cities
that a history of urbanisation often reads like a tale from trade-centre to commercial

2
metropolis.1 What starts out as local provisioning, speeds up the wheels of commerce to the
point of becoming an unstoppable engine of capitalist growth. The historiography of medieval
and early-modern European cities and towns in particular has elevated an analysis of urban
market space and practice into a centrepiece of causation. 2 Markets as physical, face-to-face
places selling food, provisions, consumer goods and commodities are seen as taking a central
role within the urban fabric. As nodal points in a still primarily agrarian economy, they are
accorded a privileged social and cultural position in the urban community. Well ordered ‘free’
and ‘open’ market exchange, it is argued, not only backed urban prosperity, it also
underpinned notions of good governance, social stability and the ‘moral economy’. 3 Thus,
throughout medieval and early-modern history, the production of urban market space, with
adjoining town halls, churches, guild houses, and other forms of civic power, is thought to
have been crucial to ideas of urban progress, development and modernisation. To put it
simply, the ‘magic of the market’ both generated urban wealth and social cohesion, and stood
at the heart of urban pride and modernity.4

However, from perspectives focusing on urban and economic modernisation from the late
eighteenth-century onwards, the market as specific urban space and practice becomes eclipsed
by the advent of arcades, department stores, retail-chains and the shopping practices of
nineteenth-century flâneurs.5 Suddenly, or so it seems, European shopping experiences were
altered in a revolutionary way. The supposedly new shopping environments created by these
retail innovations, and the new organisational systems of supply and selling which they
1
For classic overviews, see: H. Pirenne, Medieval Cities: their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton,
1952 1925); J. Jacobs, The economy of cities (Harmondworth, 1972 1969); F. Braudel, Civilisation Matérielle,
Economie et Capitalisme, vl. 2 Les jeux de l’échange (Paris, 1979); P. Bairoch, Cities and Economic
Development: from the Dawn of History to the Present (London, 1988).
2
Recent contributions are found in: D. Calabi and S.T. Christensen eds., Cities and cultural exchange in Europe,
1400-1700 (Cambridge, 2007).
3
For instance: P. Stabel, ‘The city is the market, the market is the city. Retail and urban space in late medieval
Bruges’, in B. Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds.), Buyers and sellers. Retail Crcuits and
Practices in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2006), 79-108; and M. Boone and M. Howell
(eds.), In but not of the Market: Movable Goods in the Late Medieval and Early-Modern Economy (Brussels,
2007).
4
See: D. Calabi, The market and the city: square, street and architecture in early modern Europe (Aldershot,
2004); and E. Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: consumer cultures in Italy, 1400-1600 (New Haven, 2009).
5
This historiographical bias is all too apparent in writings on nineteenth-century retailing such as E. Rappaport,
Shopping for Pleasure. Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000); and G. Crossick and S.
Jaumain eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, 1999).

3
employed, transformed consumers from casual buyers to pleasure shoppers. They also helped
to reshape the consumer landscape, functioning and experience of the city, often being seen as
central to the construction of the ‘modern’ industrial city. 6 So, whilst the role and significance
of urban market space and practice is recognised in historical accounts of medieval and early-
modern periods – to the point of repetition – markets refuse to play a key role in narrative
accounts on urban modernisation in the industrial age. Why should this be the case?

It goes without saying that the intellectual forerunners of urban history as a separate discipline
enshrined the market as a physical space, economic mechanism and socio-political institution
into their definitions of what made cities and towns different from their surroundings.
Marketplaces and the face-to-face interactions on those places shape cities; they define the
raison d’être of urbanity, or so at least reasoning goes. An influential example of such
thinking can be identified in the well-known essay of Max Weber on The City (Die Stadt,
1921).7 Famously, Weber built the definition of a city on ‘the existence of a regular, and not
only occasional, exchange of goods in the settlement itself, an exchange which constitutes an
essential component of the livelihood and the satisfaction of needs of the settlers – in other
words: a market’ (p. 1213) A city, in Webers’ terms, is essentially a medieval market centre,
the sort of settlements that was emerging across north-western Europe from about 1000AD
onwards. These were places where both rural and urban populations could ‘satisfy their wants
for craft products or trade articles by means of exchange’ which was ‘based on concessions
and guarantees of protection by the lord or prince’ (p. 1214). 8 From this starting point, Weber
goes on to connect such a ‘pure market place’ to political categories of autonomy and
authority: the city as a partially autonomous association, a community (Gemeinde) with

