Consumption and Urban Modernities

Harvey 2006

Argues 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; Critiques new urbanism and Disneyfied spaces for depoliticizing 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

Argues consumption links local and global networks; Treats commodities as social actors; Notes ethical consumption often soothes conscience rather than transforming structures;

Crewe 2000

Traces retail geography’s shift from mapping to cultural analysis; Identifies streets, charity shops, vintage markets and homes as sites of consumption meaning; Shows consumption is temporal and ritualized; Notes ethical consumption and moral economies but highlights limits in addressing inequality;

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; Treats material objects as 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; Argues 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; Fordism 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; Privatization coexists with social use and seasonal rhythms; Publicness is contingent and produced;

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;