The magic of the market

Imagine turning a corner in South Silver Spring and stumbling upon a vibrant open-air bazaar filled with a kaleidoscope of color, fragrance, and sound. African cloth, Indian spices, and Cambodian music compete for your attention with a chalk artist, a flower vendor, and an organic vegetable stall. For people accustomed to the staid predictability of chain store shopping, this chaos of people, art, languages, food, crafts, and music might seem unsettling.

A small outsoor market in New York.

But for the growing ranks of urbane Silver Spring residents, the prospect of an international variation of Eastern Market is the fulfillment of everything that Silver Sprung could never be.

So, you aficionados of all things bazaar should take heart that the Gateway Coalition has recently begun to explore the feasibility of an open-air market in South Silver Spring.

Sherpa women drinking rakshi at a Nepali Haat Bazaar

As a young Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, I had a favorite pastime of visiting to the local Haat Bazaar, a weekly feature of most medium-size Nepalese towns. Khandbari, the closest bazaar to my village was about a ten-hour walk. The bazaar was held weekly in a square in the middle of town. Early on Saturday mornings, farmers would arrive from many miles away to sell the produce of their land: rice, beans, spices, seasonal vegetables, meat, butter, and of course, rakshi, the local spirit. Most vendors were direct producers—a farmer or craftsman who grew or made his wares.

In addition to produce, many other items were for sale, ranging from the practical to the frivolous: gold and silversmiths sold finely wrought jewelry; other vendors sold red glass bangles that served the function of cheap costume jewelry; blacksmiths sold bone-handled kukhris, the curved machetes that are the trademark of the Nepali Gurkha. Some were merchants, pure and simple, who sold cheap toys and jeans from China or flip-flops and fabric from India.

Commerce was always only one of several dimensions of the Haat Bazaar. Gorgeously attired young women wearing colorful headscarves pretend to ignore the flirtation of embarrassed young men. Older men from distant villages stretched out on the grass to enjoy each other’s company, discuss the weather, and trade jokes with middle-aged woman who sold them rakshi from a clay pot. At the bazaar everyone dressed with a little more color, laughed with a little more gusto, and engaged a perfect stranger with a little more abandon.

	The modern notion of a market connotes something quite different. Modern markets are abstract things in which buyers and sellers are far removed from one another. Marketers strive to capture a certain market share by penetrating markets populated by demographic segments. Our market economics presumes that calculated self-advantage is the only object of our commercial relations. Markets have become things to be saturated, dissected, and penetrated. In the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls maintains that all markets are essentially conversations: “Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.” The basic thesis of the Manifesto is that people are famished for genuine exchange, not just commercial exchange, but the deep person-to-person exchange that was the hallmark of original markets.
Above and below, the brightly colored stalls of Pike's Market in Seattle, WA offers some inspiration for Silver Spring.

Some kind of outdoor market could be just what Silver Spring is searching for. It would support economic diversity by establishing a venue for very small businesses to start up without the albatross of sky-high rental rates. A bazaar of many cultures would be the perfect expression of Silver Spring’s rich ethnic identity. An authentic market would draw people and money from the surrounding metropolitan area and give Silver Spring a regional identity.

Most important, the mixture of culture, commerce, and civic engagement that characterizes an outdoor market is precisely the rich redevelopment mix that Silver Spring residents have always said they want.