Lizabeth Cohen

Is There An Urban History Of Consumption

It may seem at first take that consumption is not such a new lens through which to view changes in the cityscape, the physical look of cities, but I would remind you how deeply terms of production have infiltrated the language and conceptualization of urban history. We speak most often of the preindustrial city, the industrial city, the corporate city, the service city, the postindustrial city, and so forth, implying that the crucial engine generating urban change has been the production side of the economy. Without discounting the influence of the changing nature of production in shaping the city, by focusing on it exclusively we may miss the significance of consumption trends and choices in the making of the city, and the twentieth-century city in particular. What follows involves some speculation and the drawing out of larger implications from my own work to probe how the history of consumption may provide a helpful organizing framework for urban and metropolitan history of the twentieth century, and probably for earlier periods, although I will leave that to other specialists. I will focus on the United States, but I have little doubt that the pressures and challenges of consumption have shaped cities elsewhere as well. Hopefully, my observations will inspire those who work on non-U.S. cities to think in new ways about urban life in other parts of the world and all of us to think comparatively about the impact of consumption on city development. The history of consumption as a field has focused primarily on the image making of advertising, on one hand, and consumers’social identity and desires, as individuals or as part of communities usually defined by gender, class, or race, on the other. For many scholars, shopping is about more than what people buy, but usually historians of consumption focus on marketers’ manipulations or consumers’ preferences, not on the larger impact of consumer behavior on such things as the nation’s landscape or its political culture.