Continuity Through Change: Urban Ecology in a South London Market

This research works to demonstrate how different descriptions of place and identity can be understood as being co-constructed. Specifically, how this process facilitates market to be adaptable, more resilient, type of place. It is an exploration of the notion that ‘People make places and places make people’. In order to illustrate the process of research and knowledge development, the first two chapters of this thesis demonstrate a progression of the research subject. Chapter 1 sets out the key characteristics and similarities of both place and identity presented across a range of disciplines and theories. It concludes that these similarities indicate a need for a theoretical development capable of encompassing the process of construction of both concepts. Chapter 2 begins to develop the theoretical approach by looking at a short background on the previous work on markets. Further, this chapter develops the approach taken that focuses on the material culture found in and around markets. This focus is structured by a focus on Actor Network Theory and specifically focuses on how this helps us understand distributed agency and what this might look like for an understanding of place and identity. In light of the subject and theory explored in the previous chapters, Chapter 3 provides the philosophical and methodological underpinning of this thesis. The chapter lays out how and why markets were chosen and provides the framework of the methodology including coding analysis, participant observation and ethical considerations. Following the phenomenological 12 tradition, such an account works to describe the complexity of interconnected events, highlighting the process of construction through interpretive account. The results chapters are highly descriptive and cover the key themes of resilience, connectivity and selection. The final results chapter focuses on the process of ‘stalling out’ as a performative one – the practice of which holds the construction of both individual and place identity. The four results chapters combine descriptive text and photographic images taken by the researcher and informants. Finally, the last chapter provides a very short summary and suggests that markets and people can be understood as very similar systems