My grandmother, who lives in a small coastal town, has a very important job that requires her to wake up at 7 AM every Friday and be there by 8 AM. She takes this job very seriously and spends the entire week making preparations for it. She doesn't like to do her job anywhere else. She doesn't go to work with a briefcase and a suit; she goes with a two-wheeled cart and plenty of loose change. So, what does my grandmother do?
My grandmother makes it to the Çandarlı market place every Friday. For the past four weeks, I've had the opportunity to join her in this routine, and I must say, these fruit and vegetable markets are full of spatial challenges. Especially if you're in a coastal town with a small and elderly population. The chaos begins with finding a parking spot for your car; everyone tries to park around the same area at eight in the morning, and the early bird gets the worm. Then, as you navigate between the market stalls, you feel like you're on Taksim Square, Istiklal Avenue. Everyone is shoulder to shoulder, and it's hard to hear the person next to you. The key is to find the best seller for the fruits and vegetables on your list that you've been thinking about all week. And now that my grandmother is experienced in this business she knows who has the best quality products. Therefore her market place shopping has become much easier to do. After everything is done, you carry pounds of products to your car, and that's when the grandmother's critique starts, "Tomatoes have gotten expensive, watermelons were cheaper and also better in the past week." In the midst of all this chaos, she uses a sentence that sticks with me, "Whatever would we do without these markets...".
At that moment, my urban planner side took over, and I started to think. What is the
role of these markets, really, and what would happen if they didn't exist?
In fact, these markets are a huge meeting point. You catch up with your neighbors as you shop side by side at the stalls, discussing the highlights of the past week. You greet each other, ask about each other's family and friends. Sometimes, you don't even need to talk; you just exchange smiles as you pass each other. These casual interactions actually carry an underlying message of, "I'm here too, I'm keeping up with the rhythm of the city." Meetings are not just for the people in the city; even the vegetable seller you visit every Friday becomes a valuable part of this meeting. Even if you don't exchange more than ten sentences, you still wish each other a good day and get information about the products. They even know what you like and how much you need.
Let's look at this meeting from a broader perspective. It's also a meeting between urban and rural areas. You actually experience a meeting of lifestyles that are very different from each other, and you feel that they share a common language. Markets are one of the most beautiful ways to understand the concept of "Community." The fact that these two groups, with such different daily lives, have the same plans for every Friday shows us once again how important marketplaces are.
In addition, the stalls set up have great significance for the local economy. One of the most important strategies for rural development is to promote local food production because it helps preserve existing jobs, create new ones, and protect the land. (Nagy, H. N., Tóth, T. T., & Oláh, I. O. (2008)). It also creates an environment where women and the elderly can work. People sell their own products to their own community. This way, the local economy is supported.
I had the opportunity to ask my mother about her thoughts on the market. She mentioned that when choosing a new place to move, a market place being near to the location is a huge deciding factor. She talked about the dependence of people in the city on marketplaces, due to the difficulty of finding organic products in urban areas. If the customer wants organic, high-quality agriculture there is no better place to find it. It's always been a bit challenging for me to break the habit of packaged and frozen vegetables. However, the reason for this habit is that there is no place around where I live that sells organic fruits. It made me realize that I want marketplaces to be more frequent, and I even want to have a habit of regularly shopping from marketplaces myself.
Sometimes these elements, which are always in front of our eyes but are never being looked carefully, bring the depth and attractiveness of cities to very different levels and increase the quality of our daily lives. When designing a city, we always focus on society, but we often overlook the fact that society consists of individuals with their own worlds. These overlooked elements like the constant shouting, the bumping of market bags, etc. will not go unnoticed for me in my future market place visits. I hope you notice and acknowledge it’s small wonders too.
*Nagy, H. N., Tóth, T. T., & Oláh, I. O. (2008). The role of local markets in the sustainable economic development of hungarian rural areas. Visegrad Journal on Bioeconomy and Sustainable Development, 27.
Comentarios