PRODUCTION OF CONSUMING SPACES: A CULTURAL APPROACH BASED ON THEORIES OF EVERYDAY LIFE
ZHANG Min1,2, XIONG Guo1
1. Department of Urban Planning, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China;
2. Human GeographyResearch Center of Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
Abstract This paper briefly reviews the research on consuming spaces. which shows that cultural approach and the combination approach of cultural, social, economic and political are more prominent, and tries to frame a cultural research on consuming spaces with the aspect of everyday life, using the theory of production of space. Firstly, the paper puts forward everyday life as a universal and connective sphere to the research on consuming spaces by expounding the concept of everyday life. Secondly, based on the everyday life perspective, this paper explains the cultural significance of consumption and consuming spaces, points out that the consumption has very characteristics of everyday life's contradictoriness and great potential of subversion everyday life. On the one hand, the consumption is dominated by series of symbols. The production of consuming spaces becomes a construction of symbols through the cooperation of capital expansion and social structure, which can be called the space representation. On the other hand, the creative of everyday life forms the representation of consuming space. Thirdly, the paper takes everyday life's habit and discipline, resistance and poetic, which mainly come from social structures, top or dominant systems of certain society and styles of everyday life respectively, as the core dynamics of the production of consuming spaces. The relative stability and continuous change of habit gives social security and motivation of change to the practice of consumption space. Discipline which presently comes from the power of capital, by the means of symbol (and even sign), set up the dominant space of consumption. Resistance and poetic are from the inner of everyday life, continuously rewrites the existing consuming space, the right way and result is representational spaces. Finally, the paper concludes a frame of the production of consuming space on the point of everyday life.
2013, Vol. 28 
