are treated in most master plans as a temporary stage before supermarkets.
The assumption has held for sixty years and has been wrong in most Asian cities.
Markets survive because they do several things a supermarket does not.
They sell in quantities a household can afford today rather than this week.
They offer without a contract and information without a label.
They also employ a great many people per square metre, most of them women.
usually replaces an open market with a building.
Trade collapses on the upper floors with a regularity that should by now be predicted.
Shoppers will not climb for vegetables, and traders on those floors cannot pay the rent.
The ground floor becomes a supermarket, and the market into the surrounding lanes.
The city then complains about street trading that it created.
Upgrades that worked kept the market at ground level and fixed the three things traders name.
, a roof and reliable water change conditions without changing the trade.
Stall matters as much as the building.
A trader with a ten-year licence invests in the stall; a trader renewed monthly does not.