Consumers and

Promoters

Consumers and Promoters

• Readings:– Valentine Ch 7: 225-238

Commodity as Spectacle

• World’s fairs, great exhibitions– spectacular modernity– visual consumption– imperialism as a department store– magical obscuring of reality– pilgrimage– amusement

Consumers and Promoters

• Readings:– Valentine Ch 7: 225-238

Commodity as Spectacle

• World’s fairs, great exhibitions– spectacular modernity– visual consumption– imperialism as a department store– magical obscuring of reality– pilgrimage– amusement

Great Exhibition, London, 1851

Worlds Fair Chicago

Commodity as Spectacle

• The Flaneur

• The Urban Promenade

• Fashionable social occasions

Doing King, Toronto, 1870

Allan Gardens

Vienna’s Ringstrasse Corso, 1900

The Flaneur

• Somebody who wanders the streets of the city as an onlooker– watches but does not participate– a cultured observer– the archetype of the urban journalist, writer,

academic, cultural critic, cultural consumer– “visual consumers”– do they really exist?

The Flaneuse

• C19th and C20th cities offered women the chance to escape traditional female roles

• freedom of movement and association

• Role of the middle-class woman as a shopper– city becomes an environment filled with things

for women to look at– department stores redesigned around women

The Modern Flaneur

• Modern ways to consume visually:– Tourism– Channel surfing on TV– Websurfing

C19th and C20th Cities

• Developed as places of production

• But also as places of consumption

Landscapes of Consumption

• Emergence of the modern/postmodern city as a place of consumption

• Structural changes: many traditional production functions lost– from the 1970s onwards schemes to renovate

the city as a place of consumption

Commodity as Spectacle

• Department Stores, Arcades– spectacular modernity– visual consumption– imperialism as a department store– magical obscuring of reality– pilgrimage– amusement

Galeries Lafayette, Paris, 1900

Swan & Edgar, London, 1900s

Harrods, London, 1920s

Shopping and Gender

• Victorian age remade Middle-class woman as a shopper and consumer

• Shopping environments became feminised

The Mall

• spectacular modernity

• visual consumption

• imperialism as a department store

• magical obscuring of reality

• pilgrimage

• amusement

Yorkdale 1964

Yorkdale 2001

Yorkdale 2001

Yorkdale 2001

Minneapolis

West Edmonton Mall

Commodifying Spaces

• marketing landscape & place as something to consume

• former slum area gentrified in 1960s

• expensive boutiques

• allure of Hollywood stars

Eating Place

• consumers rarely know where their food comes from

• marketers mythologise the origins of food