ON SHOPPING & THE CITY:Lecture 5

1. RESISTANCE - Europe the Largest Theme park in the World- Identify the modes of resistance and their intended goal.- How is citizenship claimed/defined? How is a new European identity constructed?- Who are the winners and losers?

2. CONSUMPTION - Junk Space- What is junk space? What is it in relationship to non-space?- What is the relationship we have between space and consumption?- What do we build from here?

1. MOTHERSHIP (Doha, Sofia Al Maria)- What role does the Sheraton Hotel play in the story?- How does consumption become an act of resistance?- Identify the non-spaces in the story.

‘He wanted the shopping mall to be for suburbia what the public square was to old European cities.’ Badger 2012

‘Shopping is the medium by which the market has solidified its grip on our spaces, buildings, cities, activities, and lives.’ - Leong 2002

The Right to the City (Henri Lefebvre, 1968)

The right to the city is like a cry and a demand.

The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.

Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture.

One only has to open one's eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this generalized misery would not go without a picture of 'satisfactions' which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from it.

The Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1967)

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

1. Always carry a shopping bag.

{providence place mall}

2. Teenagers and elders make great researchers.

{brooklyn}{manhattan} {mumbai}

3. People are hungry for more than discounts.

4. Play to plan.