Clarke - Consumer Society and the Post-modern City

Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the city than in the country.

(Veblen 1994, 55)

Just as industrial concentration results in an ever increased production of goods, so urban concentration results in a limitless promotion of needs.

(Baudrillard 1998a, 65)

Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want.

(Plato, The Republic 2, 373b [Jowett 1871])

I have accrued an enormous number of debts in bringing this work to completion. The most direct I owe to two individuals with whom I have had the privilege of working most closely: Mike Bradford, who first sparked (and for a while nurtured) my interest in consumption; and Marcus Doel, a long-term collaborator whose unique brand of poststructuralist geography has proved enormously beneficial to my own thought processes. I should also like to acknowledge a debt to the late Antony Easthope and to Rob Lapsley, whose extra-mural course at the University of Manchester, Under French eyes, provided an extraordinarily pleasurable initiation into the rigours of poststructuralist thought. The present text will undoubtedly reveal the enormity of my debt to Zygmunt Bauman, whom, on occasion, has offered invaluable words of encouragement. In thanking him, I can only hope that the use to which I have put his ideas might do justice, in some small measure, to his own remarkable body of work.

In a somewhat different context, I would like to thank two Heads of Department at Leeds, John Stillwell and Graham Clarke (no relation), both of whom have been supportive of my work; even though it is, I suspect, relatively inscrutable from their own ardently positivist perspective. My sincere thanks also to everyone at Routledge, past and present, for their assistance, support, and, above all, patience. Sarah Carty, Andrew Mould and Ann Michael deserve my gratitude. I should also like to acknowledge the support of an ESRC Fellowship (award no. H52427002294), without which the time and means to explore the topic of consumption would not have been forthcoming. More formally, I acknowledge permission to include the following work as chapters of the present book: a version of Chapter 2 previously appeared in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 21(1), 218237. Thanks to Blackwell Publishers Ltd for permission to include this material, in amended form, here. Likewise, thanks to Carfax Publishers Ltd for permission to reprint the material comprising Chapter 3 from the review issue on Urban consumption of Urban Studies, 35(5 and 6), 865888, again in slightly amended form. I am once again grateful to Mike Bradford for his permission to include our jointly authored work as part of this book. Much of the material included here has been presented as seminars at a variety of institutions. Thanks to all those who offered valuable suggestions and posed challenging questions on such occasions. Thanks also to several generations of students taking my masters modules at Leeds, especially for turning up new references every time I thought I was on top of the literature. The staff of the Graphics Unit of the School of Geography, University of Leeds, and their counterparts at the University of Manchester, skilfully prepared Figures 1 and 4, and Figure 3, respectively. Thanks to all concerned for their efforts.

Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank a number of individuals who have read and offered comments on various parts of the manuscript, particularly Martin Purvis and Marcus Power. Thanks also to Jon Goss for providing perceptive comments on an earlier draft.