“¡Tengo gloria bendita!”: pitching and the sonic production of place atmospheres under increasing marketplace regulation

The staging of urban atmospheres

In recent years, there has been increasing interest toward markets as public space, giving way to a growing number of publications that value markets for their self-organizational ¹⁴ and collective character that guarantees their endurance through cooperation and the following of social norms such as reciprocity, honesty and honor. ¹⁵ Common arguments that favour markets as public space include their ethnic diversity, ¹⁶ inclusive nature, ¹⁷ neutrality in terms of class appearances ¹⁸ and the low entrance barriers they offer for immigrant retail traders. ¹⁹ As places that lack physical barriers of entrance, markets have been seen as public spaces that facilitate interactions among traders and customers across age, gender and ethnic differences.^20,21 Some scholars have also indicated the importance of markets in facilitating access to centrally organized food distribution systems ²² or as providers of food security and disaster recovery. ²³ Additionally, there is a considerable body of literature on the socio-political changes that have taken place in markets under neoliberal political economy^24,25,26 as well as due to the rise of niche marketplaces such as farmers’ markets that reproduce white privilege and exclude non-white customers and producers. ²⁷ In addition to the changes caused by the eliticisation of markets through rising food neophilia ²⁸ and the commodification of alternative agrifood movements, ²⁹ it has recently been argued that COVID-19-related health-regulations in markets have added a new dimension to the (temporary) “end” or “death” of markets as public space. ³⁰

From a somewhat different perspective, Marovelli’s ³¹ study of a Sicilian marketplace suggests that the “publicness” of markets may have decreased because of administrative interventions that aim to limit the sensory experiences at the market. She argues that markets are fundamentally synaesthetic and kinaesthetic, given that by moving across the marketplace, “customers engage with different smells, sounds, consistencies, textures and tastes that follow them to their homes, into their kitchens and finally into their mouths.” ³² She also adverts that the sensory intensity of markets is diminishing because of local authorities’ tendency to implement new regulations aimed at sanitizing the markets and suppressing the smells and sights that fall out of the institutionalized aesthetic criteria. These, in turn, are triggered by urban lifestyles ³³ and global urban regeneration tendencies that introduce the demands of more affluent customers whose cultural norms marketplaces are adapted to. This way, the sensory liveliness of markets is submitted to renovated standards of hygiene, sound levels and visual appearance that are introduced by new cultural practices that lead to the aestheticization of markets, where some sensory experiences are suppressed whereas others become augmented in order to produce hygienized market atmospheres.

The tendency to stage the atmospheres and to set the ambiances of public and private spaces has also been observed in other urban contexts, such as domestic environments, ³⁴ sports arenas, ³⁵ or public transportation infrastructures.^36,37 The French sociologist Thibaud argues that we are generally witnessing an era of:

the ‘setting of ambiance’ in urban spaces. Consider the conditioned environments of shopping malls, the planted areas of eco-neighbourhoods, the process of ‘heritagization’ of historic town centres, the privatization of gated communities, the new scenes of the creative city, and the functional atmospheres of public transport facilities (. . .) in each case, every effort is made to create an ambiance, to channel sensations and to make people feel a particular way. ³⁸

Private and public spaces such as markets are frequently intervened architecturally, through commercial place-making activities and other targeted actions with the aim of achieving well-tempered environments that should correspond to the “ideals of how a place, event or practice should or could feel” ³⁹ and lead to the desired affective correspondence and behavior of the users of the place.

Even though street regulations and other legal and design instruments have a significant role in organizing the everyday uses of the urban environment, the atmospheres of public space are also the result of a constellation of people, things, and the material world in which humans and non-humans interact among one another. ⁴⁰ Orchestrating such constellations in representational places requires surveillance and interventions in many aspects of everydayness, including the smell and soundscapes, to communicate to people that they “must do things right.” ⁴¹ But place atmospheres also depend on the sensory and affective intensities ⁴² of those interacting in the place, which make atmospheres evolve constantly. ⁴³ Buser’s ⁴⁴ definition of affective atmospheres as the range of collective affects produced through dynamic, relational place encounters is useful here to understand the autonomous evolving of atmospheres through affective encounters.

