Devrim Umut Aslan
Teaching staff
Praxitopia : Co-constituting a vibrant local street through shopping
Author
Summary, in English
In the last decades shopping’s spatiotemporal manifestations are changed radically in conjunction with proliferation of car usage, internationalization of retail sector, and construction of out-of-town malls (Wrigley & Lowe, 1996; Mansvelt, 2005; Kärrholm & Nylund, 2011; Aslan & Fredriksson, 2017). However, the main empirical focus laid mostly on the mainstream and spectacular geographies of shopping; there is little literature on how shopping is enacted in “other” retail geographies, and how these geographies are co-constituted through enactments of shopping (cf. Jones et al., 2007; Rabikowska, 2010; Hall, 2012; Findlay & Sparks, 2012; Kuppinger, 2014; Carmona, 2015; Zukin et al., 2016; Clossick, 2017). Södergatan, a local shopping street in the ‘superdiverse’ southern part of Helsingborg, Sweden, was chosen as a case study for the study, which aims to contribute to the literature on retail geographies from sociocultural perspectives, through studying how enacted modes of shopping shape a local street into a lively urban space.
The study draws on “practice theory”, which supplies a profound conceptual vocabulary and dynamic epistemological gaze for concentrating on shopping as the main analytical unit (Schatzki, 1996, 2019; Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002; Warde, 2005, 2014; Shove et al., 2012). In order to grasp the enmeshed character of shopping in the street, complicated by cultural, spatial, temporal, material, and sensorial layers, video ethnography is employed as the umbrella research method (Pink, 2007). The research shows that there are some major modes of shopping that are enacted in the street; framed and analysed as convenience shopping, social shopping, shopping-in-destination, alternative shopping, and budget shopping. It is also shown that this mix of modes of shopping, bundling with each other, co-constitute the street into a meaningful and vibrant part of the city, by interacting with the shopping street’s sensomateriality in the states of engagement formulated as “onness”, “throughness”, “withness”, and “inness”, as well as entangling with its spatiotemporality in the directions of interrelation of “verticality”, “horizontality”, “circularity”, and “linearity”.
The study draws on “practice theory”, which supplies a profound conceptual vocabulary and dynamic epistemological gaze for concentrating on shopping as the main analytical unit (Schatzki, 1996, 2019; Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002; Warde, 2005, 2014; Shove et al., 2012). In order to grasp the enmeshed character of shopping in the street, complicated by cultural, spatial, temporal, material, and sensorial layers, video ethnography is employed as the umbrella research method (Pink, 2007). The research shows that there are some major modes of shopping that are enacted in the street; framed and analysed as convenience shopping, social shopping, shopping-in-destination, alternative shopping, and budget shopping. It is also shown that this mix of modes of shopping, bundling with each other, co-constitute the street into a meaningful and vibrant part of the city, by interacting with the shopping street’s sensomateriality in the states of engagement formulated as “onness”, “throughness”, “withness”, and “inness”, as well as entangling with its spatiotemporality in the directions of interrelation of “verticality”, “horizontality”, “circularity”, and “linearity”.
Department/s
- Department of Service Studies
- Faculty Office
Publishing year
2021-08-31
Language
English
Links
Document type
Conference paper: abstract
Topic
- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
Conference name
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2021
Conference date
2021-08-31 - 2021-09-03
Conference place
London, United Kingdom
Status
Published