Marketplace decline heads East: Neoliberal reform, socio-spatial sorting and patterns of decline at Sofia's public markets

Abstract

This chapter draws attention to the trends of decline recently taking place at the traditional marketplaces of Eastern Europe. An ethnographically rich account relates patterns of socio-material and spatial re-ordering of people, practices and relationships at the open-air markets of Sofia (Bulgaria) to a neoliberal restructuring of the public marketplace institution. The chapter follows how a new policy of public tenders championed by the city administration instituted a regime of continuous commodification of the marketplace space. Several resulting “patterns of decline” are identified, such as the departure of the traditional small-scale food growers. Further, it is argued that to understand how patterns of decline set in at Eastern European marketplaces, one needs to consider how citizens are constrained to specific economic niches, social milieus and regions of space in the city. To this end, Venkov theorises processes of “socio-spatial sorting” and explores what concrete forms the sorting of people, places and practices could take in Sofia and its marketplaces.

Full text

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197058-8
Introduction
There has been a boom of literature discussing the positive impact of street mar-
ketplaces on the city. Marketplaces are being studied as contributing to local
economies and alleviating food access for low-income groups (Taylor et al., 2005),
as aiding place-making and community development (Morales, 2009; Janssens &
Sezer, 2013) and as engendering sociality and intercultural conviviality (Watson,
2009; Black, 2012). At the same time, policies of either restricting or restruc-
turing marketplaces by urban authorities continue unabated (Öz& Eder, 2012;
González & Waley, 2013; Guimarães, 2018). Marketplaces have become a prom-
inent element of the gentrication frontier worldwide (González, 2020).
Plans to revitalise marketplaces, and the associated politics of displacement
of their users, have typically come on the heels of discourses of ‘decline’. The
sense that urban marketplaces are in decline became prominent in cities around
Western Europe in the late 20th century. Now, in the 21st century, a perception
of decline is also taking hold in Eastern Europe. This is despite having a different
historical relationship between the city and countryside, including the routine
presence of marketplaces in the everyday life of urban residents throughout the
20th century (Blumberg, 2015).
In policy documents, “the decline of marketplaces” has been attributed to
changing consumer expectations and a failure of marketplaces and local authori-
ties “to catch up with the times” (González & Waley, 2013). González and Waley
object, arguing instead that the present situation of traditional marketplaces (in
the United Kingdom) is the result of neoliberal urban restructuring orchestrated
by the state and designed to create a commodied city space. In this chapter, I
esh out their argument by exploring in ethnographic detail what neoliberal
restructuring of marketplaces may look like. At the same time, their thesis is
extended to the context of Eastern Europe. I interrogate the shifting dynamics
at—and between—a central and a peripheral marketplace in Soa, Bulgaria.
These are the Women’s Market, the largest marketplace of Soa (Eneva, 2018;
Venkov, 2018) and the Ancient Wall Market, a small neighbourhood market
not far from the city centre (Venkov, 2015). The research adds to other works
on post-socialist neoliberal reforms of small-scale vending (Polyak, 2013; Rekh-
viashvili, 2015).
8 Marketplace decline heads east
Neoliberal reform, socio-spatial sorting and
patterns of decline at Soa’s public markets
Nikola A. Venkov
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 88 10-05-2022 14:37:31

