Trans-urbanisation  

By bringing the spatial practices and the cultural mechanisms that sustain informal markets centre stage, Other Markets refers to the current redefinition of the urban system not purely as an effect of accelerated globalisation but as a field of interactions between particular emergent assemblages:

· graduated MOBILITY and its intersection with urban informalities

· the effects of novel forms of LAND USE on the emergence of transient ecologies

· interrelations between politics of TRANSNATIONALITY and legal architectures of informal markets 

Informal markets create a conflict-ridden terrain of accesses without explaining the principles behind accessibility. They are not a concept of space, but an expression of social praxis. Thinking space against the grain of location, as constituted through practices of engagement and multidirectional relations, Other Markets investigates particular forms of land use of informal markets as a local manifestation of global conditions. It closely looks at the shifting patterns of global socio-spatial organisation that draw on new tools and technologies of government.

How does the accelerated marketisation and segregation of land correlate with sprawling informal agglomerations that do not resolve in terms of planned urbanity? How does the increasing virtualisation of economic space relate to the hands-on immediacy of informal market places? How does the fact of land becoming an unstable resource inform the networked ecologies of informal market worlds?

Research into transient land use focuses on the point at which transformations occur when informal market realities connect up with their particular field of application: the place where they take root, crystallise into new forms, and trigger effects that extend the field of social perception and activity. Thus, Other Markets’ interest in the complexity of local situations of land use by informal markets is concerned with examining those perspectives from which the many fleeting flows of convergence, aggregation and atomisation, which are characteristic of informal exchange, are themselves considered.