The Meaning and Design of Farmers’ Markets as Public Space

This is the third in a series of articles in this journal on the use of the case study method for landscape architecture. The first article presented the method and proposed three types of case studies—place-based, issue-based and teaching-based (Francis 2001). The second article reported on a place-based case study of the Village Homes community in Davis, California (Francis 2002). This article presents an issue-based case study on the meaning and design of farmers’ markets in public space. The article reviews the literature on the history and meaning of farmers’ markets, briefly summarizes the landscape context of the “most-popular” markets in the United States as determined by an online survey conducted by the American Farmland Trust, and presents four physical realms of the market place—the promenade, the working market, the market landscape, and the market neighborhood—as a conceptual framework to better understand the socio-spatial ecology of farmers’ markets and as a means to assess the landscape features and spatial patterns of five selected farmers’ market cases. We then present four design principles—permanency of design, flexibility, wholeness, and social life—as a means to further inform the planning and designing of farmers’ markets in public space.

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