ABSTRACT
While studies of urban consumption have predominantly focused on middle-class consumption cultures there has also been a growing focus on other urban identities. Working-class cultures, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and subcultural style are also central to urban consumer culture. This chapter reviews this progress, and looks at the experience of being poor in a consumer society and how the extremes of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are written on to the urban landscapes. Gendered consumption, ethnicity, sexuality and subcultural style are also discussed. The chapter is framed through Miles’s (1998a) depiction of the ‘consuming paradox’, which shows that while individuals feel they can construct their own identities and sovereignty through consumption, consumption simultaneously plays an ideological role in controlling the character of everyday life-within a rationalised social framework which structures, enables and constrains our urban experiences.
