ABSTRACT

Geographical research on consumption has expanded dramatically in the last decade, transcending traditional divisions in the subject between the economic and the cultural and coming to occupy something of a vanguard position. Traditionally, economic geographers have concentrated on the location of economic activity and, more recently, on the transition from Fordist to more flexible modes of production, charting the shift from manufacturing to service industries and tracing out the evolution of an increasingly global economy. In contrast, social and cultural geographers have traditionally been more concerned with the distribution of goods and services (particularly items of collective consumption such as education and public housing), focusing on inequalities of gender, race and class. But, like economic geographers, they, too, tended to ignore many areas of everyday consumption such as shopping, advertising and the media. Today, an understanding of the processes of consumption is central to debates about the relationship between society and space. Geographical perspectives on consumption-and on the dialectics of globalisation and localisation, and the shifting boundaries of the public and the private-have begun to command attention across the social sciences as part of a growing interdisciplinary concern with ‘mapping the futures’ (Bird et al. 1993).