Crafting a feasible space: Enacting post-growth evolution in a local food marketplace

Abstract

Craft-orientation is a mode of production and consumption that supports the formation of epistemic relationships in which objects are not encountered solely as tools for use but as entities that elicit curiosity and invite learning. Scholars in various fields have begun to explore its potential for organising markets in alignment with a post-growth worldview. Extending these discussions, we examine how a craft-orientation materialises in an alternative food marketplace and how it enacts to the evolution of a post-growth marketplace. Drawing from craft-orientation and post-growth literature, and utilising assemblage thinking as an enabling theory, we employed multi-sited ethnographic research on the REKO local food marketplace. This marketplace emphasises self-production and direct selling of local food. Our findings show that within the REKO marketplace craft-orientation materialises through socio-material characteristics of spatiotemporal proximity and embodied social relationships. They give rise to the practices of sufficiency, relocalisation, professionality, and tangibility supporting post-growth premises. Further, we develop a concept of feasible space which refers to a set of key conditions for a post-growth marketplace. Within such space, market actors can epistemically engage with objects, understand the processes through which they take shape, and ultimately contribute to more ecologically sustainable production and consumption practices.