Geographies Of Consumption Research Articles

Consumption and place: the phenomenology of relational economic geography

ABSTRACT This article contributes to research on geographies of consumption and relationality in economic geography by analysing the interconnection of consumption and place in practice, based on ethnographic research. This text focuses on consumption defined broadly to include a choice of clothing and lifestyle among young people in a British town characterized as ‘chavs’. The research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, including photo-elicitation interviews, observations and participant observations. To analyse the ways in which consumption is related to place, this text integrates conceptual frames used in economic, cultural and social geography with perspectives developed in economic sociology and anthropology. The study takes a relational approach in both theory and fieldwork. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that place and style consumption are relationally constitutive through practices of association and dissociation. We thereby show that the meanings attached to a place may derive partly from acts of consumption by those living there, but also that the relationship of meaning construction goes from consumption to the constitution of place. Our analysis presents evidence that style and the value attributed to people’s practices are co-constituted by the inhabitants, as well by other, typically external actors, such as bloggers and the media.

Countering Hegemonic Human Rights Norms through Migrant Labour Organising: The Case of Migrant Justice

AbstractThis article analyses undocumented migrant labour organising in a complicated context and site, the Vermont dairy industry, in relation to Tanya Basok's concept of “counter‐hegemonic human rights”. Taking migrant rights organisation Migrant Justice in Burlington, Vermont as a case study, this work examines migrant labour organising that calls upon notions of human rights for economic migrants in the USA. Migrant Justice works through commodity chain labour organising that transcends the scale of the state, calls on moral geographies of consumption and production, and autonomously redistributes not just capital, but power, from the corporation down to workers. An analysis of literature on migrant human rights in relation to labour organising will lead us to problematise mainstream human rights discourse, explore alternative conceptions of rights, and understand the liberatory components of the “counter‐hegemonic” employment of human rights by subversive actors, which may truly hold the potentials that mainstream human rights discourse claims.

The digitalisation of consumption and its geographies

AbstractAs consumer cultures become increasingly digital and the digital/data has become more commodified, geographers have turned their attention to researching the ways in which consumption spaces, socialities and subjectivities are (re)produced by the digitalisation of everyday life. This article investigates the relationships between the digital and geographies of consumption based on a close reading of recent studies on the promises, possibilities, challenges, and flaws of the intersections of the digital and consumption in geography. It connects the digitalisation of consumption with the tradition of mapping and doing geographies of consumption that is concerned with the social life of thing, and opens a conversation on how subjectivities, spatialities, and socialities of consumption are reproduced by the changes in digital spaces and practices in the mundane. This article also points to the potential of a ‘follow the digital’ approach for establishing a dynamic and multi‐sited understanding of geographies of consumption in the digital context.

Consumption practices in transition: Rural-urban migration and the food fish system in Myanmar

This article explores the reconfigurations of fish consumption practices in Myanmar in a context of rapid urbanization and changing availability of wild and farmed fish. Using a social practice lens, we analyze how everyday fish consumption practices change as people move from the rural Ayeyarwady Delta to Yangon city. We show how these reconfigurations are shaped by new routines in urban areas and the transition from capture fisheries to aquaculture. Our analysis reveals a growing detachment of consumers from production processes but, at the same time, a continuity in their everyday food routines through the upholding of “mother’s traditional cuisine”, and a general drive to preserve commensality. We demonstrate the value of using a social practices lens integrating micro- and meso-scale socio-cultural processes to understand dietary change by examining how rural-urban migration influence the sourcing, cooking, and eating of wild and farmed fish. These insights have implications for the everyday geography of consumption, including the persistence of socio-culturally appropriate food practices and the hybridisation of rural-urban food environments. As such, social practice approaches to the study of food consumption open up a means of understanding and even steering complex food system transitions in dynamically changing regions such as Southeast Asia.

