Building resilient communities: COVID-19 lessons from a resurgent farmers’ market

This article examines the role of public spaces like farmers’ markets in sustaining urban communities during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on research completed with the St John’s Farmers’ Market in Newfoundland, Canada, between 2020 and 2022, it demonstrates how a slow-growth economic model and cooperative governance structures effectively prepared the organization for the economic and social shocks of the pandemic. Through successive lockdowns and tightening of public health measures, the market used a range of techniques to provide a space for socially distant interactions, which included physical dividers and new modes of selling products alongside a restructuring of the organization’s operations. Into the later phases of the pandemic the St John’s Farmers’ Market was consistently identified as a place of community and belonging by research participants, which reflected the continuing importance of venues like farmers’ markets to the social life of cities. The article concludes by drawing lessons from this experience, with emphasis on the role of community-led development and the importance of community-owned assets in building urban resilience. In an instance where most public space literature captures the dimming of public space usage at the onset of COVID-19, this article demonstrates how such sites were re-imagined and ultimately re-opened, adding valuable perspectives on the rebuilding of urban public space in mid-sized cities.