I don’t know what’s super in a Supermarket or what is convenient in a Convenience Store. If you fancy convenience then you have the Tabaccino for a bottle of Cynar and a pack of Gauloises Caporal late at night - for breakfast! I personally don’t smoke, but had intimate insight into the breakfast triology: café, cigarette, caca. That’s convenience! The whole thing about the retail of necessities, is that a supply meets a demand in style. And that’s about the opposite of any modern retail format. So, wherever new place I go, I first locate the police station, then the post office, the fuel station and then: the wet market, the Wochenmarkt, the pazar, the souk, the mercado, the 街市. Not the boutique farmers' market where some hippie sells you a US$ 15 jar of artisanal hope, but the place where a woman cooking for a family buys five kilos of onions and argues about the price. These markets are not folklore. They are engineering. Their architecture is a thermodynamic answer to a local question, and once you see the question, the buildings, the cuisine and the social rules all fall into place.
Start with the word, because it is more revealing than people think. "Wet market" is not an ancient term at all. It came into common use in Singapore in the early 1970s, when the government needed a word for what a supermarket was not. The "wet" is not moral, it is literal: melting ice, hosed floors, produce sprayed to stop it wilting. And the distinction from the "dry market" is a formal administrative category, not a metaphor. In Oaxaca, the Mercado Margarita Maza de Juárez is split by the municipality into a zona húmeda and a zona seca. Wet is where things rot; dry is where they do not. The whole typology of these places begins from that one variable, and my working test for whether a market is real is equally simple: look for offal, feet, heads and bones. A market where nobody buys a pig's trotter is not a market, it is a hobby.
The intellectual frame I keep returning to is one I have written about before in a different context: Johann Heinrich von Thünen's ring model of 1842. Agricultural intensity declines with distance from the market, and the degree of processing rises with the cost of getting there. You keep the milk close and you make the cheese far away. What von Thünen did not spell out, because he did not need to, is that the market itself is the piece of infrastructure where this becomes visible, and that its physical form is set by the perishability of what arrives. If the ambient air does the refrigeration for you, you need no building at all. If the ambient air is your enemy, you need a roof with a chimney effect, or a great deal of ice, or a compressor. Everything else - the governance, the haggling, the cuisine - is downstream of that. Having been a consultant some time in my life, on this basis I would propose six types.
The first is the ambient freezer, and it is the one that converted me to the idea that climate writes the architecture. In Harbin, the Hongzhuan Street morning market (红专街早市) runs for 487 metres with roughly 300 stalls, on a site it has occupied since 2003, and in January it operates at around −25 °C with the goods laid out on open trestle tables. Nothing is refrigerated because everything already is. You buy 冻梨, the frozen pear that has gone black and glassy, and frozen persimmons, and fish stacked like cordwood. The municipal authority's contribution to market integrity was to distribute 70 tamper-proof electronic scales to the traders, which tells you something charming about where the actual risk lies. Push further north and the logic intensifies. At the Krestyansky market in Yakutsk, established in 1995 on about two hectares, the winter trading floor works at −40 to −50 °C; frozen fish stand vertically in their crates; buyers inspect the gills for blood as proof the fish was frozen alive on the ice; the nelma for stroganina goes for over 2,000 roubles a kilo; and the vendors keep their card terminals in polystyrene boxes with heating pads, because the electronics freeze before the fish does. This is my favourite detail in the entire subject. The payment system is the perishable good.
And then Greenland, which pushes the type to its logical end. The brætter — the "boards" — are open-air fresh markets where hunters sell directly, and the largest, Kalaaliaraq in Nuuk, was founded in 1958 on the model of a Danish market square, demolished in 2018 and rebuilt with 271 m² indoors and 46 m² of covered outdoor space. What is sold is seal, whale, reindeer, muskox, halibut, wolffish. The regulatory history is the interesting part: until a dispensation in September 2018, only fresh meat could legally be sold there, and the change permitting dried, salted, smoked and frozen product was explicitly argued as a step towards Greenlandic self-sufficiency. Meanwhile trichinella inspection for seal and polar bear was still not mandatory as of 2017, after an infection cluster in 2016 from polar bear meat bought at a brætter. The Arctic gives you a free cold chain and charges you in parasites.