Marketplace decline heads east 89
This chapter explores how the Eastern European brand of neoliberal hegem-
ony over city policy brought about patterns of decline for marketplaces. The latter
term is employed here to distinguish socio-material re-orderings of urban space
from the production and circulation of images of decline. In studies based in the
region, discourse and images have been prominent in the analysis, especially
discourses of shame as the driver of public-authority efforts for disciplining or
removing marketplaces (Petrova 2011; Polyak, 2013; Venkov 2018). The pres-
ent contribution lls a gap in this literature and focuses on the socio-material
changes at marketplaces that have been interpreted as markers of ‘decline’.
A claim advanced here is that to understand how patterns of decline emerge,
one needs to consider how people are constrained to specic economic niches,
social milieus and regions of urban space depending on the resources and social
characteristics they possess. To this end, I emphasise processes of socio-spatial
sorting of people, places and practices.
The notion of “socio-spatial sorting” is elaborated in the next theoretical sec-
tion. Then the context of the marketplaces in post-socialist Soa is introduced,
and in the third section, I describe a neoliberal policy reform instituted in 2006.
Two empirical sections demonstrate how this reform intensied several processes
of socio-spatial sorting. Finally, a discussion of the ndings section expands on
the empirical analysis and a concluding section reects on the wider signicance
of the notion “socio-spatial sorting”.
Spatialising inequality: Socio-spatial sorting
The narrative of the decline of public markets in Western Europe is predicated on
long-term trends of dropping customer numbers, decreasing revenues, increased
trader turnover and stall vacancy, poor maintenance and the lack of reinvest-
ment by public authorities (González & Waley, 2013; Guimarães, 2018). Here
I argue that an important component of many of these patterns is movement
across the city—customers dispersing, traders looking elsewhere for a means of
livelihood, money owing out, etc. Even the association of marketplaces with
social stigma depended on the change of shopping trajectories in the city. Neg-
ative representations have stemmed from the increased spatial concentration of
poor shoppers, the elderly, immigrants or illicit activities at the traditional mar-
ketplace. Social stigma could arise only because the middle classes had already
stopped frequenting the public market and began to cultivate their sensibilities
about food, hygiene and civility in different shopping contexts (Venkov, 2018:
249–257).
These changing patterns of use have been construed chiey as the result of
‘consumer preference’, as the free choice to move in or move away from a par-
ticular space and type of retail. Even when urban studies have pointed out the
vital functions marketplaces perform for disadvantaged groups (e.g. Taylor et
al., 2005; Watson, 2009), they still have paid little attention to the modes of
constraint and exclusion present in the dynamics that led to this association
between the geography of marketplaces and the geography of social marginality
in the city.
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 89 10-05-2022 14:37:31

90 Nikola A. Venkov
The purpose of this chapter is to connect the aforementioned patterns of
movement and decline with a spatialised understanding of social inequality. I
consider that movement means different things to different people; that it is dif-
ferentiated and implicated with power; a constitutive part of it is xities (Adey,
2006, p. 83). Manderscheid (2009) draws on Bourdieu to conceptualise ine-
qualities as continuously re-produced and contested in multiple and relationally
constituted social spaces. She draws on Massey, Urry and others to understand
geographical space as socially and relationally constituted through material prac-
tice, movement and an imbrication with inequality. Building on Manderscheid’s
insights, I am interested in how such a continuously re-produced social inequal-
ity could attain a degree of spatial coherence and provide a spatial dimension to
the unequal distributions of resources, activities and life chances.
I start from the notion of ‘social sorting’, used for understanding the repro-
duction of inequality along the course of people’s lives. It has been applied to
the self-sorting of populations into patterns of inequality due to the preferential
association between people with similar professional status, levels of education,
race, ethnicity, sexuality and so on (Bottero, 2007). In a different sense, the term
has been used about the sorting of subjects by external operators such as the
highly structured corporate economy in Western societies (Kerckhoff 1995) or
the educational system (Domina et al., 2017). For example, schools execute mul-
tiple categorisations on pupils that powerfully affect their chances later in life.
The idea of ‘social sorting’ impacting subjects’ life paths speaks to the mode
of constraint and exclusion that I am seeking to uncover in the patterns of
movement and change of use in the city. However, I open up the formulation
to include ‘self-driven’ processes of categorisation in the context of relational
dynamics (e.g. competition) taking place across a varied population of subjects.
The theoretical notion proposed here, “socio-spatial sorting”, adds also aware-
ness to spatiality, to a continuously re-produced urban geography and the multi-
dimensional character of inequality (Manderscheid, 2009).
Socio-spatial sorting captures processes of socio-economic and spatial re-
ordering composed by the actions of a large number of agents placed in a rela-
tional setting of competition. Competition essentially acts as a dynamic lter
that sends subjects one way or another depending on the unequal resources and
varied social characteristics they are equipped with. Still, a diversity of outcomes
survives because individuals draw on different, creative strategies and have dif-
ferent, complex backgrounds that determine if they will follow a certain path or
not. There are moments when a ‘pattern’ of movement may be said to emerge
as prevalent, although not holding absolutely. For example, one could claim
that “better off consumers are leaving the open-air marketplace for the mall”,
although consumers of means would still be found at the marketplace. It is to
such tentative patterns emerging in the messiness of the social that the notion of
socio-spatial sorting aims to draw attention to.
Socio-spatial sorting lets us look into how specic spaces might end up with
higher concentrations than others of certain types of users, activities, relation-
ships. Unlike a notion that has been used in the study of residential segrega-
tion, “socio-spatial differentiation” (Li, 2019), socio-spatial sorting avoids taking
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 90 10-05-2022 14:37:31

