La Salada, a paraformal ecology

m7red entry on the Informal Market Worlds’ ATLAS project 

The aim of this project is to examine the spatial culture of informal markets as an arena of negotiation between multiple political demands, social actors and environmental constraints.

Bringing together more than 80 case studies from around the globe, the atlas highlights current fault lines between bottom-up social organisation and top-down political power.
Through cartographies, visuals and texts, it identifies emerging informal market configurations such as border markets, post-conflict markets, container markets or hipster markets that demonstrate the changing relations between space and politics in a world of global connectivity.

This atlas is accompanied by the Informal Market Worlds READER, addressing the complexity of issues impacting on 21st century informality, while also opening up the debate about the scope of informality for instigating change.

Edited by Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, and with contributions by Hou Hanru, Keith Hart, Jiang Jun, Lawrence Liang, MAP Office (Laurent Gutierrez & Valerie Portefaix), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Vyjayanthi Rao, Ananya Roy, Saskia Sassen, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ignacio Valero, Matias Viegener and others.

Published by nai010 Publishers, Rotterdam, in March 2015.