Abstract
Public markets have long served as vital urban “third places,” fostering community, food access, and cultural exchange in cities. Yet while Toronto’s once-vibrant network of public markets largely vanished after 1950, Barcelona preserved, municipalized, and improved its 39-market system. This project asks why two cities with parallel trajectories of modernization, immigration, and urban growth took such divergent paths. Drawing on archival research, planning documents, and comparative historical analysis, it examines how distinct political-economic ideologies shaped each city’s food infrastructure. In Toronto, postwar suburbanization, supermarket expansion, and neoliberal competition policy enabled corporate consolidation that rendered public markets obsolete or gentrified. In contrast, Barcelona’s social democratic municipalism, embodied in Mercats Municipals de Barcelona, maintained markets as public infrastructure central to civic identity and food democracy. By examining markets as both food infrastructure and social commons, the research highlights how political-economic systems shape the possibilities for community life. Ultimately, it argues that the fate of public markets reveals broader tensions between privatized and civic models of urban belonging, and offers insights for cities grappling with food insecurity and the erosion of public space today.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Public markets, Food infrastructure, Neoliberal urbanism, Urban commons, Municipal governance