6
R. Dennis, Cities in Modernity. Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930
(Cambridge, 2008).
7
First published as M. Weber, ‘Die Stadt: eine soziologische Untersuchung’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik, 47 (1920-21), 621-772. We make references to the English translation published in M. Weber,
Economy and Society. An outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley, 1978),
1212-1372.
8
Weber does not go so far as to claim that the marketplace is the only element of urbanity, giving, for instance,
attention to the ‘fort’ as political centre, being equally crucial to medieval urban development. In many ways the
regulations enforced by the ‘fort’ were ways of countering urban market failures from food shortages to health
issues. See, for instance, M.W. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales
and Gascony (London, 1967) and, more recently, W. Blockmans, Metropolen aan de Noordzee. Geschiedenis
van Nederland, 1100-1555 (Amsterdam, 2010) on strategies of urban promotion by feudal superiors in order to
create marketplaces, almost invariably as sources of income.

4
special administrative and political institutions. The political autonomy and economic market
stands in a ‘plastic duality’ besides one another, sometimes even physically and symbolically
integrated into an Agora-space (p. 1224).

According to Weber, this combination of commerce and citizenship was unique to the
occidental city, but this viewpoint has been frequently criticised for its ‘teleology of a unique
Western history, which serves as a grid in terms of which other histories are read’. 9 Oriental
cities, whether in Islamic regions, India, Japan or China, are mainly interpreted in terms of
what they lacked and the West possessed. In the meantime, a narrative arch was created in
which the trajectory of the European city from middle ages to industrial times, with emphasis
on its commercial and communal underpinnings, was perceived as the standard paradigm,
capable of explaining growing Western hegemony and political superiority over the rest of the
world.10 We return to this point later. For the present, we want to focus the links between
Weber’s notion of urban markets as a force and constituent of a distinctive civic burgher
democracy, and an influential nineteenth-century liberal tendency to see a free functioning
‘market’ – now in its extended, institutional meaning of the word – as a beacon of increasing
democratic freedom, progress and human liberation. 11 Again, the city is seen as a locus for the
emergence of capitalist, market-based enterprise: a bourgeois way of life inextricably linked
to the rise of modern, industrial society. 12 It is no coincidence that both Ferdinand Tönnies
and Émile Durkheim described the typical urban social relations of, respectively, Gesellschaft
and solidarité mecanique in market-based, contractual terms, contrasting these with so-called
organic community values and modes of conduct on the countryside. 13 For Karl Marx and

9
S. Zubaida, ‘Max Webers’s The City and the Islamic City’, Max Weber Studies, 6.1 (2006), 111 (111-118).
10
M. Liverani, ‘Power and citizenship’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cities in world history
(Oxford, 2013), 164-167 (164-180).
11
H.S.J. Jansen, ‘Wrestling with the angel: on problems of definition in urban historiography’, Urban History,
23 (1996), 284-85 (277-299).
12
On perceptions of the city in Western thinking, see: C. Schorke, ‘The idea of the city in European Thought –
Voltaire to Spengler’, in: O. Handlin and J. Burchard (eds.), The Historian and the City (Cambridge, 1963), 95-
114; and, more recent, A. Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940
(Manchester, 1985).
13
M. Gottdiener and R. Hutchison, The New Urban Sociology (Colorado, 2006, 3th edition), 43-46. Read more
extensively on sociological thinking about the city in P. Saunders, Social theory and the urban question
(London, 1981); and Idem, ‘Space, the city and urban sociology’, in: D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds.), Social
relations and spatial structures (London, 1985), 67-89.

