VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

The impact of climate change on urban livelihoods reverberates social and economic inequalities and exposure to environmental hazards and disasters. Institutions, both local and global, are promoting actions and projects aimed at building or assessing a city’s resilience, as the capacity of a system or community exposed to risk factors to resist and react to the effects of a hazard, including by safeguarding and restoring its essential structures and functions. In this sense, resilience paradigms risk placing the responsibility for the outcomes of disasters on the affected communities, diverting attention away from the root causes and global interconnections that cause the disaster. The ethnographic research carried out in the context of the historical market of the ‘Pescheria’ in Catania, Sicily (Italy) aimed to analyse the problematic relationship between city, market and resilience through the peculiar exposure to flood risk but also the spatialisation of economic, political and social processes. Within the urban geography of the Mediterranean, open-air markets represent complex ethnographic objects, as specific models of spatial organisation, commercialisation and social transformation characterise them. When considered as distinctive socio-economic systems, they allow for the emergence of the global processes that run through them and how they are shaped coherently by actors with different interests. These elements allowed for a critical analysis of the frictions between global changes and local practices that characterise the living and working spaces in the market. The research demonstrates how inhabitants and market operators interpret flood risk and urban liveability locally through local knowledge that strengthens social relations and attachment to place.