The exact mirror image is the tropical ice economy, where the market is a continuous battle against its own climate and the infrastructure is water and ice. Khlong Toei in Bangkok covers roughly 100,000 m² with about 1,500 stalls and never closes: 24 hours, 365 days. The fundamental technology on display is a man with a hose keeping fish alive on a bench. Hong Kong industrialised the same problem. The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department operates 74 markets with some 13,000 stalls, and the characteristic built form is the multi-storey municipal services building, which stacks the wet market on top of a cooked-food centre on top of a sports hall, as at Java Road since 1992. The old Wan Chai market of 1937 is a Grade III listed Streamline Moderne block, and its successor from 2008 is air-conditioned, with 50 stalls. The red lampshades hanging over the pork are a small, honest fraud that every Cantonese shopper understands. And since 2008, every live bird in Hong Kong must be slaughtered before 20:00, so that no live poultry remains overnight. This is an avian-influenza measure that quietly abolished a centuries-old trading rhythm. Singapore, having invented the vocabulary, also formalised the institution: the National Environment Agency runs 123 markets and hawker centres, allocates stalls by monthly open tender, and carries subsidised rents from S$160 to S$320 a month against open bids above S$1,200. My favourite piece of institutional memory from there: the reason officials hesitated to introduce frozen fish to these markets in the late 1970s was the fear that hawkers would thaw it and sell it as fresh. The category "wet" was born as an act of consumer protection.
The third type is the one Europeans think of as the market, and it is really a 19th-century public health project: the ventilated hall. Iron, glass, a high roof to let the heat rise, and above all an inspection regime. Berlin's Markthalle Neun opened on 1 October 1891 to a design by the city building officer Hermann Blankenstein with August Lindemann, about 3,500 m² with 300 stalls of four square metres each, a dedicated meat inspection centre, cooling in the cellar and gateways sized for horse-drawn delivery carts. That is not a nostalgic building, that is a food-safety machine. Barcelona took the idea furthest, because Ildefons Cerdà treated markets as municipal utilities to be distributed like schools and drains: today the Institut Municipal de Mercats runs 43 markets across 73 neighbourhoods with 8,000 traders, 65 million visits a year and about €1 billion of turnover, and the city put €133 million into modernising 25 of them between 2011 and 2015. The Mercat de la Concepció of 1888 by Antoni Rovira i Trias, iron and glass fabricated by La Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima, is 2,910 m² of exactly this logic. Porto's Bolhão of 1914 was reopened in 2022 after a €28 million rebuild in which the clever move was invisible: deliveries and cold rooms went into a new underground level so the historic hall could go back to breathing. At Matosinhos, the 1952 market by Fortunato Cabral and Cunha Leão deliberately put the fishmongers on the lower level for airflow and natural cooling. Turin's Porta Palazzo, at 51,000 m² the largest open-air market in Europe, with about a thousand traders and 100,000 visitors a week, sits above four subterranean levels of ghiacciaie — ice houses from 1922. Even the Soviet Union built to the same specification with different politics: Moscow's Danilovsky, a kolkhoz market since 1963, got a 14-petal reinforced concrete dome with a central oculus in 1986, by Felix Novikov and Gavriil Akulov, borrowing from the Druzhba arena of the 1980 Olympics. Nixon walked through the earlier version in 1959 and was handed fruit and pickles. In 2015 the Ginza Project bought it for 425 million roubles and promised 800 million for the reconstruction, which is how a collective-farm market becomes a food court.
