Geography

Geographies of Consumption: Intellectual and Disciplinary Contours

During the 1970s and 1980s, geographical consumption research involved description, mapping, and modeling of consumption behavior in areas such as food, energy, health care, public and private housing, and leisure and recreation. In the 1990s, geographies of consumption expanded rapidly. The intensification of many processes related to consumption in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the uneven effects of globalization and trade, the commodification of new spaces and practices in both urban and rural landscapes, the mediation of commercial culture and material, and disparities within and between first-and third-world nations, prompted greater attention to relationships between consumption, people, and place. Associated with this was the development of a range of post-positivist theoretical approaches that informed concerns about the politicization of commodity provision, differing access to goods and services, and questions about the role of consumption in the uneven development of place over time. Despite a long heritage of work on collective consumption (e.g., in areas of housing, health, education, transportation), attention now turned to the ways in which consumption was actively constructed through a variety of institutional agents such as firms, states, and industries and to the role and place of consumers and consumer practice in such analysis.

Robert Sack's Place, Modernity and the Consumer's World and sociologist John Urry's Consuming Places highlighted the ways in which individuals constructed much of their everyday experience in relation to consumer landscapes and how place, space, and scale made a difference to how consumption was expressed and experienced. Consumption research in geography developed alongside Neil Wrigley and Michelle Lowe's “new retail geographies,” which were concerned with examining the power of retail capital and significance of changing retail practices in structuring consumption. Connecting retailing with political, economic, and cultural processes was also exemplified by Peter Jackson and colleagues' work on commercial cultures, which sought to understand how the market and processes of commerce were embedded in a variety of cultural processes by tracing the connections between economies, practices, and spaces. In addition, Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer's research on commodity chains and networks revealed how the connections between things, people, and places were formed through a range of regulatory regimes and institutional and individual practices such as agro-commodity production, manufacturing, marketing, [Page 648]distribution, and retailing. The significance of leisure and tourism activity in contemporary social change also led to Aitchison and colleagues' volume of geographical work on leisure/tourism practices and spaces with insights for consumption. Geographers interested in rurality noted the way in which some rural spaces were being remade and reimaged through consumption practice, but significantly more attention was accorded to process of change in urban areas perhaps because, as Mark Jayne argues, it is in the morphology of cities that its expression of consumer culture is most explicit and has been most spectacularly mediated.

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