ABSTRACT
Consumption has been at the vanguard of advances in research across the social sciences over the past 30 years with studies offering important insights to advancing our critical understanding of place: drawing connections between politics and governance, economic restructuring and changes in employment; hand-in-hand with consideration of our everyday social and cultural lives. In this chapter I explore how sustained attention to ‘placing’ consumption can add value to theoretical and empirical scholarship. Sections begin with a review of strengths and weaknesses of ‘archetypal’ depictions of the ways in which consumption is moulded by place, and how places are moulded. I then highlight recent arguments regarding a need to move beyond theorization of place and consumption dominated by studies from a handful of large metropolises in Europe and North America, pointing to theoretical and empirical opportunities offered by the emergence of thinking on assemblages, materialities, mobilities, bodies, emotions and affect, etc.
