Informal Market Worlds IV

In the context of NAI010 PUBLISHERS‘ second edition of Informal Market Worlds, an atlas of informal markets throughout the world, M7RED along with the editorial team have developed the La Salada entry. This comes as a continuation of the same entry developed for the first edition in 2015. Eight years of time have allowed M7RED to repeat fieldwork and notes about a process that the Argentine economy has been going through. This time they have focused on the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic and its quarantine affected and laid bare an economic development in which two things happen simultaneously: first, an unequal distribution of wealth, the effect of which is a growing increase of concentrated power and capital, and second, an always renewed potency for subsistence coming from the popular classes and from small entrepreneurs and merchants that uphold the lack of a collective economic and political project centred on production, development of local wealth, intelligent global positioning and a vision of divergent composition of territorial, cultural and natural potencies, one that can contain and balance the existing contradictions and different temporalities.

These dynamics were at the heart of debates that took place at a one-day research forum on new challenges for studying and engaging with informality, co-organized by M7RED and the FWF-funded research project Incorporating Informality. The event took place in Buenos Aires on 14 October 2023.

PROGRAMME