Constructing Freshness: The Vitality of Wet Markets in Urban China

Wet markets, a ‘traditional’ form of food retail, have maintained their popularity in urban China despite the rapid expansion of ‘modern’ supermarket chains. Their continued popularity rests in the freshness of their food. Chinese consumers regard freshness as the most important aspect of food they buy, but what constitutes ‘freshness’ in produce is not simply a given. Freshness is actively produced by a range of actors including wholesalers, vendors as well as consumers. The paper examines what fresh food means to consumers in the Chinese market. It argues that wet markets create a sense of freshness that resonates with this culinary culture through their sensoria, atmosphere, and trust between food vendors and consumers. Together these respond to desires for and reproduce criteria used to evaluate freshness. Within a fragmented food trade system, wet market vendors have an advantage in offering ‘freshness’ through their ability to connect various wholesalers, agencies, and middlemen, and shorten supply chains. The paper is based on participatory observation, a consumer survey and in-depth interviews of various stakeholders in southern China, especially Sanya in Hainan and Guangzhou in Guangdong. This study suggests that this cultural construction of freshness creates a niche for small-scale players and ‘traditional’ markets in an increasingly concentrated global food system

The Connectedness with Nature of Chinese Adolescent Tourists: A Q Method Approach

A systematic understanding of Chinese adolescent tourists’ connectedness with nature is helpful to illustrate the coming cultural turn in self-nature relationship. However, the existing research is almost based on the Western cultural context and follow the Western approach. Employing the Q method, this study aims to investigate the diverse patterns of CWN from the perspective of 36 adolescent tourists in Xi’an and Shenzhen, China. Our initial findings show four distinct patterns are relevant in the participants’ CWN, including individuals’ ecological self, subjective feelings about nature, positive experiences with nature, and cognitive beliefs about nature. In addition, a theoretical framework of four underlying continuums is developed to clarify how a complex process of co-construction reveals patterns of CWN. This study offers suggestions for destination management and environmental education

Fragmentary embeddedness: Challenges for alternative food networks in Guangzhou, China

Alternative food networks (AFNs) have been viewed as being more deeply embedded in the fabric of places and the social relations of their food systems than conventional food networks, and have been regarded as ‘spaces of hope’ for addressing sustainability challenges associated with global food systems. This paper argues that embeddedness, however, is contingent and shifting rather than an intrinsic quality, and is shaped by the cultures of production, trade, and consumption in particular places. This paper evaluates challenges that emerging AFNs in Guangzhou, China, are confronting relating to their embeddedness in place. The paper is underpinned by research involving interviews and focus groups with key food system actors and stakeholders in Guangzhou, including government officials, organic farmers, retailers, and non-governmental organizations. It demonstrates that AFNs in Guangzhou achieve only ‘fragmentary embeddedness’ in local cultures and systems of production, retail, and consumption. Despite strong social relationships established by a few successful farms and their loyal consumer groups, AFNs more broadly have struggled to embed themselves in the social and cultural fabric of the city and its commercial foodscapes. In terms of territorial embeddedness, the association of AFNs with western values, which do not always translate into Guangzhou's production and retail systems, can limit their embeddedness and scaling up in this context. The split between ‘new’ farmers (i.e., educated and urban-rooted producers ‘returning to the land’) and common farmers (i.e., local peasants) further exacerbates the difficulty of integrating AFNs in rural communities. Regarding social embeddedness, AFNs struggle to meet local consumer preferences regarding food appearances, quality, and taste, and therefore consumer trust in them is limited. In terms of institutional embeddedness, AFNs lack government policy support, despite the alignment of their missions with national strategies. More efforts are needed to deepen the embeddedness of AFNs in Guangzhou's food system and cultures if they are to respond effectively to China's food crisis and wider sustainability issues

Doing the 'dirty work of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play

Life, time, and the organism:Temporal registers in the construction of life forms

In this paper, we articulate how time and temporalities are involved in the making of living things. For these purposes, we draw on an instructive episode concerning Norfolk Horn sheep. We attend to historical debates over the nature of the breed, whether it is extinct or not, and whether presently living exemplars are faithful copies of those that came before. We argue that there are features to these debates that are important to understanding contemporary configurations of life, time and the organism, especially as these are articulated within the field of synthetic biology. In particular, we highlight how organisms are configured within different material and semiotic assemblages that are always structured temporally. While we identify three distinct structures, namely the historical, phyletic and molecular registers, we do not regard the list as exhaustive. We also highlight how these structures are related to the care and value invested in the organisms at issue. Finally, because we are interested ultimately in ways of producing time, our subject matter requires us to think about historiographical practice reflexively. This draws us into dialogue with other scholars interested in time, not just historians, but also philosophers and sociologists, and into conversations with them about time as always multiple and never an inert background

Sacred Rhythms and Political Frequencies: Reading Lefebvre in an Urban House of Prayer

In recent years, Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm analysis has been implied in various ways to critically examine how rhythms are formed, disrupted, and reformed through different urban venues. One theme that this body of knowledge has yet to comprehensively examine, however, is how changes in the urban sphere impact the spatial rhythms of religious institutions in cities, which can be pivotal for understanding how religious institutions are formed as urban public spaces. This article addresses this issue with a rhythm analysis of a particular religious urban locus: a synagogue in the mixed Palestinian and Jewish city of Acre in northern Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and an urban survey, the article discusses how different forms of rhythm making undergo a process of contested synchronization with linear and cyclical rhythms of the city. More specifically, how the ability to forge a space hinges on the ability to maintain a rhythmic cycle of attendance, which, in turn, is not only dependent on the ability to achieve synchronization amongst the needs of the different participants but is also intertwined with the larger linear cycle of urban life as a rhythmic equation that fuses the personal with the political, the linear with the cyclical, and the religious with the urban

Revisiting ‘place’ in a realist novel: ‘Thinking space’ in Galdós’s Torquemada en la hoguera (1889)

Departing from the premise that Galdós’s close engagement with space and place deserves to be at the forefront of scholarly attention, this article provides an in-depth study of their significance in Torquemada en la hoguera. It begins by analysing the relationship between the novel’s locations and the real world, demonstrating that the author codes the city of Madrid to express social concerns and promote reader engagement. It then proceeds to examine the public and private spheres, before highlighting the “place of the imagination” in the novel. It reveals that, as in Galdós’s press articles, reality is used as a springboard in Torquemada en la hoguera and, drawing upon recent theories, it posits that places serve as a framework for engaging readers with contemporary concerns and as an imaginative springboard for Galdós. They trigger what is effectively a “thinking space” for the author and it is through unravelling their significance that we can fully appreciate Galdós’s psychological sensitivity, the novel’s modernity, its symbolic value, and imaginative depth. The article concludes by proposing that Galdós’s works deserve to be re-examined as “Novels of the Geographical Imagination” and urges readers to revisit the significance of space and place therein