Informal urban street markets : international perspectives

Informal urban street markets are ubiquitous. Nevertheless, their existence can never be taken for granted and must be continually worked at. They are ambient constellations and complex changing configurations, always coming apart as they are coming together, always at the edge of themselves. Some endure. Others are provisional and ephemeral. In a city somewhere, someone knocks a hole in a brick wall one morning to provide access to private land cleared by a developer’s machinery. For a few hours chickens are slaughtered, underwear sold, shoes repaired, and pensioners squat and slap their playing cards down on a plastic chair. By the evening the wall is bricked up, the police have moved everyone one, and the informal urban street market is gone forever. This book brings together a collection of examples that address informal urban street markets across the globe. What we mean by ‘example’ follows on from the work of Giorgio Agamben (1993). For Agamben the example holds a unique status because it refers simultaneously to a vague and opaque generality, and a real case that is singular and refuses any claim to uniformity.