Affects can indicate the subjective moods of places and frame the array of activities that can be enacted in them. ⁴⁵ Drawing on the philosophy of Spinoza, ⁴⁶ Duff ⁴⁷ holds that affects constitute the body’s “power of action” which is the individual’s capacity to affect and also be affected by the world of bodies and things that it encounters. The affective responses that a person may experience in an environment can thus influence their actions and their overall place experience.

Sonic affect and marketplace atmospheres

One of the ways that affect may be awoken and transferred from one body to another is through sound as it can trigger bodily responses, direct attention and even guide people’s paths. ⁴⁸ As a vibrant matter, sound has the capacity to flow between bodies and things and to put them into motion. ⁴⁹ Gallagher ⁵⁰ has argued that sound itself is a kind of affect that moves bodies with vibrations that physically push and pull their material fabric. This paper draws on Gallagher’s notion of sonic affect as a force than can physically move and change bodies to describe the effect pitching can have on market visitors. The persistent cries, many of which are rather humorous, add a feeling of familiarity to the marketplace, especially when traders explicitly turn to clients with caressing names such as “beauty,” “my queen,” or “blondie.” My own perceptions of the market were often a mix of surprise, joy and fun, and because an important part of these perceptions was provoked by pitching, its textuality, rhythmicity and the melodies used for it, I believe sonic affect to be the most suitable way to refer to how pitching can affect bodies at marketplaces. It can make bodies move insofar as it draws people’s attention, guides them towards certain stalls or contrarily, pushes them away because of the excessive sound levels. What is more, the expansion of a pitcher’s voice also marks the capacity to acoustically appropriate a given space and it can potentially weave individuals into shared social spaces ⁵¹ through affective contagion. ⁵²

As protests around the globe have shown, the making of such shared spaces can lead to subversive and alarming forms of communication, especially when sound is used for expressing difference and demands for freedom in public space. ⁵³ Despite, or precisely because of its ubiquity, the emission of sound in public space is increasingly regulated by the authorities. The 1969 UNESCO Music Council resolution in Paris stated that they “denounce unanimously the intolerable infringement of individual freedom and of the private right of everyone to silence, because of the abusive use, in private and public places, of recorded or broadcast music.” ⁵⁴ The silencing of markets in particular is a result of an even longer tendency of Western cities to make its public space quieter. This Utopist and Romanticist ideal was born with the modernization of cities and with the emancipation of the bourgeoisie whose cultural practices became differentiated from that of the popular classes, whose “noisy” practices were considered unfit for the modern era. ⁵⁵ When street trading ceased to be the main means of food provision for cities, vendors’ cries stopped being considered necessary for informing about the availability of products and began to be perceived as disturbing noise that would become reproached and penalized. As a succession of these modernist ideas, today’s markets are also guided by the ideal of maintaining them as quiet, despite being recognized as quintessential places for social encounters which can therefore generate a great deal of buzz.

Pitching bans have been imposed in the markets of Istanbul, New Hampshire and Barcelona. As noise and sound are inscribed in the panoply of power, ⁵⁶ a noisy market can thus be understood as a statement against authority, ⁵⁷ as well as a failure to engineer a representational market atmosphere. While mediating healthy sound levels is necessary from a public health perspective, this paper asks whether shaping the soundscape of public markets has the same consequences for all the traders. Or does market regulation perhaps advantage certain social groups to the detriment of others by imposing norms that construct certain meanings and practices as legitimate while others become illicit. ⁵⁸ To put it differently, how does the regulation of sound intercede in the making of boundaries in markets as public space and how does the suppression of sonic affect change market atmospheres?

