Archaeologies of City Life: Commercial Culture, Masculinity, and Spatial Relations in 1980s London

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 573-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Mort
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
City Life ◽  
Cultural Transformations

Studies of contemporary systems of consumption across the humanities and social sciences are frequently shadowed by a recurrent problem. Difficulties centre on the tendency to construct a set of general theories, pitched at high levels of abstraction, about the economic and cultural transformations which have been associated with recent shifts in the structure of demand. It is argued that such a synthetic use of the concept of consumption cannot grasp the specificities of particular market sectors and their attendant forms of cultural and spatial relations. In this paper I propose a more precise and grounded focus to study the formation of a particular regime of gendered commerce in one area of London during the 1980s. The study demonstrates the ways in which a distinctive grouping of media professionals and cultural entrepreneurs occupied a pivotal role in the transformations taking place in Soho during this period. Shifts in the material and symbolic structures of social space were central to this process of urban change, which drew on earlier representations of city life to claim cultural authority. It was this metropolitan regime which actively shaped the production of a series of identifiable masculine identities. Such personas were plural and diverse, rather than unified and monolithic. The product of different masculine communities in the area, they were linked by consumer culture, but differentiated by their access to heterosocial or homosocial space.

Spaces of Consumption in American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 391-410
Author(s):  
Gary Totten
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter discusses how consumer culture affects the depiction and meaning of the natural world in the work of American realist writers. These writers illuminate the relationship between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space into what Henri Lefebvre terms “social space” implicated in the processes and power dynamics of production and consumption. The representation of nature as social space in realist works demonstrates the range of consequences such space holds for characters. Such space can both empower and oppress individuals, and rejecting or embracing it can deepen moral resolve, prompt a crisis of self, or result in one’s death. Characters’ attempts to escape social space and consumer culture also provide readers with new strategies for coping with their effects.

scholarly journals What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Ecological Citizenship ◽  
Contemporary Media

Questions of cultural citizenship and risk have become central to contemporary sociological debates. This paper seeks to relate these concerns to a discussion of ecological citizenship and questions of visual and commercial culture. In the first section, I argue that ecological citizenship needs to avoid a moralistic rejection of the pleasures of contemporary visual and consumer culture. Such a possibility I argue has become evident in recent debates on the risk society. However, I argue despite Beck's realisation that questions of risk become defined through contemporary media his analysis remains overly distant from more everyday understandings. In order to address this question, I seek to demonstrate how an interpretative understanding of visual culture (in this case the 1995 film Safe) might help us develop more complex understandings of the competing cultures of risk and citizenship.

urban consumer culture

2005 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 692-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
deborah davis
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
New Consumer ◽  
Material Standard Of Living ◽  
Material Standard

over the past decade, urban residents have experienced a consumer revolution at multiple levels. in terms of material standard of living, sustained economic growth has dramatically increased spending on discretionary consumer purchases and urbanites have enthusiastically consumed globally branded foodstuffs, pop-music videos and fashion. at the same time, however, income distribution has become increasingly unequal. some scholars therefore emphasize the negative exclusionary and exploitative parameters of the new consumer culture seeing nothing more than a ruse of capitalism or marker of all that is negative about post-socialist city life. building on nearly a decade of fieldwork in shanghai, this article disputes such a linear interpretation of subordination and exclusion in favour of a more polyvalent and stratified reading that emphasizes individual narratives unfolding against memories of an impoverished personal past, and a consumer culture that simultaneously incorporates contradictory experiences of emancipation and disempowerment.

scholarly journals Poder, sexo e línguas no marxismo à brasileira

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (31) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Lidiane Soares Rodrigues
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Linguistic Capital ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Asymmetry