The ruin(s) of Chiloé?: An ethnography of buildings de/reterritorializing

Studying buildings can be a rich entry point into emerging cultural geographies. The archipelago of Chiloé in southern Chile is experiencing rapid change since the country’s extreme turn toward neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Once a rural, communal, and sea-faring region, it has been transformed by industrial aquaculture in recent decades which has driven a new urban landscapes and consumer-oriented lifestyles. This paper offers findings from an ethnographic study of changing consumption geographies, from iconic tourist sites linked to the region’s rich heritage geographies, to the new corporate retailers and shopping malls. Specifically, the new shopping mall clashes with the heritage and tourist landscape of colonial era churches and other unique heritage architectures that have captured the attention of tourists and investors. We glimpse a dynamic architectural geography in flux, as an array of buildings pulls the population in multiple directions at once, making it an ideal case study of the competing forces of what Deleuze and Guattari called de- and re-territorialization, an appropriate analytic for understanding the powerful forces of commodification.

Retail Policies and Urban Change in Naples City Center: Challenges to Resilience and Sustainability from a Mediterranean City

Political discourses, public discussions, and studies in different fields have increasingly focused on the vulnerabilities affecting cities and on the possible responses to them, which are often traced back to urban resilience and sustainability. Research and debates in the field of retailing and consumption geographies are no exception. To carry out a critical analysis on the retail policies associated with the urban commercial change of the Naples city center, the case study is placed in the context of the literature review focusing on three concepts: spatial vulnerability, adaptive resilience, and territorialized sustainability. The analysis is conducted combining data, policy, and planning documents with long-term field research. The changing relationship between consumption practices, retail dynamics, and policies highlights a sort of hybridization of commercial and consumption central cityscapes, which is produced by the coexistence between retail-led phenomena of regeneration and forms of local resistance. The results of the research highlight, from a Mediterranean perspective, new general insights on the impact of selective forms of vulnerability and on the adaptive resilience strategies adopted, but most of all on the indispensable rethinking of the urban retail governance for the enhancement of urban livability, social cohesion, and locally sustainable lifestyles, activities, and places.

Negotiating Unsustainable Food Transformations: Development, Middle Classes and Everyday Food Practices in Vietnam

Amidst calls for making food systems more sustainable, new unsustainable food transformations unfold alongside economic development. Explanations for unsustainable food transformations in emerging economies vary greatly, but there is widespread agreement that demand from new middle classes play a crucial role. Yet this demand is to a large extent co-created by systems of provision, and middle-class consumers are constantly navigating food transformations in a search for healthy and safe food. Focusing on Vietnam’s dramatic food transformations, and combining attention to the political economy of food with a social practice approach to consumption, the paper zooms in on the how middle-class households in Hanoi negotiate the rapid transformations of food systems and food environments. The paper concludes that new thinking on sustainable food systems is urgently needed and argues that vital insights can be gained by studying food practices and their interaction with everyday geographies of consumption.

Where is Standard of Living the Highest? Local Prices and the Geography of Consumption

Where is Standard of Living the Highest? Local Prices and the Geography of Consumption

Progress and reflection of geographies of consumption from the perspective of new materialism

Progress and reflection of geographies of consumption from the perspective of new materialism

Shin-Ōkubo as a feminine ‘K-pop space’: gendering the geography of consumption of K-pop in Japan

Studies of the global spread of South Korean popular culture have often neglected the role that space plays in this transnational fandom and consumer culture. Explicitly exploring the geography of Korean popular culture consumption in Japan, this article draws upon a walking ethnography of Tokyo's ‘Koreatown’ of Shin-Ōkubo and interviews with selected consumers to reveal how ‘K-pop spaces’ within Japan have become tied to young women's consumer culture. We argue that spaces of K-pop promotion and consumption within Tokyo are inherently ‘feminised’ due to their linkage to pre-established promotional strategies in consumer districts specifically targeting young women. Through an ethnography of Shin-Ōkubo and interviews with K-pop fans who regularly visit this district, we further reveal how this ‘ethnic enclave’ has been reconfigured as another ‘feminised’ consumer space that caters to particular behaviours and attitudes based in K-pop fandom. Overall, this article charts the emergence of ‘feminine’ consumer spaces in Tokyo and interrogates how the ethnic enclave of Shin-Ōkubo has transformed into a gendered space tied to Japanese K-pop fandom.

