Rambling Quotes for Essays
On City and Consumption:
- Consumption is ideological. The is an ideological arena and the contradictions of consumption. The consumption has a key role to play in maintaining social relationships between people and their physical environments.
- Urban form is an ideological and urban culture is the active project of the urban bourgeoisie who use a city as a means of asserting their social dominance. However much consumers’ interests are taken into account in urban planning, they are not and cannot be in control of the process. In short, (consumptive) ideologies are constructed for a purpose: to fulfill the aims of a powerful social group, at the expense of a less powerful social group.
- City is the site of consumption.
- The promotion and marketing of cities operates as form of socialization which is intended to convince local people that the commodification of the city is entirely positive and that their role within this process is valued. The process itself is commodity aestheticism.
- The impact of consumption upon the city may give an impression of city life, very different to that which is felt on the ground.
- In a open market, discourse places do indeed become “commodified”, regarded as commodities to be consumed and as commodities that can be rendered attractive, advertised and marketed much as capitalists would any product, and we hence need to appreciate the constituents of this discourse – considering as we do the various turns that the discourse takes for different “actors” in the process – and their various practical consequences.
