Consuming the city: People-watching and dialectics of everyday urban life

Abstract

Since being established at the vanguard of thinking about urban life during the late-eighteenth century, generations of theorists have opened-up sightlines, tackled blind-spots, and responded to challenges of theorizing and researching ‘seeing and being seen’. This paper contributes to that work by bringing into focus everyday experiences of people-watching. Drawing on auto-ethnographic/-biographic research from the UK, I sketch out the theoretical, empirical and methodological terrain needed to account for this mundane and often unspoken practice. In doing so, I outline how a research agenda focused on people-watching, consumer culture and dialectics of everyday life, politics, and imaginations adds-value to understanding of the complex and heterogeneous ways cities are consumed.