Em sondagem realizada junto a marxistas brasileiros, as principais filiações distribuíram-se do seguinte modo: Gramsci(nianos) reuniu 33,2% da população; Lukács(ianos), 25,8%; Escola de Frankfurt(ianos), 10,5% e Althusser(ianos), 7,2%. A mesma sondagem indagou a fluência em língua estrangeira, obtendo respostas para: espanhol, de 49% da população; para inglês, de 46,0%; para francês, de 20%; para italiano, de 8% e, para alemão, de 2,9% (a cifra de 26% declarou não ter fluência em idioma estrangeiro). É notável que a língua nativa dos autores não corresponda à língua estrangeira de mais domínio dos marxistas (por exemplo, enquanto 33,2% são gramscinianos; apenas 8% declaram-se fluentes em italiano). Esta decalagem indica que o domínio da língua nativa dos autores de filiação consiste num recurso diferencial que confere vantagens  competitivas aos agentes. O presente artigo tratará dos efeitos da assimetria de capital linguístico no espaço social dos marxistas brasileiros.Palavras-chave: Marxismo. Ciências  sociais brasileiras. Capital linguístico.Power, sex and languages among brazilian marxistsAbstractIn a survey of Brazilian Marxists, the main affiliations were distributed as follows:-Gramsci(nianos) gathered 33.2% of the population; Lukács(ianos), 25.8%; Frankfurt(ianos) School, 10.5% and Althusser(ianos), 7.2%. The same survey asked for fluency in a foreign language, obtaining answers for: Spanish, 49% of the population; English, 46.0%; French, 20%; Italian, 8%; and German, 2.9% (the figure of 26% declared to have no fluency in a foreign language). It is notable that the native language of the authors does not correspond to the foreign language most spoken by Marxists (for example, while 33.2% are gramscinese; only 8% are fluent in Italian).This difference indicates that mastery of the native language of the authors of affiliation is a differential resource which gives a competitive advantage to the agents. This article will deal with the effects of the asymmetry of linguistic capital on the social space of Brazilian Marxists.Keywords: Marxism. Brazilian Social sciences. linguistic capital.

Selling Yourself: The Commercialization of Feeling in the Work of Sophie Calle

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Emotional Demands

This article argues that Sophie Calle's desire to become her own work of art exists in tension with the fear of becoming a mere product for consumption. Recognising this fear of commodification allows us to view Calle's work from a couple of new angles. Firstly, it tells a compelling story about contemporary emotional life, in particular, the emotional demands made of women. Drawing on sociological perspectives, this article will explore Calle's work in relation to a commercial culture that turns the traditionally ‘feminine’ emotional domain into a lucrative resource. Secondly, it allows us to see Calle's art-making as a form of defence against this injunction to ‘sell oneself’. In a consumer culture in which one's sense of a private self is pushed further and further into a corner, art appears as a refuge in which one's creative singularity may be preserved.

scholarly journals Shopping with violence: Black Friday sales in the British context

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Smith ◽  
Thomas Raymen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Black Friday

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as ‘extreme shoppers’ and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture.

scholarly journals New Nollywood: A Sketch of Nollywood’s Metropolitan New Style

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connor Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Distribution Method ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
City Life ◽  
Select Group ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Economic Forces

Abstract:Recent experimentation by Nollywood producers has encouraged increasing differentiation of film practices as a strategy for contending with a demanding video market. “New Nollywood” refers to a select group of aesthetically sophisticated films intended for a new tiered distribution method, beginning with theatrical release and ending with DVD release. Nigeria’s upscale multiplex cinemas are therefore a starting point for examining what is new—and not so new—in Nollywood. This article argues that New Nollywood films and the cinemas in which they appear appeal directly to spectators’ senses by promising not only a movie and shopping, but also an affective experience closely bound up with global consumerism. The films exhibit a metropolitan vantage point that emphasizes subjects such as airline travel, trendy technology, consumer culture, global pop culture, lifestyle brands, high fashion, and luxury goods. These films advertise their “modernity,” which is not presented as a consolidated order of knowledge and values, but rather as an assemblage of signifiers of city life. Whereas mainstream Nollywood continues to produce strong narratives that resonate with its intended audience, New Nollywood—with its emphasis on images and style—is a direct expression of the cultural and economic forces shaping life in Lagos today.

scholarly journals Urban Connective Syntax: Re-Imagining the Connective Relationshops of Social Space in Toronto’s Downtown Core

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Smart
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
City Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
City Core ◽  
The City

