Contested Markets, Contested Cities

Sara González is Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK where she teaches on critical urban geography courses and leads the research group on Social Justice, Cities and Citizenship. She has published work in international journals on the political and economic transformation in cities, the neoliberalisation of urban policies, gentrification and grassroots contestation of these processes. Between 2012 and 2016 she was the Principal Investigator in Leeds of the EU-funded Contested Cities network, bringing together more than 40 researchers across Europe and Latin America. Between 2006 and 2016 she was part of the editorial collective of the open-access ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. She favours participatory action research methodologies and has been a very active member of a campaign to support her local market in Leeds.

"The volume encourages us to expand our studies of gentrification beyond the residentialto investigate the relationship between transformations in retail spaces and access to public and urban life. The different cases presented in the book draw on three overlapping analyticalframeworks to present and analyze markets in different cities. Contested Markets,Contested Cities, edited by Sara González, [examines] the differentroles played by markets, and their contradictions, from the perspectives of gentrification and theright to the city." - Liz Mason-Deese, Independent Researcher, Antipode Foundation

• 1. Introduction: Studying markets as spaces of contestation 2. Markets of La Merced: New frontiers of gentrification in the historic centre of Mexico City 3. Learning from La Vega Central: Challenges to the survival of a publicly used (private) marketplace 4. Resisting gentrification in traditional public markets: Lessons from London 5. The contested public space of the tianguis street markets of Mexico City 6. Gourmet Markets as a Commercial Gentrification Model: The Cases of Mexico City and Madrid 7. Neighbourhoods and markets in Madrid: an uneven process of selective transformation 8. Mercado Bonpland and solidarity production networks in Buenos Aires, Argentina 9. Public markets: Spaces for sociability under threat? The case of Leeds’ Kirkgate Market 10. Contested identities and ethnicities in the marketplace: Sofia’s city centre between the East and the West of Europe 11. Popular Culture and heritage in San Roque Market, Quito 12. Conclusions. International perspectives on the transformation of markets