By 2030, 60 percent of the world's population are expected to be living in urban areas. Population growth is not solely in larger metropolitan centres - the mega cities. The numbers of small and intermediate-sized urban centres are also increasing and have an important role as links in the marketing system. This guide provides a simplified aid to understanding the physical implications of marketing linkages, based on a regional planning approach. The guide provides a simple planning methodology and framework that focuses on the issue of linking farmers to market outlets for their produce particularly identifying their marketing infrastructure needs. The users of the guide are likely to be at national, provincial or district levels and could include planners and engineers in ministries and departments of public works and transport, planning and marketing officers in ministries and departments of agriculture, local authority officers in planning, commerce and marketing departments and local authorities, communities, farmer groups and voluntary organizations, concerned to understand marketing constraints and with ensuring that rural producers have better access to markets for their products.

The untold story of America's wholesale food business. In nineteenth-century America, municipal deregulation of the butcher trade and state-incorporated market companies gave rise to a flourishing wholesale trade. In Movable Markets, Helen Tangires describes the evolution of the American wholesale marketplace for fresh food, from its development as a bustling produce district in the heart of the city to its current indiscernible place in food industrial parks on the urban periphery. Tangires follows the middlemen, those intermediaries who became functional necessities as the railroads accelerated the process of delivering perishable food to the city. Tracing their rise and decline in the wake of a deregulated food economy, she asks: How did these people, who occupied such key roles as food distributors and suppliers to the retail trade, end up exiled to urban outskirts? Moving into the early twentieth century, she explains how progressive city planners and agricultural economists responded to anxieties about the high cost of living, traffic congestion, and disruptions in the food supply by questioning the centrality, aging infrastructure, and organizational structure of wholesale markets. Tangires combines economic and cultural history by analyzing popular literature, innovative scholarship, and USDA publications. Detailing the legal, physical, and organizational means behind the complex exodus of food wholesaling from the urban core, Tangires also reveals how the trade adjusted to life beyond the city limits as it created new channels of distribution, product lines, and markets. Readers interested in US history, city and regional planning history, food history, and public policy, as well as anyone curious about the disappearance of the central produce district as a major component of the city, will find Movable Markets a fascinating read.