Constructing scientific objects from the fieldwork in retail Geography

Carles Carreras
Sergio Moreno
Observatori del comerç
Universitat de Barcelona
http://www.ub.edu/observatoricomerc/OCUB.html

This paper presents some methodological and theoretical conclusions of two fieldworks on retail Geography, done in the last two years in the cities of Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina) and Alexandria (Egypt).

The main object of the research, in general, was the structure and dynamics of the Islamic markets in two different cultural contexts: the Slavic and the Arabian. Doing so the concrete objectives were to understand and define some specific concepts as bazaar, suq or market, both in their historic and in their present perspective, in contrast with the rise of the new occidental shopping centres. The main theoretical objective was to rethink about the content and range of the concept of Modernization on the light of the two different study cases (Carreras & Moreno, 2007).

First, the paper tries to analyse the loss of information when applying the classical cartographical methods of representation to the fieldwork issues. Mapping the very dense retail structure of the traditional commercial centres, we found that cartographic symbols act as a sort of quantitative reduction of a lot of qualitative observations and data collection; typologies, classification systems and traditional symbols use to be too reductionist. Second, the paper suggests the use of all the narrative possibilities in order to represent and to explain the majority of data collected by methodical and floating field observation, and by interviewing the people involved in the retail and the consuming activities. This second point deals with the logical difficulties arousing from the two different and contrasted cultural contexts: the traditional Islamic and the modern capitalist one.

The paper concludes with the necessity to reinforce the qualitative aspects of the fieldwork, in general, and suggests some ways to do so. In fact, the objectivist cartographical method could be enriched by integrating many qualitative data coming from the narrative method.