Marketplace decline heads east 91
inequality as an independent input variable. It sees the production of urban ine-
qualities as simultaneously constituting and being constituted by the relational
practice that shapes urban space itself.
The following sections explore some of the concrete forms socio-spatial sorting
may take concerning urban marketplaces. They substantiate how the sorting of
different social groups and practices into and out of the public market produces
or exacerbates patterns of decline and demonstrate that marketplace decline has
made inroads in Eastern Europe by the rst decade of the 21st century. The
discussion is informed by my long-term research engagement with the Women’s
Market (2010–2013) and the Ancient Wall Market (2014). It was by the early
2010s when the patterns of decline identied in this chapter reached their peak
and helped the subsequent city visions for marketplace redevelopment gain the
upper hand. The data I collected included observation in situ, surveys of market
visitors and market traders, in-depth interviews with a wide range of stakehold-
ers and a review of policy documents, as well as the media coverage.
Soa’s evolving marketplaces
In Eastern Europe, public markets embodied uninterrupted direct contact
between the city and its rural hinterland throughout the 20th century (Blum-
berg, 2015). In the Southeast-European socialist states, open-air markets were
seen as important institutions for providing food and other goods, and they were
well cared for by the socialist state (Venkov, 2021). At the socialist market,
individual peasants, as well as state cooperatives, could offer their own produce
directly to urban consumers. Peasants were only required to pay a modest fee on
the day in order to secure a stall as well as the provision of scales, an apron, etc.
With the retrenchment of the socialist state in the 1990s, Bulgaria’s economy
collapsed, but the role of marketplaces expanded. They became hubs of infor-
mal commerce and small-scale entrepreneurship (see e.g. Konstantinov, 1996).
Marketplace areas, trader and visitor numbers exploded. It was only in the 2000s
when large, agglomerated actors of the Western-style consumer capitalist econ-
omy began penetrating the retail sector in Bulgaria (Tasheva-Petrova, 2016). By
the end of the decade, a wave of supermarket and shopping centre investment
had swept over the retail landscape. More and more customers were drawn away
from the marketplace. At the same time, public policy shifted from tolerating
small-scale vending to actively ‘cleaning up’ urban space from the latter (see e.g.
Petrova, 2011). In the mid-2000s, the public marketplace found itself without
many allies in the city government.
Neoliberal policy
In the 1990s, city markets were re-organised into municipally owned compa-
nies whose boards of directors answered to the city council. When the boom of
the informal economy began, the money owing through the markets sharply
increased. This situation got the market management (and other institutions
locally, such as the police or the sanitation authorities) involved in various
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 91 10-05-2022 14:37:31

92 Nikola A. Venkov
corrupt practices, some of which were related to the allocation of stalls and shop
booths (as evidenced in many interviews I conducted). Formally, traders were
still obligated to pay a xed daily or monthly fee as in the socialist period, but
now there were various additional informal arrangements involved. The market
companies became widely known as sources of unaccounted for ‘slush funds’ for
the political parties in Soa (ACCESS-Soa, 2005).
In this context, a newly elected city council took to reforming the manage-
ment of markets in 2006 with the ostensible goal to make municipal company
dealings more transparent. Yet, the main thrust of the changes was to start a
neoliberal reorganisation of relations at the marketplace in keeping with the
free-market dogma held dear by the city administration (as my interviews with
city councillors and market ofcials attest). Scrapped were the social policies
that survived even the 1990s, such as an obligatory quota of stalls for people with
disabilities or a stall fee reduction for people living next to the market (Soa City
Council, 2018).
However, the key reform was the institution of a mechanism for competition
in the allocation of trading lots. From now on, the rents for traders were to be
determined by public tenders. Traders submitted a declaration in a sealed enve-
lope with the monthly rate they promised to pay for their chosen lot and had no
knowledge of what other traders offered for the same spot. This situation forced
traders to pledge rents that were at the top of their earning abilities to avoid sud-
denly losing their business. Stalls were to be hired for a year; shops and booths
for three years. Any business which worked with a horizon of operation longer
than that was under great pressure around the time of new tenders. In this way,
by pitting traders against each other, the city government managed to set up a
state of “continuous commodication” of marketplace space (Öz & Eder, 2012:
307–308).
This shift in policy and attitude is illustrated by the following response made
by the head of the municipal company managing the Ancient Wall Market.
When I asked if he had any protections in place for long-established traders or
for actual food growers he replied,
We are a trading company, and we should seek maximum prot. We do not
have social welfare capacities. (Middle-aged man, high-level municipal
administration, 2014)
For the sake of contrast, just a few years before the reform, an avowedly right-
wing mayor defended the lagging revenue from municipal public markets in
starkly different terms:
Most municipal companies are not set up to make a prot but to offer certain
services. If we burden these companies with the task of bringing in revenues,
they will cease to provide services for the citizens.
(Media interview with Soa’s interim mayor, 2004,
cited in ACCESS-Soa, 2005: 161)
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 92 10-05-2022 14:37:31