Urban metropolitan city-centers offer the most complex, socially connective environments in the built world. The social structures fundamentally embedded in city life are, however increasingly being overshadowed by an isolating system of city densification. The City of Toronto, as a territory of exploration, is one of many cities that are evolving a dense array of restrictive boundaries that increasingly challenge human connectivity, and the deep-rooted ability of these environments to establish vibrant city life. It is the role of architecture to mediate the relationships between the public and private territories and to understand how these environments are utilized and engaged by the surrounding context. This thesis has extracted critical environmental components exemplified in city, community, and building territories, and has re-integrated these defining characteristics into an alternative design strategy that establishes a balanced symbiotic relationship between the private and public realms of Toronto’s future City Core.

Efficient Graph Matching

2011 ◽  
pp. 736-743 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Reforgiato Recupero
Keyword(s):  
Graph Matching ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Graph Searching ◽  
Complex Objects ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Query Graph ◽  
Regular Path ◽  
Web Graph ◽  
Association Graphs

Application domains such as bioinformatics and web technology represent complex objects as graphs where nodes represent basic objects (i.e. atoms, web pages etc.) and edges model relations among them. In biochemical databases proteins are naturally represented as labeled graphs: the nodes are atoms and the edges are chemical links. In computer vision, graphs can be used to represent images at different levels of abstraction. In a low-level representation (Pailloncy, Deruyver, & Jolion, 1999), the nodes of a graph correspond to pixels and the edges to spatial relations between pixels. At higher levels of description (Hong & Huang, 2001), nodes are image regions and edges are spatial relations among them. In a Web graph (Deutsch, Fernandez, Florescu, Levy, & Suciu, 1999) nodes are web pages and edges are links between them. In all these domains, substructure queries that search for all exact or approximate occurrences of a given query graph in the graphs of the database can be useful. Research efforts in graph searching have taken three directions: the first is to study matching algorithms for particular graph structures (planar graphs, bounded valence graphs and association graphs); the second is to use elaborate tricks to reduce the number of generated matching maps (Cordella, Foggia, Sansone, & Vento, 2004); and the third is, since graph searching problem is NP-complete, to provide polynomial approximate algorithms. In the context of querying in a database of graphs many of the existing methods are designed for specific applications. For example, several querying methods for semi-structured databases have been proposed. In addition, commercial products and academic projects (Kelley 2002) for subgraph searching in biochemical databases are available. These two examples have a different underlying data model (a web-page database is a large graph whereas a biochemical database is a collection of graphs). In these two applications regular path expressions and indexing methods are used during query time to respectively locate substructures in the database and to avoid unnecessary traversals of the database. In general graph databases, there are some searching methods where the data graph and the query graph must have the same size. Other methods allow the query to be considerably smaller than the database graphs. A common idea in the above algorithms is to index the subgraph matches in the database and organize them in suitable data structures.

scholarly journals Engaging City Residents in Climate Action: Addressing the Personal and Group Value-Base Behind Residents’ Climate Actions

Urbanisation ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 245574712096519
Author(s):  
Thijs Bouman ◽  
Linda Steg
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Personal Values ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Climate Mitigation ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
The Rich

Cities can play a pivotal role in accelerating climate action, that is, climate mitigation and adaption. Yet, the success of cities’ climate strategies strongly depends on the cities’ residents, who often have to accept, adopt, undertake and participate in climate actions. This article discusses how a better understanding of city residents’ motives—particularly the personal and group values that underlie their climate actions—could foster climate action in cities. Importantly, it engages with the rich literature in the social sciences on personal values, which—though typically overlooked by policy makers—highlights the relevance of focussing on personal biospheric values (i.e., caring about nature and the environment) in explaining and promoting residents’ climate actions. Additionally, the article provides novel insights into how perceived biospheric group values (i.e., the extent to which relevant groups are perceived to endorse biospheric values) can strengthen the value-base for climate actions, particularly among those residents who weakly endorse biospheric values. Critically, it provides concrete examples of how cities can strengthen the group value-base for climate actions, thereby showing how cities can play a unique role in engaging residents in climate action.

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