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| WEDNESDAY 6 June | |
| THURSDAY 7 June | |
| FRIDAY 8 June | |
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| Paper Session 3B 'Networks' | |
| Thursday, 7 June, 16:30 - 18:00 | |
PETER MöRTENBöCK |
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Fleeting Assemblages: Architectures of Informal Markets |
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In the past two decades a number of large-scale informal markets have arisen from the geopolitical transformations of Europe. From the improvised shanties of post-war economies and its migrant networks to the widely ramified infrastructures of Eastern Europe’s suitcase trade, they have become a prime site for economies of survival to impinge upon contemporary forms of spatial organisation in Europe. They have also become a key source for studying the potential of accelerated spatial densities and for new dynamics of cultural encounters provoked by the deterritorialising forces of the new global market order. Along a set of theoretical enquiries into the architectural organisation of informal market places our paper looks at three different informal markets as emergent micro-sites of transient and paradoxical spatial production: Izmailovo Market Moscow, ?stanbul Topkapi and Arizona Market Br?ko (BaH). These investigations form part of the EU project Networked Cultures, which aims to locate processes of European transformation through the potentials and effects of networked spatial practices. Many of the researched markets are hubs of migratory routes whose idiosyncratic complexity reflects the tension between traditional economies, black markets and the new conditions of neo-liberal capital markets. The dynamics of these sites highlight the network character of the radicalised and deregulated flows of people, capital and goods worldwide. One of the effects this network phenomenon creates is an increased transnationalisation and hybridisation of cultural claims and expressions. It contributes to a proliferation of transitory spaces in which different cultures engage in a variety of shadow plays alongside the homogenising forces of globalisation. In our paper we argue that this brings to the forth one of the most underrated characteristics of informal markets: The success of their spatial regime draws on a politics of intensification and multiplication rather than on disentanglement and clear calculation.
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