Marketplace decline heads east 93
The following sections explore how the turn to extreme free-market principles
impacted the markets of Soa.
The food growers leaving
The new system of determining the rent by sealed auctions combated corruption
by simply removing any surplus revenue from traders at public markets. If one did
not pledge the highest amount that one could recoup by working seven days a
week, ten to 12 hours a day, at a given stall or shop booth, one risked losing their
business because of another trader’s higher bid. This situation was a signicant
factor that squeezed out actual agricultural producers from the marketplaces and
with them many shoppers:
We had friends here from a village near Plovdiv. They gave up their busi-
ness.… But how can that be possible?! A producer can’t turn over that kind
of money! The shop booths around here cost a thousand leva [roughly 500
euro], even up to two thousand! Come on then, tell me what kind of crop
this guy should plant, what kind of pesticides should he use, how will he
bring it over here, how will he pay a salary [for a daily vendor] and have a
little something left over for himself—and on top of all that to pay 24,000
leva rent for the year?! (A middle-aged woman, a booth shopholder selling
confectionery at the Women’s Market, 2012)
Those who invested in a full-time presence at the market were better placed
to acquire crucial informal knowledge and networks locally. Professionalising
as an entrepreneur at the market allowed one to make the most of the auction
system, as well as of many other opportunities. Full-time presence could be
achieved by re-selling produce from the city wholesale rather than by investing
one’s time and effort into farming. Thus, resellers could offer higher bids than
food growers who in turn felt pressured by the rising rents. The new policy
started a process of sorting the market occupants towards a dominant presence
of resellers.
The auction’s system impacted the composition of traders at the market
(authentic food growers vs. resellers; Figure 8.1), but more than that the com-
position of practices. The agricultural producers who persisted at the market
had to switch to retailing too when their own produce was not in season. In
turn, the difculty of juggling the labour needed at one’s village and at the
market, and securing stock at the wholesale (every day before dawn), meant
that producers still present at the market were mainly sorted into two types.
A few traditional food growers managed to mobilise an extended family in a
complex spatio-temporal arrangement. For example, a married daughter and
her family would settle permanently in the city and work as resellers while the
others would remain based in the village and, in season, would be supplying the
family in Soa with stock. The other type consisted of larger farmers who had
enough resources to operate as a company and hire vendors and a delivery man
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 93 10-05-2022 14:37:31

94 Nikola A. Venkov
as employees in Soa. When the company’s own crops were not in season, the
Soa employees would run the same retail business as their other colleagues at
the market.
In this way, the shopping experience at the marketplace was gradually trans-
formed from buying directly from food growers to buying from wholesale stock.
There was little to distinguish the goods from those at neighbourhood fruit and
veg shops. This is the rst signicant “pattern of decline” identied in this chap-
ter. For most consumers, not being able to recognise a food grower at the stall
made them highly distrustful of the products on sale. At that point in time,
imported produce was ooding the Bulgarian market, although it was seen as
being of substantially lower quality. It was industrially farmed and based on plant
varieties developed for the needs of transcontinental shipment and a corporate
capitalist cycle. However, at wholesale, these imported varieties competed suc-
cessfully for the attention of the resellers due to lower, European Union–subsi-
dised offering prices and extended ‘shelf life’. Thus, the prevalence of retail at
the marketplace meant that it gradually lost its privileged reputation as a pro-
vider of fresh local produce and varieties.
This is how the sorting of small agricultural producers out of Soa’s market-
places motivated the departure of many formerly regular customers. Crowds
at the markets were getting visibly thinner in another pattern of decline. The
perception of decline was made more intense by the comparison on everyone’s
mind with the ideal marketplace of the socialist period and the rst years after
1989. Such comparisons never took long to pop up in my interviews with Soa’s
Figure 8.1 A mix of agricultural producers and retailers at the Women’s Market, 2012.
Source: author.
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 94 10-05-2022 14:37:31