Tapping the Economic Potential of Chickpea in Sub-Saharan Africa

Chickpea is a nutrition-rich, cropping-system friendly, climate-resilient, and low-cost production crop. It has large economic potential in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region, where it currently accounts for only approximately half a million hectares of the approximately 12 million hectares of total chickpea production land worldwide. This review highlights the opportunities for promoting chickpea production and marketing to tap the vast economic potential in SSA. The region can potentially produce chickpea on approximately 10 million hectares, possibly doubling the global production, and the region could become one of the highest consumption geographies of this healthy crop. Chickpea could easily be integrated into existing cropping systems including rice-fallows and cereal monocropping systems. Successful cases studies of the crop in the region are highlighted. The region could tap into the potential at scale through intervention in the agricultural policy environment and development and promotion of improved chickpea production technologies supported by well-organized extension services and sustainable seed systems. These interventions could be complemented with value addition and product quality improvementsÍ for SSA chickpea to benefit from high-value markets.

Fairtrade towns: Unpacking the dynamics of locally developed ethical retail geographies

One of the most significant recent developments in ethical retailing is the Fairtrade Towns initiative. Its emphasis on the promotion of Fairtrade consumption within entire urban landscapes, and the communities and organisations within them, represents a geography of consumption into which millions of consumers are actively or passively enrolled. This empirical research paper considers Fairtrade Towns as retail geographies that connect across scales, shaped by the local, and yet expressing ethics and care on a global scale. Within them, local activists are revealed to adopt a novel role as ‘citizen marketers’ promoting FT consumption by local consumers and institutions by both utilising their own social networks and adopting marketing practices more usually associated with industry professionals. The resulting evolution of Fairtrade Towns is shown to have passed through two stages. The first supporting the broader global ‘mainstreaming’ agenda of the FT movement, with the second more focused on a novel contribution of local ‘sidestreaming’ to horizontally interconnect a range of types of place within a locality. This process has enrolled novel types of place and space as components of a local ethical retail geography, but this is revealed to potentially generate both synergies and tensions across different types of local place and stakeholder.

Of “multiple interlocking crises” and agendas for geographical research

Of “multiple interlocking crises” and agendas for geographical research

Food Sources and Expenditures for Seafood in the United States.

The aim of this study was to explore United States (U.S.) seafood consumption patterns, food sourcing, expenditures, and geography of consumption. We analyzed seafood intake and food sourcing using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) cycles 2007–2008 to 2015–2016 for US adults ≥19 years old (n = 26,743 total respondents; n = 4957 respondents consumed seafood in the past 24 h). Seafood expenditures were extrapolated by combining NHANES with three other public datasets. U.S. adults consumed 63% of seafood (by weight) at home. The top sources of seafood (by weight) were food retail (56%), restaurants (31%), and caught by the respondent or someone they know (5%). Sixty-five percent of consumer expenditures for seafood were at restaurants and other “away from home” sources while 35% were at retail and other “at home” sources. Slightly less than half of overall U.S. food expenditures are “away from home,” which is much lower than for seafood, suggesting that consumers have very different spending habits for seafood than for an aggregate of all foods.

New consumption geographies: Introduction to the special section

Geographical ResearchVolume 58, Issue 3 p. 207-213 SPECIAL SECTION EDITORIAL New consumption geographies: Introduction to the special section Ruth Lane, Corresponding Author ruth.lane@monash.edu orcid.org/0000-0002-2339-444X School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia Correspondence Ruth Lane, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Email: ruth.lane@monash.eduSearch for more papers by this authorJuliana Mansvelt, orcid.org/0000-0002-2709-6167 Geography Programme, Massey University, Wellington, New ZealandSearch for more papers by this author Ruth Lane, Corresponding Author ruth.lane@monash.edu orcid.org/0000-0002-2339-444X School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia Correspondence Ruth Lane, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Email: ruth.lane@monash.eduSearch for more papers by this authorJuliana Mansvelt, orcid.org/0000-0002-2709-6167 Geography Programme, Massey University, Wellington, New ZealandSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 May 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12410Citations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume58, Issue3August 2020Pages 207-213 This article also appears in:New Geographies of Consumption RelatedInformation

New consumption geographies, new geographies of consumption

New consumption geographies, new geographies of consumption

A social practice perspective on meat reduction in Australian households: Rethinking intervention strategies

