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From civic institution to community place: the meaning of the public market in modern America

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Abstract

This paper examines the discursive transformation of the historic American public market from that of a municipally regulated institution intended to ensure fair trade and equitable food distribution to “a public place” that emphasizes community identity and sociability. Using a semiotic analysis of interviews with 31 market managers of 30 historic and contemporary American public markets, data from historic documents, and multiple site visits, we compare the social construction of the contemporary public market to farmers markets, supermarkets, and the early twentieth century public market. We analyze the meanings managers create in the contemporary public market to understand the administrative rationalities within which the public market operates. Our analysis reveals evidence of competing imaginaries active in the public market, organized around broad notions of “public benefit,” “community culture” and “institutional viability.” We propose that these tensions are embedded in the public market as an institution historically implicated in regimes of food distribution. In the contemporary context, we conclude, public markets largely substitute the spectacle of community and the image of an historic public life for a legally instated commitment to the just governance of food systems.

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Notes

  1. Alkon and McCullen (2011, p. 941) reference farmers markets as “public spaces in which political activity is already present.” They note “We spell farmers markets without the apostrophe to connote that they belong to all of the managers, customers and vendors who play active roles in their creation and functioning… (R)ecasting farmers markets as consisting of farmers, rather than belonging to them, implies that farmers markets are a public resource rather than the property of the most prominent vendors” (endnote 1, p. 951).

  2. USDA Farmers Market Directory (n.d.) and Spitzer and Baum (1995) regard farmers markets as a form of public market; Bukenya et al. (2007) conversely describe public markets as “the most popular of … ‘new generation’ farmers markets” (p. 12).

  3. See also Morales (2011) who reviews the literature on marketplaces broadly defined, with suggestions for further basic and applied research.

  4. For the purposes of the present study, we defined “historic markets” as those originally listed in the 1918 census report and/or that were established prior to the 1950s, after which migration of food retailing to suburbs and shopping centers was dominant (Cohen 1996). The following are more specific creation date ranges and the relevant number of markets included in this study. Historic markets: 1730–1791 (3), 1802–1888 (10), and 1909–1935 (4). Contemporary markets: 1968–1997 (5) and 2001–2013 (8).

  5. For reference in this article, we labeled the market managers with a two-letter state abbreviation and a number to distinguish multiple markets from the same state (e.g., PA1). The number accords with the original list of 75, rather than with the 30 studied markets. For example, we contacted thirteen markets in Pennsylvania, numbering them PA1 to PA13; however, only five of these markets participated in the study.

  6. A self-identified “pop-up” “farmers market” retained the name of the historic market and located in its original site, but was not the same market.

  7. We distinguished between market ownership (legal), management (agents of the owners), and legal ownership of the building or, in the case of open-air markets, the land that hosted the market. Given this delineation, government authorities and municipalities owned 12 markets, managed 8 of them, but owned 16 market structures and the land on which 6 open-air markets operated. Not-for-profits owned 12 markets, operated 15 of them, and owned 2 of the market structures. Private, for-profit organizations owned 5 of the markets, managed 6 of them, and owned 4 of the market structures. Lastly, vendors owned (including the market structure) and operated one market.

  8. We use this as shorthand for the early twentieth century public market.

  9. See also Baics’ (2012) discussion of this point as an example of an “agglomeration economy.”

  10. We coded the data for the various ways that managers talked about their markets, producing 25 denotative meanings, which formed the basis of the cluster analysis. (We originally coded 47 denotative meanings, but collapsed these to 25 to reduce redundancy). We inferred from the interview context their connotative meanings and institutional concerns, as well as strategies that emanated from these concerns.

  11. We thank one of the reviewers for this observation.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Harvey James and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business, Organizations, and Society, Franklin & Marshall College, PO Box 3003, Lancaster, PA, 17604-3003, USA

    Nancy B. Kurland

  2. The Floyd Institute for Public Policy, Franklin & Marshall College, PO Box 3003, Lancaster, PA, 17604-3003, USA

    Linda S. Aleci

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Correspondence to Nancy B. Kurland.

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Kurland, N.B., Aleci, L.S. From civic institution to community place: the meaning of the public market in modern America. Agric Hum Values 32, 505–521 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9579-2

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