Marketplace decline heads east 95
residents. Even immediate neighbours, who had once suffered the nuisances of a
busy marketplace just under their windows, concurred:
When was the best period of the market here? [She laughs at the paradox:]
When the market was all just shacks lled with rats! But then they were
coming over from the village with no less but car trailers full of fresh stock!
(A middle-aged woman, living in a block of ats
adjacent to the Ancient Wall Market, 2014)
Re-sorting the poor across the city
The combination of falling numbers of food growers, falling footfall and the
treatment of markets as cash cows for the city budget brought another re-or-
dering of the patterns of movement and shopping, this time on the city scale. It
intensied a central-periphery relation between the Women’s Market (the larg-
est marketplace of Soa) and smaller neighbourhood marketplaces. Earlier, vil-
lage producers considered few factors in choosing which market to attend, often
just the convenience of reaching the respective location—as did the shoppers.
However, relational dynamics between marketplaces became signicant by the
mid-2000s. The Women’s Market central position became more pronounced as
its bigger size and bustle meant larger turnovers and the ability of traders to stick
to low margins despite rents rising with the new municipal policy:
Here is where the trade is! Any place which is not the [Women’s] Market
doesn’t have trade! With this stock of mine, if I moved 10 metres to that side
[pointing at the off-street], I would be dead within a month! Because I work
with a 5 to 7 percent mark-up price. Over there I would be forced to up it to
50% at the very least.
(The trader of confectionery from an earlier quote, 2012)
Paying rents per square metre higher than those paid by international brand
stores on the high street (Presa, 2015), professionalised traders at the Women’s
Market could still offer half the supermarket’s prices. Traders at neighbourhood
markets, on the other hand, were forced to enter a spiral of compensating falling
turnovers by raising price mark-ups. As a result, across the city, residents with
restricted budgets found themselves excluded from their local marketplace—in a
country where 40% of the population lives at risk of material deprivation (NSI,
2014: 6). Poorer citizens from all around the city assembled at the Women’s
Market (Figure 8.2), sustaining between 40,000 and 70,000 visits per day in
2012–2013 (as reported by an internal study for the management company to
which I was kindly given access to).
Conrming this picture, my survey at the Ancient Wall Market in 2014
revealed that even residents living directly adjacent to the market shopped at
‘independent’ fruit and veg shops located outside the market, while the elderly,
who had much tighter budgets, made lengthy trips by public transport to the
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 95 10-05-2022 14:37:31

96 Nikola A. Venkov
Women’s Market. (There were still no supermarket chains in the vicinity, but
some better-off families had switched to driving to distant ones.)
The Ancient Wall Market by that time predominantly catered for the employ-
ees of nearby large institutions at lunch break. Many of the kiosks had been
taken over by fast-food enterprises and tobacco and drinks shops. Students from
the Architecture University would visit for a döner kebab or a pastry. Employees
from the City Court of Justice would come to get an individual fruit in addition to
their coffee or sandwich. Once a site packed with producers from the village (see
quote in the preceding section), now the Ancient Wall Market boasted just eight
fruit and veg vendors, only one of whom was an actual food grower, an elderly
woman from a nearby village who supplemented her pension in this way. The
relational impact on rents by higher-earning competitors (fast-food businesses or
tobacco and drinks corporate chains) also generated a long stretch of unoccupied
shop booths, shaping another pattern of marketplace decline—vacancy.
The evolving composition of users of the marketplace can be accompanied
also by a change in the predominant patterns of interaction between shoppers
and vendors. Such a “socio-spatial sorting of practices” can be gleaned from
seemingly inconsequential ethnographic details. An example is the shift by
which buying a single (expensive) apple had become acceptable at the Ancient
Wall Market, even though in Bulgaria fruit and veg are traditionally sold by the
kilogram. The Women’s Market sat at the other extreme: there asking to buy
less than a kilo of produce was asking for a rather rude response from the vendor.
Such practices are enmeshed in complex economic, class and cultural linkages
that could acquire a spatial dimension through the process of sorting.
Figure 8.2 Senior citizens queuing at the shop booths of the Women’s Market, 2013.
Source: author.
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 96 10-05-2022 14:37:31

