In ancient Greece, the Agora was known as the central public space for gathering and assembly; it was utilised as the place for political debate, artistic & cultural exchange and as a market-place. Notions of societal structure and collective relationships corresponded directly to architectural form, manifesting a typology of space that is open, accessible, inclusive and shared by all people of the community.
Marketplaces also act as nodes, providing points of connections to other parts within the urban context and beyond. Street-markets in particular form part of the everyday-life and are places for informal encounters, the unexpected and provide opportunities for a wide range of flexible uses. Within the context of London’s heterogenous demographic, market-places also provide critical domains of inbetween civic spaces of hybrid quality that are easily appropriated by different groups and act as genuinely shared space.
Advanced technology and changing behaviour have led to increasingly hidden, decentralised and different supply-chains, that contribute to a process of gradual obliteration for the need of a market-place as physical space for transactions. Consequences related to this redundancy will become the matter of investigation for this year.