Editor’s note: Our next International Public Markets Conference is taking place in Toronto, Canada on June 8-10, 2023.

COLLABORATION: A Market City organizes diverse partners and stakeholders to act together to achieve common policy objectives.

–7 Principles for Becoming a Market City

Markets are made for collaboration. Beyond being natural gathering places, markets bring various stakeholders together because of all of the benefits they represent, from increasing access to healthy food to creating opportunities for inclusive entrepreneurship to social connection. 

The role of markets as connectors spans across disciplines and sectors, and their many functions mean that we all have a stake in their success. This idea guides the Market Cities Principle of Collaboration at the beginning of this article.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is one city that is taking this principle to heart. A Market City in the making, Toronto shows how local government, nonprofits, and market operators can work together for the benefit of local markets and their customers. This is one of the many reasons why Toronto has been selected to host the 11th International Public Markets Conference in 2023. 

By first gathering local stakeholders and experts, Toronto sparked forward momentum that has led the municipality to transform its markets and its food system. Along the way, Toronto has moved toward a city-wide public market strategy, engaged meaningfully with grassroots networks including the Greenbelt Farmers Market Network, supported community-scale research, and taken part in pilot projects such as the Neighbourhood Food Hub, Market 707, and the Scarborough Fresh Food Market Pilot, all while bringing food sovereignty and equity to the forefront. Each step in this transformation has been built by the many people who make markets happen—and it is exactly this type of collaboration that leads to lasting change.

Getting the Right People in the Room: Toronto’s Public Food Market Working Group

The Toronto Food Policy Council was founded in 1991. According to Marina Queirolo, Founder and Steward of MarketCityTO, one of our co-hosts for the 11th International Public Markets Conference, the council was a great place where volunteers could meet once a month and connect with fellow policymakers to farmers and academics involved in projects related to food security, farming, and more. The council was a first step to formalizing the kinds of collaborations needed to inform the way the City could provide support.

However, since the Toronto Food Policy Council had a broader mandate relating to health equity, a volunteer-led group of public market organizations and managers created the Public Food Market Working Group to focus exclusively on issues relating to markets. Experts like Queirolo were instrumental in getting the group started in order to better understand the challenges Toronto’s public markets face and developing solutions. Today, the group works closely with a cross-departmental team of City of Toronto staff on a wide array of projects including policy recommendations, performing local research, and working on a public market strategy.

The Public Food Market Working Group paved the way for Toronto’s participation in Project for Public Spaces’ 2020 Market Cities pilot project in which Toronto shared best practices with two other leading North American cities, Seattle, WA, and Pittsburgh, PA, on how to support their markets. 

The Beginnings of a Strategy: Market Cities Program

Participation in the Market Cities pilot project began as a way to co-create a local action plan for the benefit of markets, and represented a partnership between Project for Public Spaces, the City of Toronto Economic and Community Development division, St. Lawrence Market, FoodShare Toronto, and the Greenbelt Markets. Partners created plans to distribute surveys, conduct interviews with market operators and other stakeholders, and map the landscape of Toronto’s market system. This information would inform the action plan, alongside global examples of successful policies and programs, making good use of databases and support offered by partners at the University of Toronto Culinaria Research Centre and the Feeding City initiative. 

During the pandemic, these partners turned their attention to the urgent task at hand—finding ways to safely reopen markets. The pilot project cohort had Zoom meetings with market managers to figure out how to bring markets back and break down the silos in the market community. Queirolo, who was involved through her work with the Toronto Food Policy Council, and her team worked on advocacy, wrote briefs at the municipal and provincial levels, and learned evolving Covid safety best practices from Seattle and Pittsburgh. The frequent contact allowed for market stakeholders to touch base and collectively identify next steps in their pandemic contingency plans. 

One of the issues Toronto’s markets came up against was the province-wide closure of “special events,” the category under which Toronto’s markets were issued permits. Queirolo recalls that much like her colleagues in Pittsburgh and Seattle, she and her Toronto partners “had to advocate for markets to be considered as food retail, and as essential for food access.” The advocacy work paid off, and once the Province of Ontario issued a letter deeming markets to be a form of retail, various market stakeholders got to work to make reopening possible: “Markets that work very differently suddenly had to work on the same guidance documents so the City of Toronto would allow us to open. It was a difficult time, but it was a time of collaboration.” Toronto also became the first city in the province to include other forms of markets in its guidelines, putting another key Market Cities principle into practice—variety.

According to Queirolo, this experience drove home the importance of creating a strategy for the City’s markets. Since then, the City of Toronto has continued to learn and adapt: Markets were incorporated into the strategy for the Food and Beverage sector of Toronto’s Economic Development and Culture division. And Toronto residents may not have to wait long for a citywide public market strategy. According to Michael Wolfson, a representative of the division, a Request for Proposals to develop the document is in the works. 

