This dissertation combines an assemblage theory ontology of urban sociology with the concept of Bauman's 'liquid modernity' (2000, 2012). It subsequently incorporates the nascent "liquid" constructs of liquid retail, liquid legitimacy, and liquid community to analyze consumers, community, and retailscapes in a violent and impoverished inner city area that has experienced constant and dramatic change. Through this lens, ethnographic fieldwork reveals a construct called consumption lifelines, which explains how consumers and communities use market-facing resources to find and create relative stability in the midst of turbulence, whether they choose to enter, stay in or leave a highly territorialized community with contested boundaries. The study adds complexity to Bauman's concept of liquidity and the construct of urban assemblages, and it has implications for other inner city communities that are similarly affected by changing times and challenging circumstances.

Natural resource–based economies are typically embedded in rural networks of production. In recent years, however, the privatisation of access rights and the organisation of markets have substantially transformed some of these rural economies. By using the case of the Icelandic coastal fisheries, this ethnographic study shows, on one hand, how property rights–based management regimes and markets have reconfigured rural economies by disentangling fishers from their community ties, leading to increasing investment and technological development in the industry. On the other hand, the case shows how daily economic ‘coping’ has re-entangled fishers in a web of money-mediated relations that have economised economic expectations from cost-awareness to increasing profit-making in the industry. This economisation of the fisheries’ economy, however, not only reconfigures forms of coordination and network ties, but also changes the social practices that lie at the heart of economic value itself: fishing and processing. Hence, the study shows how artisanal and labour-intensive industries cope with the ‘primacy of the economy’ not only by rationalising their operations towards economic efficiency, but also by recontextualising traditional forms of knowledge and technology for the collective construction of a new 'quality'-oriented market-niche. The consequences of this coping, however, are twofold: while on one hand this development has led to the valorisation of line-caught fish, coastal fisheries have become objects of financial speculation, leading to a paradoxical cycle of investment and technological problem-solving that is pushing the temporal and spatial boundaries of coastal fisheries in local networks of production. As a consequence, the meaning of ‘small boats’ as social backbone and symbol of rural independence is being contested. This study is not only of interest to scholars dealing with processes of economisation and marketisation of rural networks of production and natural resources, but also for those interested more generally in the role of markets, technology and changing economic practices of evaluation and valuation in contemporary capitalism.