Marketplace decline heads east 97
In conclusion, through unanticipated relational dynamics emerging on the
city-wide scale, the policy of public tenders contributed to the socio-spatial
sorting of prices, uses, users, practices and places. Poorer citizens were excluded
from their local markets and “sorted towards” shopping at the Women’s Market.
Places, in their turn, were being pulled into the realms of either vacancy or social
stigma, both of which could be read by urbanites as ‘decline’. Namely, smaller
neighbourhood markets seemed in the process of dying, with quieter ambience
than before, the odd customer, high prices and with the number of stallholders
dropping off over the years. On the other hand, the central market solidied
a reputation as a zone of the poor and the miserable, despite it being still very
mixed, with over 500 traders and many types of visitors. In fact, it was the ten-
sions of intense social and class mixing there—what I have elsewhere dened as
“social multiculture” (Venkov, 2019)—that directly provoked the city’s plans for
regeneration and “cleansing of the area” in 2013–2014 (Venkov, 2018).
Discussion of ndings
The patterns reviewed in the previous sections are all examples of patterns of
decline—they are material re-orderings of space that turn away traders and cus-
tomers while strengthening images of decline. The empirical observations of this
chapter included the departure of agricultural producers who once made up the
identity of Soa’s marketplaces, an emerging association between the market
and poverty as a result of the spatial concentration of the poor at the chief mar-
ketplace of the city and, nally, the visibly reduced visitor crowds and even the
blight of shop vacancy. At places such as the Ancient Wall Market, even the
core marketplace identity of fruit and veg sales was affected by the takeover by
more ‘efcient’ types of business.
While each of these changes was the result of complex dynamics and some
might have run their course anyway, here I have traced how a single shift in city
policy intensied them. The introduction of public tenders in 2006 imprinted
the administration’s neoliberal vision onto urban space. By seeing marketplaces
only as sets of plots to be rented out at the highest opportune price, it set up an
ever-present precarity for traders. It instituted what has been termed by Öz &
Eder, 2012 “continuous commodication” of space. Through the resultant soar-
ing rents, the municipality succeeded to appropriate an ever-larger portion of the
incomes of the city’s poorest shoppers and struggling micro-businesses.
The analysis in this chapter substantiates in ethnographic detail how state-led
neoliberal encroachment on urban space produces the decline of the public mar-
ketplace, which then triggers politics of revitalisation and displacement (as in
González and Waley, 2013). Patterns such as the ones identied in this chapter
are typically drawn upon by public authorities to argue that traditional market-
places do not suit the needs of the contemporary consumer anymore and should
be transformed for use by different—invariably, more afuent—demographics.
Indeed, at both marketplaces explored here, following the period under dis-
cussion, the city-initiated projects for revitalisation, which marginalised its tra-
ditional users and uses further. A major redevelopment of the Women’s Market
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 97 10-05-2022 14:37:31

