Food memories within urban interiors of marketplaces

Throughout history, food markets have continuously connected urban and cultural food identities, leading to transformation and adaptability of systems, products, recipes, and lifestyles. As public places, food markets are places of encounters and expressions of cultural identities, where people savour their memories of food experiences, shaped by diverse everyday rhythms. Marketplaces express the language of food rituals and eating habits practised within communities, which contribute to broader innovations in food design. In the market, local and newly migrated ingredients are on display, revealing the everyday consumption rhythms influenced by sensory experiences of food memories. Through their senses, people migrate back in their imagination to the familiar, to what they know and where they belong. Based on Gaston Bachelard’s definition of inhabitation and Henri Lefebvre’s interpretation of rhythmanalysis, this chapter explores the everyday rhythm of food markets as places of urban interiors. This term describes public places with interior qualities, where rhythms of everyday activities connect the intimacy of interior life to the exteriority of urban space. Developed through earlier research in 2012, this transdisciplinary methodology examined a city centre in Beirut, Lebanon, as an urban interior – a public space, which contained the rhythms of domestic everyday life. Adopting a phenomenological approach, this chapter explores inhabitation from interior and urban design perspectives, while the rhythms of markets and natural ecosystems are analysed through a food design lens. Similar to design processes, these repetitive everyday rhythms encourage experimentation and transformation, offering the potential for new food identities to emerge, shaped by both personal and collective food memories.