URBAN CULTURES & CONSUMPTION
The focus of our research is to enhance understanding of urban landscapes and city living, particularly in the context of consumer culture. Urban cultures have become a vital area of geographical research over recent decades. We are dedicated to contributing cutting-edge work to this agenda by engaging in theoretically informed, empirically rich, and politically engaged research.
Our main research interests
Our work focuses predominantly on the contested meanings of the city, both past and present, as manifested across a variety of discursive sites, from recreational spaces and retail environments to public spaces. Key areas of engagement include the significance of consumer culture and processes of consumption to the changing nature and experience of urban life, and the practices of co-operation and conflict shaping the forms, meanings and uses of cities.
Understandings of the historical development of urban space and its contested nature in contemporary cultures form central components of our approach, which explores the ways in which meanings are embedded in cities and city-spaces, their manifestation in the urban environment, and their mediation by individuals, communities and social movements, and through cultural forms and practices. Thinking about urban lifestyles and urban terrains as contested spaces in an era characterised by choice and risk forms a link to a second key focus: consumption.
Exploring the impress of consumption and consumerist lifestyles on the city and on urban life is another key aspect of the cluster's research agenda. Work on spaces of consumption and city living (from domestic and retail sites to recreational spaces such as parks and nightclubs) lends a distinctive emphasis to our recent research. By engaging with major theoretical debates on the changing forms and meanings of cities, and by employing a range of innovative approaches, we aim to enhance critical understandings of urban cultures and consumption, in both historical and contemporary cities, across a variety of cultural contexts and locations.