98 Nikola A. Venkov
into a pedestrian shopping street took place in 2013–2014. Today, periodic vinyl
sales and gourmet street fests (see Petrova, 2020) are organised next to a public
market greatly reduced in size. Interestingly, these events take place behind tall
temporary fences that serve as a barrier against the area’s ordinary users. As a
means to ‘revive’ the Ancient Wall Market, weekly organic ‘farmer’s markets’
with quite a different class composition of vendors and patrons was promoted
over regular, rent-paying traders (see Venkov, 2015). By 2020, a single daily fruit
and veg retailer survived at the site.
Conclusion
The literature on marketplaces and retail gentrication has powerfully contested
the thesis that public marketplaces have lost their function in contemporary
consumer society. However, it has tended to focus only briey on the purported
phase of marketplace decline, mainly as a prelude to discussions on the subsequent
events of regeneration or gentrication. Often, multiple causes for the historical
decline are listed in a rather cursory manner—the expansion of other forms of
retail, suburbanisation, long-term disinvestment, neoliberal urban restructuring,
power struggles and investor interests, to name a few (Öz & Eder, 2012; González
& Waley, 2013; Polyak, 2013; Guimarães, 2018; González, 2020).
The present contribution identies a single potential factor—a change in
market management regulations—and teases out the causative connections
linking it to patterns of decline at Soa’s public marketplaces. Rather than argu-
ing against the importance of multiple interwoven factors for urban change, this
approach suggests a methodology to make legible a multiplicity of interlinked
relational elds.
Central to the contribution is the notion of “socio-spatial sorting”. It captures
the dynamics of spatial stratication of citizens into different regions of urban
space owing to the unequal resources and social traits they are equipped with.
Socio-spatial sorting is a heuristic designed to scrutinise how social inequality
obtains spatial coherence and how urban geographies of marginality take shape.
Fundamental to this perspective is the understanding of urban space as produced
by the dynamic cross-dependency of many relational elds through which social
agents are continuously juxtaposed—e.g. in their possession of economic, cul-
tural and social capitals (if we use Bourdieu’s terms), choice of tactics as well as
life-long strategies, etc.
This chapter begins to sketch out the kinds of insight socio-spatial sorting
can provide. Further work would look into the multiple factors that bring about
patterns of change at urban marketplaces; it would uncover further spatial
scales at which sorting processes play out. The full potential of the heuristic
socio-spatial sorting would be explored in other thematic areas of urban studies.
Gentrication is one obvious area of application since at its heart lie processes
of socio-spatial sorting where local residents have found themselves at a disad-
vantage compared to urban space users with a different set of resources. Gen-
trication theory has been criticised for applying a pre-dened set of relational
elds to contexts around the world where they may not be relevant (Bernt,
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 98 10-05-2022 14:37:32

Marketplace decline heads east 99
2016; Lawton 2020). Socio-spatial sorting, on the other hand, is adapted for
cases where new relational scales emerge and interact with existing ones, as
has been shown in this chapter. Furthermore, this perspective is especially use-
ful for studying instances of neoliberal restructuring, which often implies the
commodication of new regions of social space by the setting up of new scales
of competition.
References
ACCESS-Soa (2005), Soa – A Dirty Dream Story. Reports by ACCESS-Soa Foundation
for the Economic Activities in the Capital [София – мръсна приказка - Доклади на фондация
“АКСЕС - София” за стопанските дейности в столицата]. Soa: Apostro.
Adey, P. (2006), If mobility is everything then it is nothing: Towards a relational politics
of (im)mobilities. Mobilities, 1(1), 75–94.
Bernt, M. (2016), Very particular, or rather universal? Gentrication through the lenses
of ghertner and lГіpez-morales. City, 20(4), 637–644.
Black, R.E. (2012), Porta Palazzo: The Anthropology of an Italian Market. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Blumberg, R. (2015), Geographies of reconnection at the marketplace. Journal of Baltic
Studies, 46(3), 299–318.
Bottero, W. (2007), Social inequality and interaction. Sociology Compass, 1(2), 814–831.
Domina, T., Penner, A. & Penner, E. (2017), Categorical inequality: Schools as sorting
machines. Annual Review of Sociology, 43, 311–330.
Eneva, S.A. (2018), Contested identities and ethnicities in the marketplace: Soa’s
city centre between the East and the West of Europe. In: S. González (Ed.), Contested
Markets, Contested Cities: Gentrication and Urban Justice in Retail Spaces (pp. 166–181).
London/New York: Routledge.
González, S. (2020), Contested marketplaces: Retail spaces at the global urban margins.
Progress in Human Geography, 44(5), 877–897.
González, S. & Waley, P. (2013), Traditional retail markets: The new gentrication fron-
tier? Antipode, 45(4), 965–983.
Guimarães, P.P.C. (2018), The transformation of retail markets in Lisbon: An analysis
through the lens of retail gentrication. European Planning Studies European Planning
Studies, 26(7), 1450–1470.
Janssens, F. & Sezer, C. (2013), ‘Flying markets’ activating public spaces in Amsterdam.
Built Environment, 39(2), 245–260.
Kerckhoff, A.C. (1995), Institutional arrangements and stratication processes in indus-
trial societies. Annual Review of Sociology, 21(1), 323–347.
Konstantinov, Y. (1996), Patterns of reinterpretation: Trader-tourism in the Balkans
(Bulgaria) as a picaresque metaphorical enactment of post-totalitarianism. American
Ethnologist, 23(4), 762–782.
Lawton, P. (2020), Unbounding Gentrication Theory: Multidimensional Space,
Networks and Relational Approaches. Regional Studies, 54(2), 268–279.
Li, Z. (2019), Sociospatial differentiation. In: A. M. Orum (Ed.), The Wiley Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. (pp. 1920–1923) Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Manderscheid, K. (2009), Integrating space and mobilities into the analysis of social ine-
quality. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 10(1), 7–27.
Morales, A. (2009), Public markets as community development tools. Journal of Planning
Education and Research, 28, 426–440.
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 99 10-05-2022 14:37:32

