ABSTRACT
Much of the so-called ‘post-modern’ writing on the city at the end of the twentieth century is preoccupied with images of the casual affluent shopper-a modern-day flâneur cruising the fashionable shops of a gentrified downtown street or the latest up-market suburban shopping mall. Images of this kind are also the stock in trade of much contemporary television and billboard advertising: the city is constantly reconstructed as a site of playful activity as well as a place of comfort and aesthetic pleasure, whether by reference to bright city lights or, as in so many recent examples in Britain, to European-style arcades and squares in the evening light.