Digging Deeper through Community Research

MarketCityTO has also brought academia into the mix, engaging with University of Toronto students and professors to gain a deeper understanding of the landscape of markets and their challenges. The university’s Culinaria Research Center provides a basis for this collaboration, and was founded by faculty including Professor Jayeeta Sharma. The result is a cross-department hub for food studies, which focuses on mixing research with community outreach in what Professor Sharma calls a “journey of mutual learning.” 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Center embarked on a public project called Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond, which convened 11 collaborators to create a research brief focused on racialized neighborhoods where public market systems didn’t exist. From there, the Center was able to establish the Feeding City Lab, and Professor Sharma has been able to place a number of students with Marina Queirolo to assist with various things including research and contacting market managers. Student researchers at both the undergraduate and graduate levels are compensated competitively through work-study grants, and use their own academic backgrounds and cultural competencies to enrich the data on Toronto’s food systems.

The Feeding City Lab engages with the City often, mostly with the Economic Development and Culture division (Food and Beverage sub-division). “Its defining task is to connect folks in the community, academics, students,” says Professor Sharma. “It’s a model of collaboration and co-creation.” For example, in a recent pilot project with the City, students conducted field work in local restaurants to examine the real-world impact of City programs like support grants distributed to the food service industry. Research assistants were matched with restaurants based on familiarity with cuisines and cultural norms, which helped build familiarity and trust as they interviewed restaurateurs about their experiences with and barriers to accessing local support programs. 

What sets the Lab apart is its community-facing approach. “I get asked a lot about how we do community-engaged research, and the relationship building comes first,” notes Professor Sharma. “We understand in a much more grassroots manner what is actually needed to realize the vision of a public market. This hands-on, community-engaged part of that research is as important as the other types of ‘academic’ research.” In fact, Sharma sees this collaborative model of research as a potential new model for other communities to follow in their efforts to become Market Cities. 

Fostering Food Sovereignty with Local Partners

Equity and access are some of the most important issues facing urban food systems today, and sit at the center of conversations about what makes a Market City. To examine and confront systemic barriers facing residents, Toronto has convened a multi-stakeholder group of organizations and individuals called the Black Food Sovereignty Alliance. The alliance was initiated by local nonprofit Afri-Can FoodBasket alongside the ​​Centre for Studies in Food Security. Supported by the City of Toronto’s Confronting Anti-Black Racism unit (CABR), the alliance advocates for the advancement of equity for Black communities in Toronto. Focused on food issues, the alliance was created in order to create action research initiatives, organize events on Black food sovereignty, and write food policy recommendations. 

Covid-19 began to spread before many of these outputs came to fruition. “We pivoted and when panic buying started to happen, we realized our community was going to be affected,” says Zakiya Tafari, Interim Executive Director of Afri-Can FoodBasket. That’s when Black Food Toronto Program began, providing packages of culturally sensitive food to the African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) community in Toronto. According to Tafari, the program focused on leveraging buying power in order to feed up to 600 families per week. The program received its initial funds from the City of Toronto, and since its start, program partners have worked closely with departments in the City to sustain it and keep things moving forward. Next on the horizon is the idea of drop-off centers for more efficient food distribution—Tafari has had conversations with Toronto Community Housing about creating food package drop points within their buildings. 

This work is just the beginning. Tafari notes that a broader vision of Black Food Hubs is coming together for Toronto. The Toronto Black Food Sovereignty Plan describes the hubs as being created through new partnerships and more equitable procurement in order to cultivate “a Black food pipeline and safe, accessible food hubs to improve food access in Black communities.”

Collaboration in Practice

Toronto is exploring many paths on its way to becoming a Market City. The municipality has been able to better support its extensive network of public markets by engaging with experts and nonprofits, involving academic researchers, supporting the incubation of market opportunities, and centering topics like equity and food sovereignty. The common thread between the various parts of this journey is how a collaborative approach has allowed the City to tune into the know-how of a wide variety of stakeholders to map out the future of Toronto’s markets. 

As the City of Toronto moves forward with its public market strategy, it will have to confront barriers like permitting practices for markets, difficulties faced by nonprofits in funding capital purchases like buildings, and the need for more inclusive market spaces. It’s a significant task, but Toronto’s networked approach has equipped the City with vital lines of communication to understand the realities facing its market operators, vendors, customers, and communities.

‍Katherine Peinhardt has a background in climate change, and writes about the intersection of resilience and placemaking. She currently works at the ICLEI European Secretariat, and is a former German Chancellor Scholar.