Contextualizing street markets in Catalonia

Nearly seven hundred street markets take place in a little less than five hundred towns and villages across Catalonia. ⁵⁹ This number includes second-hand flea markets, markets that only sell organic food, and regular mixed markets where all types of goods, from clothing to herbs and spices, are on sale. What these markets have in common is their temporality: they normally take place once a week, often in the central part of the town where stalls are set up early in the morning and taken down before lunchtime. To avoid excessive competition, market days do not normally coincide in towns that are located nearby, in the same region. This allows traders to sell in different markets each day of the week.

Street markets in Catalonia are managed by the local authorities, either by the department of commerce or by a similar office that falls under the governance of the city council. Markets are regulated through Ordinances that are approved by local city councils that must follow autonomic, national and European regulations, which means that markets may have locale-specific rules which must be in accordance with the EU Services Directive. ⁶⁰ The Ordinances are normally published in Catalan and are available online. The regulations delimit a rather wide array of matters, including material aspects such as the size of the stalls and types of products that can be sold by the traders, as well as rules that delimit traders’ behavior in the marketplace. For example, the Ordinance of the markets of Barcelona obliges traders to dress “properly,” it impedes them to have disputes that could cause scandals or to behave in a way that goes against the “good customs and habits of conviviality.” ⁶¹ Regarding sonority, traders are not allowed to “explain the characteristics and the price of the goods through shouts or to cry out the customers.” ⁶² Similarly, the Ordinance of the market of Vic is also very clear about the use of sound, as it considers the unauthorized broadcasting of music or any other type of diffusion of sounds a serious infraction that can be fined with an amount of 750–1500 euros or by suspending the selling license for up to 6 months. ⁶³ Licensed traders who are involved in or help perform illegal sales can expect the same type of economic sanctions and the removal of their license. ⁶⁴

The size and location of the market and thus its economic and symbolic value for the city tend to influence the amount of resources destined for the market management. Some towns have specific personnel who allocate market pitches, oversee the compliance of the market regulation and solve conflicts at the marketplace. Other, smaller or peripheral markets can be more laissez-faire, where deviant practices such as hawking, selling goods under other people’s licenses, or advertising the goods in unauthorized, sonic ways is more frequent. Here, I focus on two markets that have rather different characteristics in regulatory terms. First, the strongly regulated market of Vic that takes place on Tuesdays and Saturdays on the central square of Vic, and the less regulated market of Trinitat Vella which takes place on Wednesdays in the North-Eastern periphery of Barcelona.

Vic market is one of the most famous street markets of Catalonia because of its longevity and its picturesque architectural surroundings that date back to medieval times. Because of its good reputation, it attracts visitors from across central Catalonia, especially on Saturdays. Traders also drive there from different parts of Catalonia. Vic has a population of a little less than 50,000 inhabitants, 14% of whom are foreigners. The city’s income per capita is just a little below the average of Catalonia. ⁶⁵ The ethnic composition of the market is fairly diverse: apart from the Catalan-speaking vendors there are numerous stalls that are operated by Spanish Roma, Pakistani and Bangladeshi traders, as well as a few Senegalese vendors. Regarding the clientele, there are higher income Catalan customers who buy anything from organic vegetables to truffles and cheese at the market, and Moroccan and West African (mostly female) clients who tend to visit the cheaper clothing stalls. In pre-Covid times it also attracted clients from France, but their share has decreased significantly in the years marked by the pandemic. The market is managed by the city council; two civil servants are fully in charge of the licensing process as well as of monitoring the commercial activity during market days. In addition, police officers often patrol the area during market days and occasionally check traders’ documents.

