Geographies of retailing and consumption

In this, the first of three reports on geographies of retailing and consumption, I will attempt to map out and delimit the boundaries of this large and growing research area. From being one of the most undertheorized and ‘boring of fields’ (Blomley, 1996), retail geography has come to occupy a central position within social-scientific research. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that the spaces, places and practices of consumption, circulation and exchange lie at the very heart of a reconstructed economic geography (Crang, 1997), and that retailing is in many ways redefining the economic and cultural horizons of contemporary Britain (Mort, 1995). Quite how such a transformation has occurred forms the basis of the following account. Part of the problem with early work in retail geography was its inability to take either its economic or its cultural geographies seriously, the result being a largely descriptive and all too often simplistic mapping of store location, location, location. While many cultural theorists, historians and anthropologists at the time were exploring the ways in which retailing and consumption spaces act as key sites for the (re)production of meanings and the constitution of identities (Leach, 1984; Wolff, 1985; Benson, 1986; Abelson, 1989; Buck-Morss, 1989; Dowling, 1991; Williamson, 1992), retail geographers were slow to interrogate the ways in which consumer spaces can be at once material sites for commodity exchange and symbolic and metaphoric territories. The result was that retail geographies throughout much of the 1980s remained woefully undertheorized (Blomley, 1996). This early emphasis on retailers and store location activities served to ‘misrepresent both the wider structure of the commodity channel and the status of consumption in shaping retail change’ (Clarke, 1996: 295). However, the decade of the 1990s was a period when a reconstructed retail geography began to take shape, stimulated in part by Ducatel and Blomley’s (1990: 225) Progress in Human Geography 24,2 (2000) pp. 275–290