The fourth type is the one my German readers will recognise in their bones: the periodic market, where the market is not a place but a time. German law is magnificently precise about this. § 67 of the Gewerbeordnung defines a Wochenmarkt as a regularly recurring, time-limited event at which a plurality of vendors offers foodstuffs, agricultural products and raw natural produce — and, in a clause of pure Teutonic exactitude, generally excludes alcoholic drinks unless the farmer produced them himself. There are more than 3,000 such markets in the country. The version I actually use is the Turkish markets which are artefacts of the Gastarbeiter economy and one of the few genuinely unpretentious things left in Germany. Istanbul runs the same principle at industrial scale: the Fatih Çarşamba Pazarı, over three hundred years old, fills seven main streets and seventeen side streets around the mosque with 4,811 stalls, tarpaulins strung between the buildings as a temporary roof, and when it closes at 21:00 the municipality sends in sixteen refuse trucks. The Moroccan countryside operates about 800 active weekly souks, of which 161 are in Marrakech-Safi alone, and they are named after their day: souk el-had for Sunday, souk el-tnine for Monday. Oaxaca's Central Valleys have run a rotation since long before Cortés: Etla on Wednesday, Zaachila on Thursday, Ocotlán on Friday, Tlacolula on Sunday, and in Tlacolula trueque, straight barter without currency, is still practised. This is a form of architecture that consists entirely of a calendar.
Behind all of these sits the fifth type, which the shopper never sees but which sets every price they pay: the wholesale leviathan. Mexico City's Central de Abasto, inaugurated in November 1982 to a design by Abraham Zabludovsky on 328 hectares of former chinampa land, moves around 30,000 tonnes a day and supplies roughly 80 per cent of the food consumed in the metropolitan area, with 70,000 people working inside a deformed hexagon 2,250 metres across. Seoul's Garak market, opened in June 1985 as Korea's first public wholesale market with auction-based trading, covers 542,920 m², handles about 7,300 tonnes a day and is now in the middle of a one-trillion-won modernisation aimed largely at tripling cold storage. Noryangjin auctions its fish between 01:00 and 03:00. Tokyo's Tsukiji opened in 1935 and closed in October 2018 in favour of the fully enclosed, temperature-controlled Toyosu; and in June 2020 Japan substantially deregulated the Wholesale Market Law of 1971, abandoning the 商物一致 principle that physical goods had to pass across the market floor. Casablanca's marché de gros, 24 hectares handling roughly half the country's wholesale produce, logged a record 1.7 million tonnes and 244,706 incoming trucks in 2025. Delhi's Azadpur Mandi, founded in 1977 on some eighty acres, turns over 12,000 to 15,000 tonnes daily and employs forty to fifty thousand people, including the palledars who carry hundred-kilo sacks through 40-degree heat wearing a pitthoo, a pad stitched from old gunny sacks. When India's farm laws of 2020 threatened to let buyers bypass the APMC mandi system, this was the machine people were fighting over. The haggle is retail; upstream it is a gavel, and the gavel is politics.
The sixth type is not defined by climate at all but by migration: the market as arrival infrastructure. Marseille's Noailles, the Marché des Capucins, formally founded as a food market in 1956 on the site of a Capuchin convent seized as national property in 1791, is where you buy preserved lemons at three to five euros a jar and fresh harissa graded by heat, and where the etiquette is absolute — you say bonjour, and you do not touch the produce, you point. Toronto's Kensington Market, 27 hectares and some 240 businesses, was the "Jewish Market" of the early twentieth century and had live chickens in sidewalk cages, slaughtered on demand, well into the post-war decades; today the traditional grocers are thinning while cannabis dispensaries multiply, and a community land trust is buying buildings to slow it down. Porta Palazzo, once the market of southern Italian migrants to Turin, is now largely run by traders from outside the EU and carries a sign reading Amare le differenze in several languages. The pattern is consistent enough to be a law: a stall is the cheapest available unit of self-employment, and a cuisine reaches a city through a market long before it reaches a restaurant.