The Trinitat Vella market is in Barcelona’s most North-Eastern neighbourhood that borders with the river Besòs and one of the highways that give access to the city. It has a population of 10,000 inhabitants, 32% of whom are foreigners, especially from Pakistan, Morocco and Ecuador. ⁶⁶ The income per capita of Trinitat Vella is 40% below the average of Barcelona, which situates it also at the lower end of the average income of all of Catalonia. ⁶⁷ The ethnic composition of the market of Trinitat Vella is also diverse and similar to Vic, with the exception that there are no (gourmet) food vendors who are more often native Catalan traders. It is also uncommon to find tourist visitors at this market, since it is rather far from common tourist areas. The product offering relates to the average income of the area and typically has lower prices than one might find at other street markets. There are no specific personnel dedicated to managing the market of Trinitat Vella and there is no regular control of the commercial activity either. The institutional absence at the market of Trinitat Vella provides favourable conditions for hawkers to sell their goods in the proximities of the licensed traders, which is not a common practice in other markets. However, every now and then police cars drive by and sometimes the agents perform inspections that can end up with the confiscation of illegal goods or the flight of unlicensed traders.

Methodology

The data used in this paper was collected between June 2020 and July 2021 when Catalan street markets were subject to often-changing sanitary measures, which required bigger distances between the stalls, and the wearing of face masks. While mobility restrictions between different regions and the fear of Covid-19 initially decreased the number of visitors and traders, by the end of the fieldwork period in summer 2021, markets were more or less back to their normality, with the exception that many traders were now indebted due to a significant decrease in their revenues. Also, as of December 2021, masks were still obligatory at markets, which made the sounding of human voices somewhat filtered, but not necessarily any quieter.

The study involved semi-structured interviews with traders and market managers, participant and non-participant observations, the following of traders and field recordings. The latter is understood as a method that “attends to worldly sounds, the vibrations of the multiplicity of beings, materials, and forces that come together to form environments.” ⁶⁸ The recordings that were complemented by photos and field notes were used for catching both the textual content of the pitching, as well as to recall the overall soundscape buzz. Following other scholars who have carried out sensory ethnographies,^69,70 the auditory is not given a higher status but is considered alongside the other senses, especially vision, given that traders’ use of pitching is largely aimed at making themselves and their goods more visible for the shoppers. All the recorded materials were carried out with the written or oral consent of the informants who were given information sheets along with oral explanations about the research project.

As I carried out the recordings, my own body became a tool for listening to these spaces, ⁷¹ along with a Zoom H4n sound recorder to register the sounds. Both structured and unstructured sessions of listening and recording soundscapes were performed, the former followed the methodological suggestions of Simpson ⁷² and Gallagher. ⁷³ In order to notice potential regularity in the soundscapes, the recordings were made in different locations of the markets at different intervals and times of the day. In turn, unstructured recordings were performed whenever “hot data” ⁷⁴ and some particularly outstanding pitching occurred in the field. The audio files were repeatedly listened to, transcribed and categorized.

Given that researchers have an active role in creating and attributing meaning to data, I acknowledge that the interpretation of the material corresponds to my subjective perception which does not claim to produce a unique account of reality but to offer versions of the experienced reality that are as loyal as possible to the context in which the knowledge was produced. ⁷⁵ My being a female North-European researcher might have influenced the participation of some informants, given that very few traders were reluctant to speak to me. My interest towards the sonority of the marketplaces is owed to my earlier academic work on music and place making, and my personal involvement in music making, which have both trained my body to pay attention to how sounds constitute places and how it affects bodies. All my interactions were done in Catalan or Spanish, depending on the traders’ preference; the pitching quotes used in this article all appear in the original language with my own translations on the side.

Finally, regarding the place dimension, this project mainly focuses on two markets; however, accompanying traders to several other marketplaces gave the researcher a better comprehension of traders’ practices and place-making capacities, as well as of the interconnectedness of different markets that are drawn together through traders’ trajectories. It also contributed to an understanding of how markets as public space are characterized by notions of movement, rather than fixity.^76,77 In this instance, traders are seen as agents who produce and “shift” ⁷⁸ market atmospheres through their movement and trajectories in and between different places. This approach allows the researcher to distance from a place-based focus and to centre the study on different typologies of market pitchers which, in turn, gives insights of markets as places of difference and diversity.

