A Day in a Marketplace in 2050
Marketplaces, as basic spaces of exchange in cities, shed light on the multiple everyday mobilities and connections necessary to sustain our living standards. How will our lives look like? Will people manage to avert climate change and distribute resources equally across the planet?
25th of Mai 2050, 2.30 pm
At a marketplace somewhere in a city in Western Europe, Robin, tall and grey-haired, 68-year-old enters the market square. They walk slowly to the stall number 7, where their vegetable basket is ready to be picked up. Robin is happy to get out of the small apartment, as maybe this will be an occasion to meet someone and have a chat outdoors in the adjacent park, safe from viruses. It is the 3rd global pandemic in their lifetime.
The covered market square holds space for 30 stalls, which are built sufficiently apart that people from the neighborhood can walk past each other at a safe distance. Birds whistle from the nearby trees and bees buzz in the greened facades of the revitalized abandoned buildings; these are all former office spaces and shopping centers that are no longer in use. Vegetable gardens planted on the surrounding roofs allow for a cooling effect during the otherwise unbearably hot summers. Three people are planting potatoes in the field on the right side of the square. Robin spots a friend, and after a distant greeting, the two sit on one of the many benches near the three-story bicycle parking lot. Bike lanes crisscross the city and have replaced the parking spaces designed for the private cars they once knew. Bicycles with trailers dominate the scene.
Some people get out of solar-powered autonomous aerial vehicles, which form part of the public transport system. Privately owned cars no longer exist. Only on-demand, self-driving cars of different sizes, driving on specifically designated roads are used. Cities have been redesigned with the aim of the 15-minute city, where everything is accessible within 15 minutes by foot. All other forms of everyday mobilities are severely controlled.
Robin and his friend squint at the sun, and watch the hustle and bustle. Their bags are filled with fresh vegetables and legumes, but with nothing else, as they have already consumed their monthly share of meat and dairy products. Their gaze wanders to the open stage where a performer and two politicians debate ideas of tightening the digitalization law, which foresees a further restriction to individual data consumption.
Mobilities of Food – And the People Behind Them
A pigeon lands in the dirt in front of the two on their bench. Robin and his friend have experienced a time when food was transported from all over the world to Europe in container ships and planes. When bottled water was driven thousands of kilometers in trucks, even to water-rich regions. Long gone is the time when every single meal was wrapped in plastic packaging. Long gone is also their highly resource-intense lifestyle that led to extremely high rates of waste per capita, which had to be exported to other continents. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’. The same held for food production itself, as they remember.
During the first outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, many forms of mobility were put on hold, and governments promoted physical distancing and ‘stay home’ campaigns for those who could work remotely. However, there were important exceptions. Some people were meant to travel even when national borders were closed. The temporary migrant farmworkers from eastern European countries working on western European fields were all of a sudden deemed ‘essential’ (Creţan and Light 2020). The pandemic clearly illustrated the dependence of western European agriculture on low-cost migrant labor, and led to a public discussion about the exploitation of these workers, as well as the shortcomings of labor protection legislation.
Global Interdependence and Social Inequalities
Starting from 2021, growing awareness of global interdependence and the importance of systemic changes dovetailing the Corona crisis had led to rapid political and legal transformations. Pressured by mass social movements of the young, national governments enacted new laws which brought an internalization of the so-far externalized costs, such as greenhouse gas emissions, and protected human rights in the whole production process. These changes soon led to a decrease in economic growth, but also a fairer distribution of wealth within and among nation-states. They went far beyond the individualization and normative condemnation of consumption choices that contributed to global warming (such as long-distance flights). Instead, the transformation of the economic system (Latour 2020) led to changes in the financial markets, trade regulations, the aviation and fashion industry, and mass tourism. Globalized supply chains were regionalized, and shorter food supply chains installed to provide access to healthy food for everyone (Pulighe and Lupia 2020).
The transformation also included the introduction of a universal basic income and a reevaluation of different kinds of work. Activities such as care work with the elderly and children became better remunerated. In parallel, other activities with negative impacts on human well-being and the planet were deemed less valuable. The implementation of these longstanding feminist claims (Bahn et al. 2020) allowed for a change in the basis of social organization and more egalitarian forms of sociality and connection. The mutual aid groups, collective kitchens as well as numerous forms of collective housing testified to the social solidarity started during the years of the first global health crisis. At the same time, individual and collective consumption patterns of western Europeans and other formerly high consuming societies were drastically altered, as each individual had only a certain amount of material resources at their disposal. The decentralized marketplaces, present now in every neighborhood, had a vital role to play in the distribution of food for each citizen.
Epilogue
In 2050, all human mobility is measured against the backdrop of climate change and the consumption of resources. Urban design is not only adapted to environmental and social sustainability (Sharifi and Khavarian-Garmsir 2020) but also to new forms of pandemics. Everyday mobilities are severely restricted. Robin shoulders his bag and says goodbye to his friend. Together they watch the pigeon take off and fly away.
Joanna Menet is a post-doctoral researcher in the Moving Marketplaces project which is interested in the everyday production of inclusive public spaces.
References:
– Bahn, K, Cohen, J, van der Meulen, and Rodgers, Y. A (2020). Feminist Perspective on COVID‐19 and the Value of Care Work Globally. Gender Work Organ 27, 695– 699.
– Creţan, R. & Duncan L. (2020). COVID-19 in Romania: Transnational Labour, Geopolitics, and the Roma ‘Outsiders’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 61(4-5), 559-572.
– Latour, B. (2020). What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model?
– Pulighe, G. and Lupia, F. (2020). Food First: COVID-19 Outbreak and Cities Lockdown a Booster for a Wider Vision on Urban Agriculture, Sustainability 12, 5012ff.
– Sharifi, A. and Khavarian-Garmsir, A. R. (2020). The COVID-19 Pandemic: Impacts on Cities and Major Lessons for Urban Planning, Design, and Management, Science of the Total Environment 749, 1–3.