100 Nikola A. Venkov
NSI (2014), Poverty and Social Inclusion Indicators in 2014. Soa: National Statistical
Institute.
Öz, O. & Eder, M. (2012), Rendering Istanbul’s periodic bazaars invisible: Reections on
urban transformation and contested space. International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 36(2), 297–314.
Petrova, V. (2011), Take the market out of sight! Seminar_BG, 2(1). https://www.sem-
inar-bg.eu/spisanie-seminar-bg/special-issue1/item/319-take-the-market-out-of-sight.
html
Petrova, V. (2020) Experiencing the spectacle of ne dining. New forms of festivity in
Soa, Bulgaria and diversion of public space. In: V. Marinescu (Ed.), Food, Nutrition
and the Media (pp. 189–201). Cham: Springer.
Polyak, L. (2013), Exchange in the street: Rethinking open-air markets in Budapest. In:
A. Madanipour, S. Knierbein & A. Degros (Eds.), Public Space and the Challenges of
Urban Transformation in Europe (pp. 60–72). London/New York: Routledge.
Presa (2015, May 15), It is the traders who brought the rents up for themselves at the
Women’s Market [Търговците сами си вдигнаха наемите на Женския пазар].
Presa. http://presa.bg/article/archive/53023/2/0
Rekhviashvili, L. (2015), Marketization and the public-private divide: Contestations
between the state and the petty traders over the access to public space in Tbilisi.
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 35(7/8), 478–496.
Soa City Council (2018), Soa, Ordinance for the markets on the territory of Soa
Municipality [Наредба за пазарите на територията на Столична община] (May 5,
2018). https://soa.obshtini.bg/doc/114205
Tasheva-Petrova, M. (2016). Retail Gentrication and Urban regeneration of the City
of Soa. Retrospective and Perspective. Paper presented at the “From CONTESTED_
CITIES to Global Urban Justice” Conference, Madrid.
Taylor, J., Madrick, M. & Collin, S. (2005), Trading Places: The Local Economic Impact of
Street Produce and Farmers’ Markets. London: New Economics Foundation.
Venkov, N.A. (2015), “Rimskata Stena” Marketplace – A Sociological Analysis/Policies
Towards Municipal Markets [Пазарът “Римска стена”– социологически анализ/
Политики към общинските пазари]. Soa: Studio Architectonica/Soa Municipality.
https://tinyurl.com/2cj8bnzd
Venkov, N.A. (2018), Assembling the post-socialist marketplace: Transitions and regen-
eration projects at the central pazar of Soa. Ethno Anthropo Zoom/ЕтноАнтропоЗум,
17, 229–279.
Venkov, N.A. (2019), Conviviality vs politics of coexistence: Going beyond the global
North. CAS Soa Working Paper Series, 11, 1–42.
Venkov, N.A. (2021), The “cooperative marketplace” as a point of pride and a challenge
for the socialist system [Кооперативният пазар като гордост и предизвикателство
за социалистическата система]. In: A. Luleva, I. Petrova, P. Petrov & Y. Yancheva
(Eds.), Bularian Socialism: Ideology, Everyday Life, Memory [Българският социализъм:
идеология, всекидневие, памет] (pp. 39–61). Soa: Prof. Marin Drinov. https://tinyurl.
com/yc8n7v53
Watson, S. (2009), The magic of the marketplace: Sociality in a neglected public space.
Urban Studies, 46(8), 1577–1591.
9781032053257_Ch8.indd 100 10-05-2022 14:37:32