Market pitchers’ typologies

Discussion and conclusions

By describing three types of pitchers – the Silenced, the Repeaters and the Influencers – I have aimed to show that their sonic interventions add layers to marketplace atmospheres and make them more lively, creative and at times entertaining. Pitching allows traders to occupy a determined territory through the sonic reach of their voice and in some occasions, it immerses customers and other traders in affective atmospheres that encourage people to interact with others and to associate positive memories with the marketplace. While loud pitching was denounced as nuisance by some neighbouring traders, when these expressions contained an element of creativity and humour, they were positively perceived by the customers and other companions. The generic prohibition to pitch therefore threatens to make marketplace atmospheres duller and more orderly, as if markets were not places for the spontaneous intermingling of people.

I argue that apart from intervening in marketplace atmospheres, market regulation can create boundaries and discrimination at different levels. By listing numerous forms of conduct and practices as illegitimate, it imposes dominant norms of civility and order in public space, which in turn excludes practices that do not fall under these definitions. Not only do the aims of silencing marketplaces represent the tendency of increasing surveillance of public space by limiting what and how people can express themselves; also exerts a more systematic form of discrimination of people for whom pitching is necessary for performing their livelihoods. Given that the majority of pitchers whose sonic advertising has been described in this paper are Spanish Roma and South Asian traders, the sonic regulation of markets mostly disadvantages these ethnic groups who are already systematically marginalized. By illegalising pitching, its practitioners are located at the margins of the society and left with uncertainty about the legitimacy of their profession. In this sense, the prohibition to pitch adds to other, already existing forms of discrimination towards migrants and the Spanish Roma who experience systematic exclusion from more conventional professions because of migration regimes, ethnicity, or class. ⁹⁴

As Sharma ⁹⁵ argued in her retrospective view of the gradual prohibition of pitching in colonial Britain, there is little understanding of street cries and vending as integral to a shared economy within the complex production and provisioning system that is intrinsic to urban morphology. By undermining the importance of pitching as a skill that helps traders to successfully perform their sales, we underestimate its importance for upholding working-class (and often migrant) livelihoods of people who persistently try to eke out a place for themselves in cities where it is increasingly harder to find steady employment.

Not only does pitching help a substantial part of traders to perform their profession, but pitchers’ persistent sounding in public space is also important because these are voices that are not so often represented elsewhere in the public sphere. In contrast to cultural perceptions that have become rooted with the modernisation and hygienization of Western cities, pitching is not just an arbitrary form of noise but rather, a professional and cultural practice that can also express a subtle political desire of recognition of difference. It allows social groups that are otherwise seldom heard in the public sphere, to perform difference through their sonic expressions and claim its acceptance in places where multitudes come together. This could potentially prevent the propagation of racist discourses and stereotypes of unknown others, ⁹⁶ although market regulations have thus far been more prone to initiate discrimination rather than their acceptance.

Finally, while pitchers do not directly challenge the systems of political and social control that are materialized in the market regulation, their sonic form of advertising is a way of defying the harmonious, non-disruptive and non-subversive atmospheres that markets are adapted to through urban management practices that aim to conceal poverty and messiness from (representational) places where they ought not to be visible nor heard. Through pitching, traders not only claim their right to be present in public space, but also contest some of the aspects of state prerogatives, such as the meaning of order and control of public space. ⁹⁷ This way, the sonic dissonance of pitchers functions as an essential contrapositive to neoliberal urban management tendencies and helps to maintain marketplaces alive through the unmediated social and sonic interactions that take place in these shared spaces. This is especially relevant in times when markets and small businesses are under a constant threat of extinction because of their systematic underfunding, decrease in revenues due to competing online sales platforms, lockdowns and social distancing measures which keep challenging their endurance.