School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemShopping City: Transience, Consumption and the Urban in Contemporary Japan( 2021)“Shopping City” explores how consumption and mobile lifestyles shape the urban experience. It is based on an ethnography carried out between May 2017 and February 2018 in a newly built shopping mall in a Tokyo suburb that is adjunct to a railway station. The exploration of this railway station shopping mall exhibits two aspects that contribute to our understanding of the relationship between consumption and mobility. Firstly, it serves as a node within the urban public transport network in which activities related to shopping, leisure or child rearing all take place on the move. It is, thus, a place characterised by a constant circulation of people, information, and material culture. Secondly, the shopping mall constitutes a field of experimentation as it allows its visitors to explore a variety of urban cultures in a familiar environment and to experience them vicariously through symbolically loaded commodities. Acknowledging these cultural connections that the shopping mall has with places that are situated beyond its premises the latter chapters of this thesis are aimed at an analysis of those cultural practices and lifeworlds that are emulated and commodified in the shopping mall. Taking on a journeying approach, these chapters consider how Japanese interpretations of urban cultures such as gangsta rap or skateboarding are reflected in the shopping mall’s range of goods. Underlying these parts of the thesis are themes of suburban versus urban consumer culture and of the need for safety versus the desire for experiencing the urban ‘untamed’. The thesis aims to explore these fields not by treating them as fundamentally opposed but as relational. Because the different parts of the ethnography for this thesis were conducted in places that are characterised by constant flux and fleeting encounters the thesis is based on the deployment of mobile research methods that are meant to capture the transience of the consumer experience of urban and suburban dwellers.