ABSTRACT
The spaces of consumption include where commodities are sold and consumed, from impromptu markets or souks to more purpose-built department stores, supermarkets, shopping centres or malls. This chapter will concentrate mainly on department stores and shopping malls, since there is an historical unfolding of one into the other which opens up questions concerning the structure and use of such spaces. Malls in particular have been characterised as homogeneous and identical spaces across the world. Shopping malls, like theme parks, are held by some to be symptomatic of the McDonaldization of society, as we saw in Chapter 3. As usual, we can problematise such ‘top-down’ theories by focusing on the intricacies of the practices of everyday life, taking a ‘bottom-up’ approach that looks at how, exactly, these spaces are used, appropriated and, if only temporarily, taken over. Just as in identity, such spaces are subject to a dialectic of flux and fixity, at once given or imposed and fluid and malleable.
