“The market is about relying on each other”: The temporality of solidarity at the Fatih Çarşamba street market in Istanbul

Abstract

Street markets are specific relational urban settings, with rhythms of their own. This article addresses what sort of solidarities the fleeting relations of traders on street markets may generate. We expand Oosterlynk’s concept of place-based solidarity to explore street vendors practices in the street market as constituting two forms of solidarity following from the spatiality and temporality of the setting: unplanned solidarity that is anticipated based on shared experiences that suggest a ‘mandatory’ moral commitment to the future, but remains ambiguous, and calculated solidarity, where traders expect transactional trust out of instrumental logics. The case of Fatih Çarşamba Market (FÇM) in Istanbul, Türkiye, helps to theorise how both such solidarities follow as moral by-products of everyday interactions in a public space where agents ritualise and institutionalise or ‘make’ the ‘market’ as a place . Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with street vendors, we show that while these solidarities advance economic resources, they are moral in how they come about. The market’s temporality makes some of them unplanned, but they are not just products of casually fleeting relations.