Ariadna Sabina MARTINEZ, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico UNAM, Mexico
Pedro GUIMARAES, Instituto de Geografia y Ordenamiento Territorial (IGOT), Portugal
Patricia OLIVERA, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico UNAM, Mexico
The intensification of consumption is a priority of the dominant contemporary urban society, promoting the creation of innovative environments to expand the consumption of the ever-increasing diversity of products, objects, and services. By implementing technologies, experiences, advertising, and aestheticization, the city becomes a themed showcase for variegated stores, retails, streets, squares, parks, shopping streets. Thus, the city consumerspaces bring together spatialities, temporalities, and the creation of atmospheres with multiple forms.
A methodology of collecting visual materials and fieldwork is designed to show the diversity of consumerspaces. The research analyses different geographical locations in two cities. From high-end shopping destinations such as Pedregal, corporate centralities such as Santa Fe; or traditional city center shopping areas, subject to touristification issues, such as in Lisbon, among others. In all areas, one can find specific artificial, material, and symbolic attributes, forming environments that attract different types of consumers, including residents from diverse social classes and tourists, that value consumer objects for their aesthetics, spectacle, experience, prestige, and distinction atmospheres.
We found that the main transformations of urban spatiality are associated with the thematic forms of consumerspaces in the urban and social fabric, shaping spaces that articulate consumption in increasingly more comprehensive schedules and for various groups, in a contrasting mix and social segregation of induced consumers.
The research calls to be attentive to the subtle, constant, and even gentrifying thematization of consumption that translates into the loss and substitution of the place's cultural richness and authenticity of urban spaces, objects, services, and values, homogenizing commodification of consumption urban spatiality through marketing.
Mots clés : Consumerspaces|City thematization|Aestheticization|Authenticity and marketing
A102717PO