Neil Maycroft

Cultural consumption and the myth of life-style

The concept of life-style seems to have been thoroughly naturalised, both academically and in common parlance. There is little critical interrogation of what life-style involves, beyond its connection to cultural and aesthetic aspects of consumption. What are the implications of accepting this culturalised description of consumption and its shorthand designation, ‘lifestyle’? This polemical paper interrogates both the linguistic and conceptual challenges associated with the term, and argues that it acts to efface and erase important social differences of wealth, opportunity, class, gender and ethnicity, as well as obscuring global and historical inequalities.

Designing with Waste

Concern about the over-use of irreplaceable resources increases as the global population increases. A global divide between and within societies results in many communities living in extreme poverty. These communities are consequently forced to create many wares from waste materials, broken, and abandoned objects. Where survival needs predominate, basic objects are being produced from the waste of others. The need to create items from waste is setting an unexpected and ingenious example to more prosperous societies and one can see the emergence of a global community of designers and other enthusiastic advocates who point to the significance of such vernacular innovation. The development and increasing visibility of a generation of designers that is embracing the need to upcycle is addressed here. The aim is to demonstrate how ingenuity, circumstance, and the guiding hand of design can work together to change perceptions of the value of both materials and making practices.

Repetition and Difference: Lefebvre, Le Corbusier and Modernity's (Im)moral Landscape: A Commentary

This article engages with the relationship between social theory, architectural theory and material culture. The article is a reply to an article in a previous volume of the journal in question (Smith, M. (2001) ‘Repetition and difference: Lefebvre, Le Corbusier and modernity’s (im)moral landscape’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 4(1), 31-34) and, consequently, is also a direct engagement with another academics scholarship. It represents a critique of their work as well as a recasting of their ideas, arguing that the matter in question went beyond interpretative issues to a direct critique of another authors scholarship on both Le Corbusier and Lefebvre. A reply to my article from the author of the original article was carried in a later issue of the journal (Smith, M. (2002) ‘Ethical Difference(s): a Response to Maycroft on Le Corbusier and Lefebvre’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 5(3), 260-269).

Re-valorizing Rubbish: Some Critical Reflections on ‘Green’ Product Strategies

This article critically engages with green product strategies propounded by various radical designers and environmentalists. The beneficial environmental effects expected from adopting such strategies are critiqued by locating them within the political ecology of capitalisl social relations.

Satirising the bourgeois worldview: Patrick Hamilton's Impromptu in Moribundia

As well as being a cultural product itself, literature provides a means for the critical interrogation of the processes of cultural production and consumption in class-structured capitalist society. Realist narrative, utopian speculation and dystopian conjecture have all been used to good effect. So, too, have satire and fable, and these come together in a neglected and largely forgotten novel from 1939, Impromptu in Moribundia,1 written by the bourgeois Marxist Patrick Hamilton. Though dated in many ways, and clearly rooted in a particular social and political context, this fabulous tale, nevertheless, retains interest for those wishing to critique the production of the bourgeois cultural worldview.2