‘
 ALL EYES ON ME
 ’: The (In)Formal Barriers to Market Trade in Europe

Studies of marketplaces in the global North have often conceptualized markets as important public spaces of social encounter and conviviality where visitors, regardless of race, age, class or gender, feel they have an equal right to be. Yet comparatively little has been written about how inclusive European marketplaces are for the traders who (want to) work there. In this article we argue that the common conception of marketplaces as accessible to everyone, and as vehicles of socioeconomic mobility, is oversimplistic and romanticized. We draw on empirical data from marketplaces in four European countries to focus on the more or less informal ways in which markets are regulated by managers and traders themselves, and on the exclusionary and inclusionary effects of this process that may ultimately determine traders’ access to and success in these markets. This article not only challenges dominant conceptions of marketplaces as accessible and inclusive, but also addresses prevalent stereotypes about economic practices in the global North and assumptions about the ways in which these differ from practices in the global South. Introduction During fieldwork at a street market in London, we talked to Omar, who had been operating his stall at the market for five years. His market was situated in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood, where many residents faced economically precarious circumstances: a third of households had no adults in employment, and the number of benefits claimants were higher than the average for London and the United Kingdom. Talking about his experiences as a newcomer at the local market, Omar stated firmly: ‘Exclusion is good! When I started here it was “all eyes on me”, but I made it’. When asked to clarify what he meant by ‘all eyes on me’, Omar elaborated: The traders are suspicious when a new person turns up; they make life hard for you. They ask you what you are doing and tell you that you can’t stand there. I don’t mind that stuff. It’s good, it adds competition! We don’t want anyone from the street to think they can just come and join the market. Like people who’ve just lost their job, they want to join the market. They look at me and my stall and say, ‘ahh, it’s easy! ’. They think I’m young, they say to themselves, ‘he’s just a kid, if he can do it I can! ’ So they turn up with their things. But the next day they aren’t there. And why? Well . 1 1 All interviews were conducted in the local language(s). Apart from extracts of interviews conducted in the United Kingdom, extracts in this article have been translated into English by the authors. © 2023 the authors. internationaL JournaL of urban and reGionaL research pubLished by John WiLey & sons Ltd on behaLf of urban research pubLications LiMited. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This article is the result of collaborative work. Gunvor Jónsson and Maria Lindmäe contributed with conceptualization, analysis and writing of the article. Emil van Eck and Joanna Menet contributed to review and editing. The data presented in this article was collected and analysed by all four authors in their respective study countries. This article is based on research conducted for the Moving Marketplaces (MMP) project. MMP is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heran et.info), which is cofunded by NWO, AHRC, AEI, SNF and the European Commission through Horizon 2020 (grant number: Hera.2.015). We gratefully acknowledge the support of our colleagues in the MMP project: Janine Dahinden, Marco Madella, Rianne van Melik, Joris Schapendonk and Sophie Watson. We also thank the anonymous IJURR reviewers for their constructive feedback on an earlier version of this article. JÓNSSON, LINDMÄE, MENET AND VAN ECK 2 To those with few income generation options, perhaps owing to lack of financial resources or limited residency rights, marketplaces appear to be an attractive employment option. Generally, relatively little startup capital and no formal qualifications2 are required to set up a business in a European marketplace. Various scholars have argued that marketplaces provide a potential route out of precarity and towards greater inclusion into the labour force and economy for marginalized people (Janssens and Sezer, 2013a; Hiebert et al., 2015; Vaughan, 2015). Although we agree on the whole that marketplaces often constitute important spaces of social inclusion and public conviviality, we argue that a conception of marketplaces as accessible to and inclusive of everyone who wants to work there is oversimplistic and romanticized, as Omar’s comments indeed suggest (see also Aptekar, 2019). While some traders get ahead, others struggle. This can be attributed not merely to their financial assets and skills sets, but is equally determined by informal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that entail that some traders are supported while others face significant barriers, including discrimination in the marketplace. A stark division appears in the reviewed literature on marketplaces, which scholars have tended to conceptualize either as public space or as places of work by focusing respectively on the social dynamics that unfold in these spaces (Watson and Studdert, 2006; Dines, 2007; Watson, 2009; Morales, 2011; Janssens and Sezer, 2013b; Polyák, 2013; PottieSherman, 2013; Hiebert et al., 2015; Mele et al., 2015; Schappo and van Melik, 2017) or on the traders who work there (Clark, 1988; 1994; Seligmann, 2000; Gertel, 2009; Meagher, 2010; Jónsson, forthcoming). This division reflects regional divisions in urban studies, in which the public space approach is firmly situated in wealthier regions of the world, while research on market traders focuses primarily on poorer regions where informality supposedly prevails. Our article unsettles this North/ South divide by examining marketplaces in the global North primarily through the perspectives of the traders and their experiences of the market as a place of work, and by exploring the relevance of the concept of informality in the context of European marketplaces (see also Hentschel, 2015; Devlin, 2018). We thus build on the global urbanism paradigm, which rejects the problematic global North/South dichotomy that prevails in urban theorizations (Robinson, 2002; Roy, 2009a). By focusing on informal regulations and boundary work in European marketplaces in this article we challenge prevalent stereotypes of economic practices in the global North and assumptions about the ways in which these differ from practices in the global South. Informality and the sociocultural embeddedness of economic activities in marketplaces have traditionally been the focus of studies conducted in the global South (e.g. Hart, 1973; Clark, 1988; Lyons and Snoxell, 2005; Meagher, 2010). Meanwhile, similar dynamics among traders in the global North have received relatively little attention (although, see Boels, 2014; Ram et al., 2017; Devlin, 2018; Clough Marinaro, 2019). Traders and their businesses are often left out of analyses of European marketplaces and only appear as a kind of backdrop to the social interactions among visitors. This analytical approach to marketplaces relegates the (business) practices of traders to a kind of ‘blank canvas’ devoid of social dynamics, meaning and politics. As a result, there is only a limited understanding of how markets in Europe are organized. The literature on informal economies in the global South proves useful for analysing how markets in Europe operate from the perspective of traders. In this article we show how informal mechanisms within formally regulated European marketplaces can result in exclusion and inequality among market traders. The limited research on informal and socially embedded economic practices of traders in the global North has largely been confined to migrant spaces (Riccio, 1999; 2 Although no formal qualifications are required for obtaining a licence to trade this does not mean that it is an ‘unskilled’ occupation (Watson, 2022).