5
Friedrich Engels as well, the horrors and faults of the bourgeois city notwithstanding, a return
to what they described as the ‘idiocy of rural life’ was a route to be avoided at all cost. 14

It seems crucial to pursue German thinking on the city just a little bit longer, since these ideas
were so essential in the genealogy of urban history and urban sociology as distinctive
disciplines.15 In any case, typical late nineteenth-century oppositions between city and
countryside, or between a capitalist and non-market-based society, become most outspoken in
another influential German essay. In Metropolis and Mental Life (Die Großtädte und das
Geistesleben, 1903), Georg Simmel equates the rapidly modernizing cities of his time, in
particular his hometown Berlin, with ‘the seat of the money-economy’. 16 Whereas before, the
market was an identifiable and locatable space of face-to-face exchange between, mostly,
buyers and sellers, the metamorphosis of urban life as market practice is now complete: the
City has become the Market.17 For Simmel, urbanity as a way of life in the industrial age is
dominated by ‘the many-sidedness and concentration of commercial activity’ (p. 12), which
effectively ‘reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level’ (p. 12). In
place of the more deeply felt emotional relationships of rural and small town existence,
Simmel sees in the city the rational, calculating behaviour of buyers and sellers at work,
waging their interests against each other. Citizens are thus forced to create a ‘blasé attitude’ in
order to preserve their identity and integrity in the face of a ‘rapid telescoping of changing
images’ and ‘rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves which are thrown together in all their
contrasts’ (p. 11 and 14). This sensory bombardment of smells, sights, sounds and frictions
with other people – historically always associated with a frenzied market day on a actual,
physical place – has now become the everyday norm in the Metropolis. It dictates the rhythm
of the flâneur, and dominates the decorations of shop and department store, billboards,

14
P.J. Corfield, ‘Cities in time’, in Clark (ed.), Cities in World History, 833 (828-846).
15
A. Lees, ‘Berlin and modern urbanity in German discourse, 1845-1945’, Journal of Urban History, 17 (1991),
153-180.
16
Simmel’s essay was first published in 1903; our references are drawn from the English translation in G. Bridge
and S. Watson (eds.), The Blackwell city reader (Oxford and Malden, 2002), 11-19; quote from page 12. On the
centrality of the Berlin experience in the thinking of Simmel, see D. Jazbinsek, ‘The Metropolis and the mental
life of George Simmel: on the history of an antipathy’, Journal of Urban History, 30 (2003), 102-125.
17
See also M. Bevir and F. Trentmann, Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World
(Cambridge, 2004).

6
vaudeville stage, theatre, museum, and other spaces of a now, deeply commercialised
amusement culture.18

It is within this modernising, contractual and market-driven European townscape of the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the urban market as physical space and practice
evaporates in its pervasiveness as intellectual key and metaphor to grasp modern, urban
culture and living. Urban sociologists acknowledge the market’s historical significance as the
spatial focus (the central business district) around which European cities grew and flowered in
concentric circles. This is, for instance, evident in the work of one of the most famous pupils
of Simmel, Robert Park, who publishes with his colleagues of the Chicago school their
manifesto on The City (1925).19 Its significance is equally apparent in the emerging disciplines
of urban geography and urban economy, not least in Walter Christaller’s placement of the
market centre in the middle of the building blocks that make up his central place theory (see
Baics in this issue).20 Finally, in urban planning as well, the idea of a city as market holds
strong. For Ebenezer Howard, the garden cities were meant to be for farmers a ‘new market
for their produce close to their doors’ – similar to the medieval model of town building.21

