Actor-Networked-Markets: Practices, Dependencies and Topological Assemblages of Hong Kong’s Food Horizons.

Interrogation of urban markets reveals the precarious tensions faced by places of trade in the globalised world. The consumerist paradigm sterilise or interiorise markets, shifting emphasis towards high-class development, mirroring dichotomies of what the ‘global’ dictate versus the needs of the ‘local’. Moreover, the uncertain futures marketplaces face contests developmental typologies, equally to challenging the very definition of marketplaces as single, isolated entities.
This paper questions how the intertwined (global-local) relationships of markets in of Hong Kong could be understood differently; as systems designed for profit against feeding and social horizons. Harnessing empirical, actor-network techniques across five urban markets, the paper characterises the intricate and deeply rooted dependencies of networks and social mobility above location or places dependencies in dense cities. Moreover, the five-fold conclusion draws attention away from markets as products of a binary globalised system, reframing marketplaces as nutritional assemblages, and topological nodes of interconnectivity and flow. Characteristic of compact city development, the reclassification marketplaces operating at intranational and territorial horizons constructs larger agile ‘market-complexes’, beyond normative readings of markets as simplistic spatial and economic entities.