Last month, at Placemaking Week Europe in Reggio Emilia, Italy, urban leaders and placemaking practitioners gathered for an inspiring session exploring how food markets serve as engines for community development, social inclusion, and urban–rural connection. The Food Capitals Network HQ joined member cities Helsinki, Turin, and Wrocław, along with speakers from PlacemakingUS and Roof Coliving (Turkey), to share international approaches to reimagining markets as vibrant public spaces.
Turin’s Market Renaissance: From Historic Halls to a New Cultural Pulse
Cristina Cerutti from Turismo Torino shared how Turin has reimagined its historic markets as dynamic places where tradition meets innovation. Once primarily spaces of daily commerce, the city’s market halls and open-air stalls have been revitalized to blend food, culture, and tourism, making them essential destinations for both locals and visitors.
Cristina highlighted the “Porta Palazzo community concierge project,” a concept launched in Turin in 2021 and the first of its kind in Italy. Set up in former newspaper kiosks around Turin, including close to the main market, these neighbourhood info points act as bridges between residents, tourists, and the city. Locals can access community resources or find out where to buy specific products, while visitors can discover cultural events and attractions. By embedding these micro-hubs into everyday market life, Turin has strengthened the sense of belonging and accessibility around its markets.
Cristina also shared a creative experiment bringing together food and electronic music. During the Kappa FuturFestival, Italy’s largest outdoor electronic music event, organisers transformed one of the market stalls into a vibrant culinary-meets-cultural playground. A DJ performed alongside a local chef preparing gourmet sandwiches, drawing festivalgoers into the market for an unexpected sensory experience. The success of this pilot has inspired plans to replicate it in the future, proving that Turin’s markets can be not only places of trade but also platforms for experimentation, community engagement, and urban vitality.
Revealing Hidden Spaces Through Shared Meals in Helsinki
Peggy Bauer, CEO of Helsinki Premises Ltd, shared how Helsinki is reimagining its historic markets into vibrant public spaces where food and community meet. From the bustling Market Square to various districts, the city has been transforming traditional trading areas into cultural destinations that celebrate food culture and collective experience. Markets are not just places to buy food—they are places to eat together, share traditions, and celebrate local identity.
Peggy highlighted how food has become a powerful placemaking tool and perfect catalyst for helping people rediscover hidden parks, share meals outdoors, and reclaim public spaces once considered as off-limits. Through initiatives like temporary street takeovers, illuminated winter markets, and community dining events, Helsinki shows that even in a cold, dark climate, food can bring people together and breathe new life into public spaces year-round.
Roof Coliving (Turkey): Rethinking the Bazaar Through Community Mapping
Zeynep Aybüke Mutlu, from Roof Coliving (Turkey), presented a reimagining of the iconic Turkish neighbourhood bazaar, spaces deeply rooted in everyday life yet often overlooked in urban planning. Her team observed significant challenges: vendors relocating daily between neighbourhoods, difficult logistics, and substantial waste production.
Roof Coliving used participatory smell maps, sound maps, and waste maps to understand how people truly experience these markets. These insights informed new prototypes aimed at transforming markets into sustainable, community-centered spaces, hosting shared dinners, workshops, and events that build collective identity. The work highlights how traditional markets can evolve beyond commerce into into places of connection, learning, and collective identity.
Wrocław’s Market Transformation: Revitalizing Tradition for Today
Edyta Pawlaczek from Wrocław, Poland shared how the city has been transforming its traditional markets into vibrant community spaces that respond to modern urban life. One historic market, once struggling during the week, was reinvented as a weekend market with organic food, developed collaboratively between local business owners and the municipality. By adding cultural and social programming, the market quickly became a destination for both residents and visitors. Another market evolved by welcoming street food vendors and food trucks, blending the traditional farmers’ market with a contemporary dining experience. This fusion not only revitalized public space but also created opportunities for people to gather, eat together, and rediscover the city’s food culture.
To attract younger generations and compete with supermarkets, Wrocław has been enriching its markets with social and cultural dimensions. The city partnered with local university students to co-design a welcoming space and transform the perception of marketplaces into a multifunctional zone of the future. The “Love Wrocław Markets” campaign, featuring branded tote bags and bio-waste containers, helped strengthen awareness of local food, sustainability, and market identity. Through these initiatives, Wrocław demonstrates how thoughtful design, creative programming, and policy support can turn traditional marketplaces into thriving centers of community life, celebrating local producers while shaping a more sustainable and connected urban food culture.
Find out more about Wroclaw’s food and gastronomy projects in the latest episode of Cities at the Table, The Food Capitals’ Podcast.
PlacemakingUS: Building Social Food Hubs Across the U.S.
Ryan Smolar, initiator of PlacemakingUS and co-director of Long Beach Fresh, shared inspiring stories from across the United States that link food democracy and placemaking. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, his team has mapped local food systems, from gardens to markets, to identify how public spaces can better serve communities. Ryan emphasized that while many European cities have long-standing central markets, many American cities face “placetaking” rather than placemaking: spaces dominated by commerce without social infrastructure. Through local initiatives, his work seeks to transform these spaces into social food hubs, where community engagement, education, and food access come together to build more just and connected neighbourhoods.
Sharing inspiring examples, Ryan illustrated how small interventions can help shift the dynamics of markets: simple seating installations that encourage people to linger, the strategic placement of music and children’s activities to create vibrancy, and even the use of reusable plates that reduce waste while prompting people to stick around and therefore create social interactions. He shared the touching story of Phil’s Farmstand, a community-built project honoring a beloved local gardener, showing how food and placemaking can nurture care, memory, and belonging. His stories from California to Portland demonstrated how thoughtful design, inclusion, and local collaboration can turn markets into inclusive, resilient gathering places that embody both food justice and human connection.
Global challenges and place-based solutions
The session concluded with break-out conversations with each of the speakers and an invitation for continued exchange and collaboration. Here are some of the take-aways:
The diverse examples from these various cities demonstrated that while each city faces unique challenges, food markets everywhere have potential to serve as powerful tools for community building, social inclusion, and urban vitality at the local level. The key is recognizing markets not just as commercial spaces, but as essential social infrastructure that can strengthen the fabric of urban life. These market innovations offer tangible, human-scaled approaches to building more connected communities: one meal, one conversation, one shared space at a time.
Find out more about Placemaking Week Europe and see you in Wrocław for the 2026 edition!