And yet, whilst the market had become a guiding concept to understand the historical rise,
economic and spatial organisation of European cities and urban systems, it more limited
meaning as place of face-to-face exchange had ceased to be a concrete subject of analysis to
comprehend modernisation in industrial society. Urban market space, and practices and
processes that occurred therein, were thought to be no longer innovative or modern, to the
point of being ‘naturally’ eclipsed by ever more efficient, large-scale commercial spaces and
leisure-like shopping behaviour.22 It is telling that for Howard’s cities of tomorrow the market

18
Such a sensory approach to the history and sociology of cities has recently gained renewed interest, as is
evidenced by M. Diaconu et al. (eds.), Senses and the City: an Interdisciplinary Approach to Urban Sensescapes
(Münster, 2011); and the recent 2013 CHORD conference ‘Retailing and the senses: historical perspectives’ (see
[Link]
19
R.E. Park, E.W. Burgess and R.D. McKenzie, The city (Chicago and London, 1925). A nice analysis of their
urban framework is provided by M. Savage and A. Warde, Urban sociology, capitalism and modernity
(Houndmills, 1993), 9-18.
20
W. Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany (Englewood Cliffs, 1966 1933).
21
E. Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London, 1902), 22 (see also p. 26 and 76-77).
22
See G. Shaw, ‘The study of retail development’, in J. Benson and G. Shaw (eds.), The evolution of retail
systems, c. 1800-1914 (Leicester, London and New York, 1992), 1-14; and N. Alexander and G. Akehurst, ‘The
emergence of modern retailing, 1750-1950’, Business History, 40 (1998), 1-15.

7
as physical space has become a wholesale market to be planned in an outer ring. The centre of
town is now dominated by a garden, park, civil buildings and a fashionable glass-arcade
called ‘Crystal Palace’, to be used for ‘that class of shopping which requires the joy of
deliberation and selection’. Thus, the old market square has given away to a ‘great shopping
centre’, while the actual markets for diaries and other daily necessities are relocated to the
periphery (see Beeckmans and Bigon in this issue for other modernist visions on urban
marketplaces).23

Urban markets were increasingly considered remnants of the past, and in linear, evolutionary
models bound to decline and disappear once the city cloaked itself in modernity. Their
continued existence in the early-twentieth century European townscape was seen as
anachronistic, only made intelligible from a cultural standpoint: the urban market as a place
where the modern, efficient, shop-addicted homo-economicus seeks the ‘thrill’ of gone by, or
the ‘authenticity’ of the past.24

From teaming with life to the fall of public man

Urban historical accounts after WWII have followed quite closely this interpretive and, quit
obviously, western scheme of market decline in modernisation. Whilst the volume of data and
research on pre-industrial urban market space and practices grew exponentially, the subject
lacked for a long time its supporters for modern times. The connections between commerce,
civic power and progress that medievalists wove around market squares, were focused in
narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth-century onto other urban spaces, most notably the
department store and shopping mall, but also exchanges, banks (see Toftgaard in this issue)
and later shopping precincts.25 Certainly, urban historians continued to argue that urban
23
Howard, Garden cities of tomorrow, 23, 76.
24
These associations frequently pop-up in remarks on persistence of second-hand markets in the modernizing
townscape. See M. Charpy, ‘The scope and structure of the nineteenth-century second-hand trade in the Parisian
clothes market, in L. Fontaine (ed.), Alternative exchange. Second-hand circulations from the sixteenth-century
to the present (New York and Oxford, 2008), 127-151; and J. Sobart and I. Van Damme, ‘Modernity and the
second-hand trade: themes, topics and debates’, in Idem (eds.), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade.
European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700-1900 (London, 2010), 1-15.
25
See I.S. Black, 'Spaces of capital: bank office building in the City of London, 1830-1870', Journal of
Historical Geography, 26 (2000), 351-75; K. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping (New haven, 2003), 251-
61.

8
markets had become unimportant by the end of the nineteenth-century, mainly by focusing on
historical changes that hinted at its supposed decline and demise (see also Kelley in this
issue). Such reasoning was not only backed up by taking evolutionary economic factors into
account, but by looking at the impact of cultural and social changes – as regards gender,
leisure, the public and private spheres – on the supposed demise of marketplaces.

