Imagining Community: Two Case Studies of the Construction of Inner City Community through Consumption

Abstract
This research is interested in the nature of community as it operates at the conjunction of consumption practices and place. In particular this research will focus on the ways that consumption experiences within quasi-public spaces may work to construct and reinforce community in the contemporary Australian inner city. The city has a long and problematic association with themes of place-based community; similarly the relationship between community and consumption is also challenging. This is primarily because place-based community has historically been idealised as being formed through embodied intimate social relations that reinforce shared value structures and a ‘common good’. City environments however, have been described as dominated by associative interactions, and consumption practices are primarily viewed as undertaken for the benefit of the individual only. At the same time however, quasi-public consumption spaces have a strong association in both research and popular culture as a site of communal gathering. This research proposes that postmodern conceptions of community offer a valuable means of considering how the emotional potential of the fleeting interactions that occur during consumption activities in such sites, may also work to create and reinforce experiences of shared value that can be interpreted as evidence of place-based community membership. This relies on an acceptance that both the social relations and shared value of place-based community can be abstracted to the extent that they are imagined as collective, but primarily work as a process of individual identity definition.

The problem this research will explore then, is if, and if so how, a community that is grounded in place can be constructed through an individual’s subjective interpretation of the secondary interactions and shared value that can be generated through consumption experiences within its cafes, bars and retail stores. This will be explored through two case studies undertaken in separate inner city contexts; one is an established neighbourhood, the other a yet to be constructed master-planned mixed-use development. The first case applies an autoethnographic method to investigate if, and if so, how, an individual’s experiences of consumption-based interaction within neighbourhood shopping spaces may be subjectively interpreted as evidence of community membership. The purpose of this case is to explore the extent to which an experience of place-based community can be imagined by an individual to be constructed through place-based consumption practices. The second case, conducted in partnership with a property developer, investigates the ways that an experience of the shared value of community may be constructed through the planned targeting of the value offerings and interaction capabilities of the shopping spaces within it. The purpose of this case is to explore the possibility of designing a retail precinct so as to maximise its potential as a site in which a postmodern version of place-based community can be constructed. Both cases therefore explore different but complementary aspects of the process of imagining an experience of community; how an individual may imagine it, and how a retail precinct may be designed so as to facilitate this imagining. Furthermore by considering this process from different stakeholder perspectives and in different neighbourhood contexts, these case studies also allow a broader evaluation of the possibility and potential of consumption-based interactions and shared value experiences to construct and reinforce place-based community in the contemporary inner city.

Team

Partners