Micro retail

This growth without design nevertheless results in organizational structures through processes of what I read as urban sedimentation. This is a process that takes place in constant negotiation and growth in time, and involves settlement, accumulation, coagulation, and consolidation that are all common patterns in “informal” conditions generated by poverty in many parts of Latin America. In my view, such patterns occur equally in housing, commerce, and transport, creating a network of microurbanisms that linked together, make-up the “informal” city. A city of microurbanisms is constructed of units that reduce down, from near chaotic complexity, to the scale of one single individual. A person can carry his home, business and transport on the body; and build up from there; several individuals create micro-organizations that, outside of legal structures, consolidate over time into complex systems creating the new urban matter of physical and social infrastructure. Matter is then understood as a network of interconnected parts that generate an entity made of related individuals, functioning at different scales at the same time.

The body as a commercial vehicle is one of the most resourceful and flexible strategies that constitute the base component of informal urban economies. For the Other Markets I am presenting several collages that present the case of micro-commerce, using typological diagrams made with photographic images that I have been collecting for several years in Lima, Peru, and Tijuana, Mexico. The visual diagram investigation is divided into four phases or typologies of growth:

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