AbstractRecent widespread calls and strategies for consumers to change and reduce meat consumption position meat as both an environmentally unsustainable and highly desired food. Such change is often understood as an unattractive and difficult process of relinquishment, and that perspective informs interventions designed to lessen the presumed hardship involved. This article troubles such assumptions by reference to a practice theoretical approach and by extending conceptual debates circulating within consumption geographies. The work explores food preferences and tastes generated in what I describe as everyday “mealing” practices, within which meat's relevance may be diminishing, contingent, or negotiable. I draw on go‐along stories about meals‐in‐flux told to me by Australian householders participating in “Meat Free Mondays” and/or consuming meat substitute products. I analyse the practical, material, and sensorial aspects of “mealing‐practice” change and show how the stir‐fry is a meal displacing “meat and three veg.” The work contributes to geographical research increasingly focused on understanding desires and tastes produced through everyday practices. In the process, it complicates understandings of meat consumption reduction as sacrifice and points to possibilities for new research and more effective forms of intervention.

Spaces of capability: Consumption geographies at an inner‐city university

AbstractInner‐city universities are noteworthy in relation to food provisioning and consumption because of their locations and spatial characteristics. Among 18,500 university students surveyed by Universities Australia in 2017, one in seven reports being unable to eat in regular patterns. This finding suggests that it is important to explore how eating spaces at inner‐city universities intersect with students' eating practices. Ethnographic work conducted over three semesters in Melbourne at RMIT University's city campus revealed that around 100 microwaves installed there were used by students to prepare food in ways that may support regular eating. The research included observations, focus groups, and digital ethnography. Analysis of the findings suggests that the university's eating spaces and their material arrangements are related to students' on‐campus and off‐campus practices. Using both Walker's interpretation of Sen's capability approach—the social practice capability framework—and Schatzki's site ontology, I propose that this relationship produces spaces of capability, encouraging and enabling varied activities such as using leftovers, bulk cooking, and buying discretionary foods less impulsively. The study and its use of the idea of spaces of capability may foster new insights about the ongoing challenge to ensure student wellbeing and to consider the relationship of student wellbeing to broader issues such as sustainable consumption and environmental justice.

Meatification and everyday geographies of consumption in Vietnam and China

ABSTRACTThe rapidly escalating production and consumption of meat across the world has drawn much attention in recent years. While mainstream accounts tend to see the phenomenon as driven by ‘natural’ processes of consumption pattern change through economic development, critical geographies have turned to exploring the uneven capitalist processes underpinning what Tony Weis calls ‘meatification’. In Weis’ view, meatification unfolds through what he calls ‘the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex’, which is presently becoming a dominant form of agricultural production worldwide. Simultaneously, but less thoroughly investigated in the emerging scholarship, meatification unfolds in and through everyday geographies of consumption that we conceptualize as variegated ‘meatscapes’. By bringing together critical geographers’ interest in the political economy of meat with practice theory and consumption research, this contribution furthers the geographical dialogue around the spatial transformations brought about by meatification. Looking at Vietnam and China as examples of rapidly meatifying countries, we explore the intersection of macro-scale spatial transformations through trade and commodity flows and, at the micro-scale, transformations in food practices. We thus argue for an approach to meatification that is multi-scalar and conducive to further regionally specific research of meatification in Asia and beyond.

Ride-Sharing and the Geography of Consumption in Cities

Despite the near ubiquity of ride-sharing services in cities worldwide, little evidence exists as to how these services affect economic behavior. Given the first-order role travel considerations play in shaping consumer choices, this paper studies the effect ride-sharing technology has on the geography of consumption in the city. Consistent with the notion that ride-sharing reduces spatial frictions, we find that it provides a significant stimulus to the restaurant and nightlife industry. Exploiting the sharp geographic and temporal variation in the availability of Uber, we find the arrival of Uber is associated with an increase in the number of restaurant and nightlife venues as well as a greater level of employment at those establishments. The increased economic activity suggests that ride-sharing not only leads to substitution from other modes of commuting but also promotes greater intra-city travel, generating consumption opportunities which may otherwise never happen. When evaluating the effect across neighborhoods, the results reveal wide disparities. New businesses entered in areas of the city with high pre-existing consumption amenities, adding to the extent of urban polarization. While it is commonly believed that ride-share platforms have contributed to more cost-effective urban transit, this study is the first to explore how the resulting change in transportation infrastructure generates meaningful gains and distributional implications for other sectors of the local economy.