This picks up again on lively debates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
which questioned whether public markets could withstand the onslaught of modernisation,
especially in the face of Haussmann-inspired urban planning. The famous Viennese architect
Camillo Sitte argued in his influential and widely read City planning according to artistic
principles (Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, 1889) that:

‘In our time public places (fora, markets, etc) hardly serve any more for grand
popular festivities, nor for daily necessities. Their only reason for existing
consists in bringing more light and air to a monotonous ocean of houses. (…)
What a difference with Antiquity. Back then, public places were of prime
importance, because they were the theatre of all the principal scenes of
everyday life, which are now occurring in the interior’.26

His cultural pessimism was mainly aimed at an increasingly oppressive municipal

government, concerned with sanitizing and regulating urban space to an unprecedented extant.
For adhering to such drastic urban reforms and rebuilding schemes, taking action in the name
of public safety and public health was not only right, but also morally righteous. With true
revanchist panache the ‘city of dreadful night’ and potentially dangerous socialist uprising
could be remade in a pleasant and beautiful bourgeois townscape in which the liberal
circulation of water (through modern pipes and sewers), light, air (through new avenues and
squares) and people (and policemen!) took centre stage.27 As such, a cleansing sunlight could
finally reach ‘attractive public places (…) which for centuries had only known moisture and
darkness’.28

26
This is our own translation. See C. Sitte, L’art de bâtir les villes. Notes et réflexions d’un architecte. Traduites
et complétées par Camille Matin (Genève and Paris, 1902 [1889]), 7 (see also pages 16, and 135-137).
27
P. Joyce, The rule of freedom. Liberalism and the modern city (London, 2003).
28
C. Daly, L’architecture privée au XIXe siècle sous Napoleon III. Nouvelles maisons de Paris et ses environs
(Paris, 1864), 5-7.

9
In the vision of these reformers, public markets had to change as well; especially those selling
food and livestock. Their medieval and early-modern charters and regulations had to be
abolished; their stench and filth dampened and partly interiorised behind the fashionable
facades of new market halls; their location removed from the historic centre to emerging
suburbs. These processes had begun in the eighteenth century, but gathered pace in the
nineteenth century, often as part of wide-reaching programmes of urban improvement and
civic boosterism (see Toftgaard and the article of Fava, Guardia and Oyón in this issue). 29 For
antimodernists like Sitte, however, such reformatory actions heralded the fall of public man
and the loss of the ‘soul of the city’.30 In his romantic take on town planning and the urban
past, the streets and squares of European cities were once teeming with life: pigs and chickens
grubbing around, children playing, beggars and market sellers shouting, passers-by carefully
picking their way through the dirt and odours of urban life. The proposed changes of
contemporary reformers and town planners – which Sitte could experience at first hand with
the construction of Vienna’s Ringstraße – promised what was for him a deplorable vision of
an ‘immaculate’ cityscape: monumental streets and public spaces in which all life has been
sanitised, zoned, serviced, controlled, and dominated by precisely the avoidance of the sort of
sensory onslaught and human friction that Georg Simmel associated with the Metropolis. In
his popular manifesto Aesthetic of cities (Esthetique des villes, 1893) Charles Buls, a
contemporary soul mate of Sitte and himself a reformist Mayor of Brussels, rephrased such
dystopian readings of the modern city as follows: ‘In former times public squares were
exclusively markets. (…) When a square has no practical use it is sad and deserted. It is an
artificial creation lacking life and not justifying its existence’. 31 Modern public places built
solely around a monument, palace or church appear to him cold and empty, a cemetery
doomed to fail as a place of human interaction.

