sense of locational advantage that the lottery is held in order to ensure any disadvantages aren’t in play for too long a period. The fan-shaped plan of the market and high-pressure environment force this on the organization of the space, where peculiar plan forms, location near to columns or positioning closer to the market entrances can have a massive influence on the potential profits for each stall holder. Bestor himself admits that he had preconceptions about family relationships built over generations or a rational organization based on some technical specifications – the revelation that there was in fact a shake-up every 4 years seemed so illogical in terms of his expectation, but in fact revealed a great deal about the operation of the market both practically and theoretically.13
It is these discoveries based in everyday practices that become incredibly important when analysing the social life of a site. It takes a fully immersed period of research to understand these aspects of the marketplace: an enquiry not loaded with expectations and preconceptions, but open to the reality and complexity of how things really are. The latest phase in the market’s development at Toyosu will be interesting to see how much of Tsukiji’s ways are maintained and what new practices might emerge.
The spatiality and temporality of the
market, depicting a matrix of sellers from jewellers to dry goods salesmen and the three main constituencies of customer: tribal, local Hindu and non- local Hindu. His charts depict the complexity of these relations, which groups trade in money and which ones deal in barter goods, credit or services. Further context for the market is described diagrammatically, with other local markets mapped out across the course of the week, making it instantly clear that the regional marketplace reserves certain days for certain markets. It is clear that Dhorai does not operate in isolation, but is part of a network which operates as a total system.
Gell uses diagrams not only to explain the social relations to the reader, but as a way of revealing some of those interactions and correspondences (1999:121). The market represents broader societal interactions in a microcosm, the purchase of goods serving as a focused unit of analysis.
He is careful not to extrapolate too much, but rather to use this instance to corroborate material he has gathered from other social contexts in the area.
There two social structures are at play in this marketplace: one to do with social status and one to do with the hierarchy of the values of different kinds of goods, arranged in concentric zones (1999:121–122).
Gell’s analysis considers the way in which jewellery retains its value and can be re-sold, keeping its status and exchange value, perhaps even rising over time. This inherent value of precious metals and stones gives this centrally placed stall even more status within the market, greater than other luxuries, which can be similarly expensive, but are not a ‘permanent store of value’
(1999:123).
The zones of the market, then, are numbered from the centre out to the periphery as follows:
1. Jeweller
2. Luxury goods (refined or processed) 3. Consumables (unrefined or raw materials) 4. Non-luxury cloth and dry goods
5. Vegetables and local crops
6. Low-prestige crafts and middlemen.
Two forms of axis are also presented:
Radial: Choices between the zones themselves are between fundamentally different types of value.
Circumferential: Economic choices within a given zone are made on the basis of value for money.
The maps and diagrams Gell develops not only describe his findings, but assist him in arriving at them. They represent abstractions of his long-term and
sophisticated observations of the dual concentric and axial arrangements of this marketplace. The same can be true of any site analysis conducted by an architect sufficiently open to these overlapping practices of description. The ways in which architects engage with a site can be understood as a set of skilled practices appropriate to the profession. These practices are collected together, grouped as a habitus.
Writing in a more explicitly architectural frame (Mooshammer, Mörtenböck, Cruz & Forman, 2015; Mooshammer & Mörtenböck, 2015 & 2016), the market as architectural typology is rehabilitated and described as a global phenomenon estimated to represent up to 50 per cent of economic activity worldwide. Marketplaces are described as ‘a locus of multiple forms of agreement’ (2016:9) and as the most public of spaces. This has both a civic and an economic dimension, a site for negotiation. A feature of these spaces, operating as heterotopias (see Foucault, 1986), is that they do not function in isolation: markets, even the most informal, are networks of spaces, connecting sites of production with those of consumption, and linking one marketplace with another. As such, they are spaces of communication, of transmission.
These unofficial and informal architectures are often ignored by architectural history and theory, falling outside of what we consider to ‘be’ architecture:
their impermanence and flimsy materiality suggesting that they are something completely different from the received canon of architecture. They are, however, sophisticated reading and rewriting of space as a set of social relations.
Designed by non-specialists with limited means and permission, they are nonetheless sophisticated articulations of spatial conditions arranged around exchange, communication and transmission. Bringing these marketplaces into the orbit of architectural debate requires a fundamental shift in our discipline, too often embedded in the neoliberal economy alone through mechanisms such as competition and commissioning, professional validation and indemnity insurance; the informal marketplace integrates some of the latest technologies (2016:18–20) in unexpected and innovative ways, makes efficient use of materials and occupies space with the lightest of touches. It exists at the threshold of the legitimate and illegitimate, the permitted and the illegal.
The benefits of the marketplace are sometimes hidden. Writing on his concept of black urbanism, Abdoumaliq Simone (2010:227) discusses one example of young women who make deliberate detours on the way home from their jobs as housekeepers and nannies in order to expose themselves to the opportunities represented by the market. This is characterized as a spontaneous decision to diverge from their usual routes and to move into spaces where they had few or no existing social connections. There were risks to both their employment status and their safety in these sojourns, but the diversion was understood to be worthwhile as opportunities might be available there. This built social capital in their discussions with others,
building a cache of experience that allowed them to be valuable sources of knowledge about their city.
Simone’s theory of black urbanism develops with a focus on the contentiousness of language; it is notable that Simone deliberately conflates the sense of black as a racial denotation with illegality of the ‘black market’. He posits this very illegality and, more correctly, informality as a way of organizing and understanding this form of encounter with the city. His argument is that the conflation suggests alternative or unconventional forms of regulation in these circumstances rather than an absence of regulation or legal frameworks.
Rather than focusing on legitimacy, Simone’s approach to urban economies is to look at how interactions are actually practiced and performed (2010:280).