Meeting on the marketplace: on the integrative potential of The Hague Market

Abstract

Marketplaces are important commercial and gathering places in cities. After decades of decline and negligence, they are recently rediscovered as potential meeting grounds that bring different people together. Their integrative potential goes beyond the "ground level" of the market (with encounters between traders and visitors), also uniting different stakeholders (municipalities, traders, entrepreneurs, inhabitants, social institutions) joined around the market on an "organisational level". Using The Hague Market in the Netherlands as case, and drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this paper investigates the integrative potential of the marketplace. It illustrates how the market indeed serves as an important meeting ground for external stakeholders, but does not (yet) unify the direct beneficiaries: the local government and market traders. Top-down government planning, previous conflicts, distrust, group loyalties, diverging business views and commercial competition are important factors hampering the integrative potential of The Hague Market.

Marketplace Trade in Large Cities in Poland

“…For these people, having a place where they can meet and communicate generates a sense of belonging and attachment [18]. Research by Schappo and van Melik [36] shows that the marketplaces can certainly serve as meeting places for a diverse population, but achieving their full inclusive potential still requires some kind of commitment from the government.…”

The Analysis of Local Marketplace Business on the Selected Urban Case—Problems and Perspectives

“…Their conversion was a catalyst for gentrifying neighborhoods (exclusive private housing), rather than improving conditions and creating benefits for vulnerable groups in society [12]. The attitude of city officials that they represent a major health and safety problem (infectious diseases, noise, traffic congestion, and urban mess) contributed to this condition [3,12]. Subsequently, marketplaces all over the world faced difficult times [3].…”

“…They appeared almost at the same time as the first exchanges of goods, i.e., when people, faced with the fact that they had something more than they needed, and had something in small quantities or lacked it completely, spontaneously formed places where they could exchange their goods [2]. They are specially assigned and arranged spaces where goods and services are sold, and they are usually located in the center of urban/rural settlements surrounded by institutions of local power [3]. Therefore, marketplaces are defined as indoor or outdoor locations where vendors gather periodically to sell merchandise [4].…”

“…Bearing in mind the role of the marketplaces in the gentrification process, the European Union has launched the "Urban Markets" project in 2013. The urban markets as key drivers of change of cities (economic, social, and cultural) provide a new model of regeneration and sustainable living [3,10,13]. The real estate conditioned the trend of the forced relocation of street market structures as undesirable urban actors in newly developed "trade areas" where their business is often predisposed to fail [14,15].…”

Marketplaces as Public Spaces in Times of The Covid‐19 Coronavirus Outbreak: First Reflections

“…Second, with regard to practices of traders at the organisational level, Schappo and Van Melik (2017) have shown that traders produce marketplaces through sustained interactions with stakeholders (including, among others, government officials, other entrepreneurs and members of traders’ associations) that are situated in spatially undifferentiated networks that surround the physical limits of marketplaces. Behind the façade, traders develop broad social networks of support and conflict, as they often do not have permanent workplaces.…”