The extent to which urban historians and sociologists took such gloomy discourse on social
and cultural change in society for reality is debatable. There is, however, a pervasive grand
narrative that sees public life in modernizing cities increasingly retreating into safe,

29
See, for example J. Stobart, ‘Building an urban identity. Cultural space and civic boosterism in a ‘new’
industrial town: Burslem, 1761-1911’, Social History, 29:4 (2004), 485-98.
30
This metaphor for the historical city was used in the widely read and pessimistic account of modern life: O.
Spengler, The Decline of the West. Perspectives of World-History (London, 1928 [1922]), 89-110. See also M.
Hebbert, ‘The vision of the European city’, Tiedepolitikka, 30 (2005), 27-34.
31
C. Buls, Esthétique des villes (Brussels, 1893), 20. For an English translation, see
[Link] (Municipal Affairs, 3, December, 1899, 732-741).

10
disciplined and controlled semi-public spaces, such as the political meeting room, the covered
market hall, the department store, the museum and the coffee house. 32 Thus, a certain
historical process of internalisation and a retreat from open and unmanaged public space – the
kind of environment formed by the market square – becomes aligned with several influential
accounts of Western urban modernization itself.

Markets in modernisation: in need of more research

It is only in the last two or three decades that the urban market has re-emerged in accounts of
urban modernisation that seek to explore more fully the historically complex, contingent and
fragmented nature of urban change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Urban historians
have increasingly become aware that, although market-exchange was pervasive in all domains
of the early-twentieth century Metropolis, this did not exclude the continued operation and
use of urban market space and face-to-face interactions on these places between, mostly,
retailers and consumers.33 The historical core of the city may have been sanitized and
reconstructed for the interests of bigger businesses, tourists and traffic flows, but in
surrounding suburbs newly installed and well-frequented neighbourhood markets indicated
that markets were clearly more than a fossilised remnant of the past or a simply a relic cultural
practice. Moreover, even this neat core-periphery distinction was not always followed because
the same ‘rule of freedom’ that cleaned-up the European townscape also liberalised and de
facto accepted the existence of street trading and street markets – at least to an extent (see
Kelly and Baics). Modern streets were clearly still teeming with life, because urban market
space and practices fitted widely shared consumer needs for differentiated prices, quality and
goods. Markets served labour needs and sensibilities, but also bourgeois purposes: new
covered market-halls and newly engineered market-squares, for example, were often planned
and built in the same architectural forms and processes of urban modernisation that gave rise
to arcades and department stores. Nineteenth-century retail markets became, as a recent edited
volume on the subject argues, ‘one of the most obvious expressions of municipal pride,
32
This is apparent in the works of such diverse thinkers as Walter Benjamin (Passagenwerk / The Arcades
Project, 1927-1940), Jürgen Habermas (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit / The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, 1962), Michel Foucault (Surveiller et punier / Discipline and Punish, 1972), and, most recently,
Richard Sennet (The Fall of Public Man, 1977).
33
See, for example: H. Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore,
2003).

11
architectural innovation, urban renovation and new commercial structures of capitalist
cities’.34 So, rather than emphasising clear-cut discontinuities between pre-industrial and
industrial times or imprinting a certain grand-narrative of modernisation on the complexity
and diversity of historical change, we are becoming more aware of the long running
connections between markets and urban pride – even in the modern metropolis (see especially
Fava, Guardia and Oyón in this aspect).

Old habits die hard, however. Whilst Michel de Certeau, Frank Trentmann and others
increasingly point to the need to address everyday practices and consumer politics in the
modern period, too little attention has been paid to the analysis of urban market spaces and
practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 35 Moreover, a research strategy that
pursues urban comparisons of market space and practice in the modern world from a world
perspective has yet to be initiated. Indeed, it is telling that the interesting anthropological
studies of Daniel Miller and others on shopping practices in the modern world, almost always
focuses on shops and shopping malls. 36 These are the key consumer spaces, it seems; markets
remain marginal and anachronistic to modernity. What we need, then, are more empirical
studies to add to extra layers to our understanding of the market in modern society, and more
attempts to think conceptually about how urban markets function in and for the modern city.
Non-western studies in particular can open up new ways of seeing the market in the era of
urban, industrial capitalism. Only then will we be able to address properly questions
concerning the changing relative importance of the market in urban distribution chains (was it
always eclipsed by more ‘modern’ retail institutions?); in the production and representation of
modern urban space, and in discussions around urban governance, spatial planning and social
engineering.

