Abstract
The overarching project of Consuming Space is to ‘tease out the implications of conceptualizing consumption as a spatial, increasingly globally-scaled, yet intensely localized activity’ (p. xii). In pursuit of this broad ambition, it draws together an interdisciplinary and international collection of works which in diverse ways shed light upon the diverse interdependencies between space, consumption and production.
With a focus upon the interrelations between these bewilderingly broad themes, there is little surprise to find a rich diversity of contributions. The editors make a valiant effort at marshalling the 12 chapters into a coherent and structured volume. In an introductory chapter they frame up the four substantive sections of the book by drawing on a very wide range of recent and contemporary work on different aspects of the relations between consumption and space. Despite this, the links between chapters within sections, or with the work discussed in relation to it, are often far from transparent. Nevertheless, the editors have drawn together a collection of chapters which, from widely varying direction, each illuminates relations between space and consumption.
Despite the book’s domination by geographers, it is a historian who offers the clearest engagement with different conceptualizations of space. Trentmann draws upon examples from Victorian Britain to explore the historical constitution of the figure of ‘the consumer’, through struggles over the proper relations between public and private space and battles of taxation, citizenship and access to basic goods and entitlements, before exploring the historical precursors of movements today which seek to close the distance between producers and consumers.
Over the book as a whole, the dominant engagement with space is through following the journey of commodities. Jackson, Ward and Russell give the most focused study, drawing upon interviews with respondents at different points along the industrialized broiler chicken supply chain to understand the nuanced processes of ‘manufacturing meaning’ that are required to overcome aspects of disconnection between consumer and production process. Gwynne explores the co-evolution of the (specifically British) market for Chilean wine and the development of Chilean wine production, tracing the flows of knowledge and taste as much as of the wine itself. Bryant provides a classic unveiling, tracing how teak became constituted as a luxury resource through the history of British imperialism, before exposing the intense violence and social costs that accompany its production in Burma.
Themes of the spatial constitution of properties of quality or ethics in products figure prominently in other chapters too, with critical engagements around various ethical and ‘alternative’ movements. Hughes, Wrigley and Buttle use their research, on a campaign specifically targeting corporate purchasing practices in the UK, to explore how diverse actors together problematized the classic separation within corporations between social responsibility strategies on the one hand, and the priorities of the buyers who secure their supplies on the other. Wilkinson explores the problematic tensions between food movements, whether based on either aesthetics (concern for terroir, for example) or universalistic ethics (such as workers' rights), and the production and consumption of rural spaces, caught within the dialectic between essentially political movements, and the corporate markets which variously resist and seek to assimilate them. The tensions that arise as ‘alternative’ movements are assimilated to the mainstream is a topic also considered in David Goodman’s chapter. Surveying aspects of space and place in relation to alternative food networks, he pays attention to the appropriation of signifiers of quality which emerged through more or less oppositional movements, such as organic, fair trade or local, by large corporations and supermarkets.
Other chapters each engage more specifically with spaces, rather than with how things move through or across space. The contribution by Laing, Newholm and Hogg is the only one to consider virtual space in relation to consumption, and they do so from a distinctive angle by considering the effect of the internet and the information and communication it enables, in destabilizing established relations of trust and authority in the encounters constituting the consumption of professional services, such as in healthcare. Considering a much more bounded space, McNeill and McNamara explore the development of the corporate ‘boutique’ hotels in 1980s New York, as a case study of the co-evolution between the design of consumption spaces and patterns and tastes of consumers. Taking a different scale of ‘consumption space’, Redclift traces the shifting historical constitution of space and place in relations of production and consumption with and of the Mexican Caribbean coast. This historical narrative contrasts strongly with the preceding chapter by Clarke, which draws on psychoanalytical theory to explore fetishization and seduction in relation to spaces of consumption.
Consuming Space shares with many edited collections a sense that more could have been done to make it more than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, across its diverse chapters, a reader can find both engaging empirical accounts and stimulating analyses which speak to contemporary preoccupations in the lively field of geographies of consumption.