Consumption and Urban Modernities

Harvey 2006

Urban public space is shaped by class power, commodification and governance

Contrasts Athenian agora as democratic ideal with privatized and surveilled modern cities

Uses Haussmann’s Paris to show urban redesign serves political control and capital circulation while also enabling counter-publics and class struggle

New urbanism and Disneyfied spaces depoliticises public life

Calls for reclaiming democracy through restructuring urban forms against capitalist logics;

Goss 1993

Defines shopping malls as corporately designed pseudospace simulating publicness under private control

Shows malls manufacture spectacle, nostalgia and consumer subjectivities

Spatial design and tenant mix exclude undesired groups

Malls act as third places primarily to extend corporate profit and conformity

Mansvelt 2017

Consumption links local and global networks

Treats commodities as social actors

Ethical consumption often soothes conscience rather than transforming structures

Crewe 2000

Identifies streets, charity shops, vintage markets and homes as sites of consumption meaning- can be resistance

Shows consumption is temporal and ritualized

Mansvelt 2005

Argues commodities circulate, gain and lose value and have agency

Material culture shapes identity

Uses e-waste and uneven waste geographies to show global costs of consumption;

Horton & Kraftl 2013

Shows consumers have agency such as subcultures using malls socially

Argues production and consumption co-produce meaning

Material objects are active in everyday life

Marx 1867

Defines commodities through use-value and exchange-value

Argues value corresponds to socially necessary labour time

Commodity fetishism obscures social relations behind object relations;

Linehan 2020

Locates origins of modernity in 15th-century Europe with Enlightenment and state formation

Shows modernity reshaped knowledge, labour and urban form

Modernity is paradoxical, enabling mobility while producing exclusion and colonial hierarchies;

Mansvelt 2005 Histories

Traces historical roots of consumption before industrial capitalism

Shows industrialization accelerated mass markets;

enabled mass consumption

Post-1970s consumption emphasizes symbolic differentiation and identity;

Rice 2020

Identifies malls and retail parks as dominant postwar consumer landscapes

Contrasts enclosed malls with peripheral retail parks

Notes spectacle-making and threats from e-commerce

Highlights mega-malls and suburban sprawl reshaping consumption geographies

Miles 2010

Argues shopping colonizes urban life through the consumer city

Retail becomes central to civic identity

Malls generate both community and alienation

Jayne 2006

Shows cities and consumption are mutually constitutive

Post-industrial urbanism centers leisure and retail

Consumption disciplines social order and stages spectacle and class display;

Thornton 2010

Uses Beijing to show transformation of Tiananmen Square from state spectacle to commodified leisure spaces

Argues state and market collaborate to produce staged publicness and tourism spectacle

Latham 2008

Defines public space as plural including collective use, state ownership, access and visibility

Argues regeneration produces staged and privatized publicness

Genuine publicness emerges through interaction and hybrid uses;

Tyndall 2010

Shows suburban malls produce negotiated publicness

Different groups use space differently

Privatisation coexists with social use and seasonal rhythms

Publicness is contingent and produce

Houssay-Holzschuch & Teppo 2009

Analyzes Cape Town waterfront as privatized publicization

Shows multiracial visitor mix alongside colonial aesthetics

Identifies racialized temporal and spatial divides and discomfort for marginalized visitors

Ferreira et al. 2021

Examines coffee shops as third spaces supporting weak and strong ties and local collaboration

Notes their role as workspaces

Critiques reproduction of gentrification and exclusion through aesthetics and pricing

Miller 2014

Studies Buenos Aires mall without stores as affective and biopolitical space

Malls engineer mood and provide refuge without transaction

Informal workers remain excluded

Miller & Laketa 2019

Conceptualizes malls as affective assemblages of human and non-human actors

Shows malls shape identity, modernity and inequality

Experiences vary by intersectional position;

Biehl-Missal & Saren 2012

Argues aesthetic marketing uses design, scent and sound to create seductive atmospheres

Extends dwell time and shapes behavior

Critiques third place myth as obscuring corporate substitution of sociality

Liu 2023

Argues digitalisation reconfigures consumption through platforms, prosumption and datafication

Highlights algorithmic hierarchies and e-waste

Shows uneven regional digital cultures and spatial re-embedding of consumption

Clarke & Doel 2005

Shows early cinema and panorama created immersive motionless trips

Moving images reshaped perceptions of space and time

Produced phantasmagoria and new urban experiences

Vasudevan 2003

Analyzes Berlin asphalt literature as performing modernity

Texts enacted speed, montage and the flâneur

Writing both constituted and critiqued modern urban rhythms