Key themes

It was questions of this kind which prompted us to organise a session at the 2012 EAUH
conference in Prague, some of the papers from which are published in this collection. In that
34
M. Guardia and J.L. Oyon eds., Fer ciutat a través dels mercats Europa, segles XIX i XX (Barcelona, 2010).
35
M. De Certeau, The practice of everyday life (London ,1984); F. Trentmann, ‘The politics of everyday life’, in
Idem (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of consumption (Oxford, 2012), 521-547.
36
D. Miller, A theory of shopping (Ithaca, 1998); D. Miller a.o., Shoppig, place and identity (London and New
York, 1998); Idem, The dialectics of shopping (Chicago, 2001).

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session and in this volume, we wanted to explore the diverse fortunes of the urban market in
the world through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the ways in which studying urban
market space and practice in a modernising urban landscape of consumption opens up debates
regarding key economic, social, cultural and political changes in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century cities. In particular, the papers draw out four important sets of ideas.

First is the challenge that they pose to the assumed decline of the urban market in the modern
city. Whilst Toftgaard notes the progressive marginalisation of the market in nineteenth-
century Odense, it is striking that even in great metropolitan centres, such as London and New
York, urban markets remained dynamic and vital elements of the retail distribution system.
Kelly notes how London street markets continued to prosper right alongside more ‘modern’
retail forms, proving robust in the face of competition from multiple stores and even the
destruction of wartime bombing. Resilience did not mean ossification; indeed, both the papers
by Baics (New York) and Fava, Guardia and Oyon (Barcelona) demonstrate that urban
markets were adaptable and flexible institutions, capable of responding to changing contexts
of demand, urban structure and political regulation. The last of these, in particular, could have
profound impacts on the organisation markets, as Baics and Harada demonstrate in the
context of the deregulation of New York food markets and the establishment of Japanese fish
markets respectively. The continued importance of the market in processes of provisioning the
urban population should not be too surprising, although it is often overlooked. What Fava,
Guardia and Oyon, Kelly and – in a very different context – Beekmans and Bigon all make
clear is that the market also structured the daily lives and social relations of a large proportion
of the city’s population. In this way, understanding the operation of the market is central to
comprehending the modern city, just as it is for the early-modern and medieval city. The
study of market space and practice therefore opens up broader questions of urban resilience
and economic adaptation, social interaction, and urban form and structure.

Second is the additional insight into the spatiality of city offered by fuller analysis of the
urban market. Its location has elicited much interest in the past; spatial marginalisation being
seen as both metaphor and symptom of a declining importance in the geography of the city.
However, as Fava, Guardia and Oyon argue, urban markets continued to play a key role in
shaping the geography of provisioning, social relations and economic day-to-day interaction
of Barcelona throughout the twentieth century. Markets remained spaces worth fighting over,
even as cities modernised. This was true in a formal sense, with municipalities and capitalist

13
institutions such as banks seeking to redefine market spaces in nineteenth-century Denmark. It
was also apparent in the more mundane arguments over space and regulation which embroiled
the street market in Lewisham analysed by Kelly. Whatever the specific context, the market
remained an important element in the urban spatial matrix, one that is structured by the
architecture and use of space – a point brought out clearly in the analysis of Dakar and
Kinshasa offered by Beekmans and Bigon. It was both a product and constituent of the
political economy. As Baics demonstrates, the geography of retail food markets in New York
shifted markedly in response to the transition from public to free-market provision. Far from
being marginal, then, the urban market thus comprises a touchstone for the wider space
economy of the city.

