Vernacular logistics and the making of a ‘rural-like’ market in urban China

China’s urban food system is increasingly governed through standards of formalisation, visual order and supply-chain integration. Yet small-scale, vendor-led food circulation continues to sustain everyday access to fresh produce across rural and urban geographies. This article examines Jinsheng, a busy fresh produce market in Sihong County, northern Jiangsu, which is located in the urban centre yet widely described as ‘rural-like’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I use this paradox to examine how vendors organise food flows through agricultural routines, embodied knowledge, rural social networks, multi-role labour and local spatial familiarity. I conceptualise these practices as ‘vernacular logistics’: locally embedded arrangements through which vendors sustain circulation between fragmented rural production and urban consumption. The article makes two arguments. First, vernacular logistics constitute a form of infrastructural agency, enabling vendors to work through partial regulation, uncertain recognition and uneven market governance. Second, these logistical practices produce the marketplace as a rural-urban interface, where rural temporalities, materialities and forms of exchange are continuously brought into the urban core. By foregrounding the everyday work of food circulation, the article challenges planning approaches that equate infrastructural improvement with standardisation alone, and points towards more differentiated licensing, spatial and temporal regulation, and market management practices that recognise vernacular forms of urban provisioning.