Lee, Chiun2024-07-092024-07-092024-07-092024-06-12http://hdl.handle.net/10012/20715This thesis explores the potential towards a transformative role of informal markets within modern retail environments, contrasting them against the backdrop of both rigid physical retail storefronts and intangible digital platforms. The informal market typology in Mexico, the tianguis, has persevered by adapting and responding to people’s demands despite its various drastic social and political changes throughout Mexico’s history in the span of centuries from the Spanish conquest to the more recent revolution. While more recently, there have been safety concerns about the contextual relevance of the tianguis based on increased crime, the newer generation of storeowners in the city are working to enhance social relationships through communities with more contemporary informal strategies that allow for building a more comfortable environment to sell their products. Central to the analysis is the dichotomy between formal and informal retail structures in the contemporary scene. This paper explains how formal retail spaces usually do not encourage social interactions like community bonding necessary for marketplace through their rigidity and uniformity. By contrast, with their flexible and community-based designs, tianguis not only answer local people’s needs and preferences but also enhance social and economic resilience. In order to form the basis of a retail environment that embraces flexibility, community interaction, as well as identity, this paper uses varied cases studies and prototype design to develop a tianguis prototype. It calls for rethinking retail space design in view of the iterative concerns of informal architecture towards more inclusive, responsive and commity engagement. In addition, this study constitutes an important contribution to the urban design/retail management literature through an examination on how informal market practices can inform and redefine current retail strategies making them adaptable enough for modern urban life and its inhabitants.enarchitecturemexicoinformaldesign-buildtianguismarketplaceretaildesignMaster Thesis