Consumer Landscapes

Some cultures imbue their landscapes with explicit knowledge. In traditional Indigenous mythopoeia and place making, an understanding of the relationship between ancestor, spirit and place developed through learning via verbal and visual stories which related to the landscape itself. Song and dance is necessary before one can read the landscape (Munn 1996). These relationships are described and explained through ‘The Dreaming’, a religious belief that inscribes the Indigenous Australian culture with its meaning. The Dreamtime stories are both an explanation of how the world came to be, and a guide for environmental, social and cultural conduct and relations. Indigenous Australians have a pre-disposition therefore to read their natural landscapes as full of meaning, which in turn shapes and mould their very being. The explicit knowledge derived from the landscape in the case of indigenous Australians results in a strong sense of place.

To draw comparisons to our consumer culture, icons built of glass and steel containing shop after shop are the new meaning to our technological and information driven lives.  Like Indigenous Australians we read our environment and learn from it.  Our consumer spaces are the manifestations of our consumer culture and vice versa.  Our very disconnection from the origin of our products is materialised through typologies such as the shopping centre, casino’s, multiplexes, stock exchanges, the detached suburban house, mega retail stores, fast food establishments and the mixed use tower.  These new types begin to now dominate our urban morphology and thus fuel our consumer culture.  Through a mutation of the consumer type can a new culture be cultivated becoming the foundation or grounding of a new landscape where we may begin to understand the origin, the cause and effect of the things we consume?