Socioplastics 11839 The Market Exists between Its Market Days
A weekly market is present through the days when its stalls are absent. Recurring activity leaves routes, expectations, maintenance practices and economic relations that shape a place over time. RhythmContinuity describes this material continuity and asks how the timing of collective life connects workers, residents, institutions and infrastructure. Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis relates cyclical routines to linear schedules and planned change. Sarah Sharma examines how people occupy unequal positions within shared time. Tim Edensor studies the geographies of recurring rhythms, and Anne Buttimer’s humanistic geography attends to lived experience and place. Together, their work helps ask who synchronises with whom and whose labour sustains the recurrence. A weekly market could be studied across several cycles before and after a proposed relocation. Researchers would map arrival, set-up, trading, deliveries, rest, cleaning and departure, then speak with vendors, customers, nearby shops and maintenance staff. The study would trace effects on familiar routes, older residents, seasonal work and service access. A staged trial with transport adjustments and a review after several cycles could make change responsive to lived experience. RhythmContinuity treats schedules as infrastructure because they coordinate bodies, resources and expectations. It also brings the labour of set-up, repair, cleaning and care into the account of public events. A place can change while carrying forward or revising the relations that make its recurring life possible. Recording several cycles helps distinguish a temporary disruption from a lasting change in access, work or relations among the people who rely on the event.
REFERENCES
Buttimer, A. (1976) ‘Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66(2), pp. 277–292.
Edensor, T. (ed.) (2010) Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. Farnham: Ashgate.
Lefebvre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by S. Elden and G. Moore. London: Continuum.
Sharma, S. (2014) In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html