ABSTRACT
Food markets have profoundly influenced urban and rural landscapes throughout history. Their townscape elements have expressed and shaped the landscapes of urban life in complex and diverse ways for business and pleasure: spatially, socially, environmentally, and economically. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the relationship of the food markets to landscape in the early twenty-first century is not only about the nature of the market places or buildings themselves – important and often overlooked though these physical entities are – but reflects their influence across food system loci from production through distribution to consumption and so-called waste. The chapter traces how these landscapes of food – as townscape elements – contribute to both settlement space and to social and economic practices relating to food today, and how such market landscapes might embody significant implications for a sustainable future.
