Popular infrastructural politics: Connecting grassroots knowledge and practice on marketplace governance

Marketplaces play a vital role in the everyday life of many urban communities. They are part of the supply systems that make food and other basic staples accessible to urban residents, and in many cities around the world, they also represent significant public spaces where social connections and forms of belonging are built. Either covered or open, marketplaces have increasingly become essential infrastructures for low-income and marginalised urban residents, who rely on their affordable prices for subsistence.

This contribution to people's subsistence largely depends on the vibrant economic, social, cultural, and political life of market trader communities, whose efforts to keep these commercial infrastructures working are permanent.

The aim of this fellowship is to disseminate and consolidate my research findings concerning the traders' permanent efforts to keep the marketplaces alive. In doing so, the fellowship will help to better understand the long-standing contribution of grassroots organisations to infrastructure and city-making. The fellowship also aims to encourage an international conversation between academics, marketplaces' stakeholders, and practitioners about their experiences in infrastructure governance.

In this way, the fellowship will facilitate knowledge exchange concerning the challenges embedded in infrastructure provision, maintenance, and transformation. Focused on these two aims, the fellowship will contribute to envision alternatives to current trends in infrastructure governance from a grassroots perspective which recognises and values the work and political experience of key workers such as market traders.

For this, the fellowship builds upon my PhD research, which explored Mexico City's trader community and its public markets' network, which comprises more than 70,000 traders and 329 commercial facilities. These actors and spaces have developed what I have conceptualised as popular infrastructural politics to fight against political neglect and infrastructure abandonment and deterioration.

Rather than seeing grassroots politics as discrete, fragile, or ephemeral, popular infrastructural politics seeks to capture the existence of long-standing grassroots political traditions that revolve around the rights to subsistence, infrastructure, and the city.

My fieldwork revealed that market traders have been able to forge these long-standing political traditions around public markets, making popular infrastructural politics a crucial practice to defending an essential service for the marginalised. Furthermore, through popular infrastructural politics, Mexico City market traders have not only developed strategies to shape marketplaces governance at a local scale but infrastructure provision and law and policymaking at the city and national levels for the past 70-years.

The proposed activities for this fellowship will take these conceptual and empirical contributions further through publications, an international online workshop, a project's website, a podcast series, and new research. These dissemination and engagement activities will seek to maximise the impact of my research findings by engaging with both theory and practice on infrastructure governance.

They will also seek to inform public opinion by raising awareness of the contributions of marginalised urban actors to infrastructure provision, maintenance, and transformation and city-making in general.

This research on popular politics and infrastructure governance is relevant in a context in which governments and the public have widely acknowledged the importance and value of key workers and essential services. Therefore, the activities and outputs proposed under this fellowship will not only be significant to those directly related to marketplaces, but to anyone involved or interested in the long-term grassroots struggles to keep safe and running essential urban infrastructure.