What ties the six types together is that the kitchen writes the specification and the market is built to it, not the other way round. Cantonese steamed fish requires a fish that was alive twenty minutes earlier, which is why Hong Kong fought so hard over the live poultry rules and why the tanks are at the front of the stall. Oaxacan mole requires a wall of thirty kinds of dried chile, which no supermarket will ever carry. Kimjang, the Korean autumn kimchi-making that UNESCO lists as heritage, produces a November tonnage spike in napa cabbage, radish, coarse salt, chile and fermented seafood that the wholesale markets have to plan around. Stroganina requires −40 °C, full stop. Grüne Soße requires seven specific herbs in one bunch, which is precisely what the Frankfurt Kleinmarkthalle. There is a good academic argument here too. Chinese researchers have shown that "freshness" in these markets is not a property discovered in the goods but something actively constructed through sensory display, atmosphere and long-term trust between vendor and customer, and that the vendor's real competitive advantage is the ability to work several wholesalers at once and thereby shorten the chain. That is the honest answer to why the market survives against a supermarket that has better logistics, better lighting and better parking.
I do not want to write a sentimental piece, so let me be blunt about the two forces actually killing these places, neither of which is the supermarket alone. The first is gentrification, and it works by substitution rather than closure. La Boqueria in Barcelona now takes about 40,000 visitors a day and its fishmongers are being crowded out by chocolate-covered strawberries and paper cones of fried fish. Lisbon's Mercado da Ribeira, rebuilt in 1930 with a domed skylight the locals nicknamed the Mesquita do Nabo, gave half its floor in 2014 to the Time Out Market, which drew close to four million visitors in 2018 and is now the global template for turning a market into a curated food court. Markthalle Neun is the same story with better bread. Danilovsky is the same story with a Soviet dome. The tell is always the ratio of things you can cook to things you can only eat standing up. The second force is the state's hygiene regime, and here I refuse to be cynical, because the epidemiological case is real: the Lancet Planetary Health typology of wet markets identifies live animals, interspecies mixing, market size, hygiene and supply-chain length as the actual risk variables, and correctly separates the ordinary produce-and-butcher market from the wildlife market that the Western press spent 2020 conflating it with. Hong Kong's 20:00 slaughter rule is not bureaucratic vandalism. It is why the 1997 H5N1 event did not repeat.
The loss, when it comes, is not a loss of charm. It is a loss of price discovery, of redundancy in the food system and of the small producer's access to a customer. Thirty-nine per cent of Singaporeans surveyed had not set foot in a wet market in the previous year. The council of the 12th arrondissement of Paris spent early 2025 debating whether to let the open-air Marché d'Aligre sell meat and fish, in a market authorised by Louis XVI in 1777 and rebuilt in 1843, because turnover was falling. Japan's neighbourhood shotengai have produced enough closures to earn the name "shutter streets". And Vietnam ran the whole experiment to its conclusion: Hanoi announced in 2011 that it would replace nearly 350 wet markets with modern trade centres, the conversions failed because traders were pushed into inaccessible basements and simply went back to the pavement, and in August 2024 Decree 60/2024/NĐ-CP reversed the policy — public money now funds renovation rather than replacement, and even "naturally occurring" street markets are formally recognised. Of the eight and a half thousand markets in the country, over seven thousand are Class 3, under two hundred stalls, serving a single ward. It took the state thirteen years to work out that these were not a transitional stage on the way to somewhere better.
Which brings me back to why I bother, cheerfully carrying a bag through a puddle of fishwater on a Tuesday morning. In a supermarket I am a throughput problem. In a market I am asked what I intend to cook and then told that I have chosen wrong, which is a different and much better relationship. The vendor at Noailles selects the aubergines because he, not I, knows which crate came in this morning. The woman in Harbin hands me a frozen pear as if handing over a small dark planet. This is the last piece of retail infrastructure in the world where the transaction still contains an argument, and the argument is the point. I am now in Malta, which runs its own quietly elegant version of all six types at island scale. The wholesale Pitkalija at Ta' Qali is closed to the public and opens twice a week, where hundreds of farmers drop off thousands of kilos to be auctioned to supermarkets, grocers and hawkers through licensed pitkala middlemen; since the 2021 reform every green crate carries a barcode tying the produce to a price and a named farmer, and the Malta Food Agency now administers the Pitkalija, the Pixkerija fish market and the abattoir together. Alongside it the farmers' market at Ta' Qali opens on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and on Sundays the fish comes ashore at Marsaxlokk and is essentially gone by ten. Barcode traceability upstream, a periodic market downstream, and the sea setting the timetable.