Third are the new conceptual and methodological approaches adopted by the various papers,
which illustrate how a concern with the urban market can help to develop urban history as a
discipline. In this context, Baics’ paper is again important in the way that it links questions of
spatiality to those of political economy through analysis of retail food markets. Charting the
changes that ensued as food was reconceptualised from a public good to a private commodity
offer a model for assessing broader arguments over the so-called ‘fall of public man’. An
alternative approach is offered by Toftgaard, who argues that Lefebvre’s tripartite model of
space is useful in understanding the ways in which urban space is produced and contested. His
attempt to analyse the market as a space of consumption is thus a welcome addition to a
relatively limited historiography exploring such theorisations of space. More pragmatically,
Fava, Guardia and Oyon offer us an example of the insights to be gained from a profoundly
empirical approach. Their detailed analysis of relative spatial location and socio-economic
linkages centred on markets and market traders provide both an excellent overview of the
spatial influence of the market and detailed insight into its constituent elements: the daily
interactions of real people.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, is the way these papers highlight the importance of
comparative analysis. This is an approach explicit in the contributions from Harada and
Beekmans and Bigon. The former shows how the Japanese market system developed at least
partly in reference to European models, but also how it reflected local cultural and regulatory
milieus – as, of course, did markets in Europe. The latter argues that markets in colonial
towns took references from the metropole, but also from regional neighbours. More generally,
it is an approach that underpins the collection as a whole and gives coherence to it. By

14
looking at case-studies in Africa, America, Asia and Europe, the assembled papers become,
on a meta-historical level, an exercise in comparative research; one that attempts to grasp
differences and similarities between specific urban trajectories situated in their own time and
space.37 One thing that emerges from this comparative framework is the different trajectory of
markets as a public good. In nineteenth-century New York, there was a shift from public
control to private ownership, but the direction of travel was reversed in Japan, Spain and, to a
lesser extent, Dakar and Kinshasa. Such changes tell us a lot about the broader shifts in
political economy that characterised these very different countries and the willingness (or
otherwise) of the state to involve itself in the provision of food – often seen as a key part of
governance in medieval and early-modern towns. More generally, juxtaposing European and
non-European narratives is particularly useful in ‘provincialising’ the modern, Western
experience of urban development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a recent
volume on urban issues in global perspective argued convincingly: urban theorists and
historians ‘have tended to remain entrenched in conceptual and empirical approaches that
have barely moved beyond the study of a small number of ‘Western’ cities which act as the
template against which all other cities are judged’. 38 While the papers on London and New
York fall confidently within such ‘standard’ Western narrative of urban modernisation
(although they problematize in their own right the western narrative of ‘decline’), case studies
on Barcelona, Danish cities, Kinshasa, Dakar and the Japanese townscape open up new lines
of research on patterns of consumption, retailing and urban governance. More importantly,
they lead to a fuller appreciation of patterns of convergence and divergence within modern
urban history more generally.

Taken together, then, these papers make an important contribution to the process of bringing
the urban market to a more central position in discussions of the modern, industrial city that
came into being in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They demonstrate its
continued importance to the everyday lives of citizens; the integration of social and economic
networks, and the production and contestation of urban space. In this way, they challenge

37
See, among others, D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference
(Princeton, 2000); J. Kocka, ‘Comparison and beyond’, History and Theory 42 (2003) 39-44; D. Cohen en M.
O’Connor (ed.), Comparison and history (New York, 2004); M. Siegel, ‘Beyond compare: comparative method
after the transnational turn’, Radical history review 91 (2005) 62-91; en H.-G. Hapt, ‘Comparative history. A
contested method’, Historisk Tidskrift, 127 (2007) 697-716.
38
T. Edenso and M. Jayne (eds.), Urban theory beyond the West. A world of cities (London and New York,
2012) 1.

15
long-established notions of the market as somehow anachronistic or even irrelevant to urban
modernity.

16