What is Consumption?

The word ”consume” often has a negative and fleeting connotation and the digital encyclopaedia Dictionary.com describes it as ”use up, to spend wastefully, to destroy”.  Thus the opposite of consumption would be to create, save, make and build.


To only assess consumption from encyclopaedias or opposites is therefore incorrect, because it would show only its negative sides. Or what about the current happenings with the American bank Bear Stearn and its collapse this spring, due to risky lendings to consumption; ”use up, to spend wastefully, to destroy”...


But to consume is at the same time something positive. We consume restaurant visits, theatre shows, travels, education and so forth. Many enriching and life enhancing experiences springs from consumption. To use the word destroy about a wonderful travel, a magical concert or a
university degree would be quite wrong. Consumption is quite simply both positive AND negative, from different aspects.  The David Report. Issue 9, 2008.

Humanistic geographers, phenomenologists such as Lefevbre, Heidegger, Sac and Malpas write of learning that one experiences through urban life.  The spaces and places designers conceive influence our core belief and being far further than the confines of their walls and streets and cities, rather they are powerful pieces of information, collected and stored by those inhabiting them as themselves. The nature of phenomenology reveals a far more powerful communication tool, urban learning.  It is here that architects and urban planners can impact through the consumer spaces they conceive.  Is there an opportunity to design new social spaces around a connection between product maker and consumer? 

We are continually bombarded throughout our daily lives by mass media urging us to consume more.  The movie “Minority Report” theorises that future advertising will be so specific that advertisements will be delivered to us on every surface, personalised through retinal scanning and delivered via the vast amounts of collected personal digital  data we produce each time we push the power button on our computer.  If this is the future then what will become of our consumer spaces?  How will we learn from that environment?  

The old adage that “money (or stuff, in this case) can’t buy happiness” is a well recited yet culturally dismissed proverb.  What is the future of consumption considering the events of the previous year as the world crippled due to the worlds credit greed.  What future part will stuff and shopping play in our lives, where we may essentially come to the conclusion that we can’t shop our way to sustainability.  In our efforts for a culturally and environmentally sustainable world our society may either continue to buy as much stuff as we can store or discard, as long as its green and sustainable, or we could simply buy less stuff.  Research undertaken by The Encyclopedia of Earth, represented in the graph above, suggests that the latter is the way to go, however unrealistic.

This architectural thesis will attempt to account for both aforementioned consumption remedies but recognises that the latter is an ingrained deep rooted sociological issue of which architecture itself can be seen as “more stuff”.  Beginning with the undeniable assumption that we can’t discard consumption altogether, and that consumption has both good and bad connotations, can architecture and urban design mediate and mix, through the built environment, consumption spaces, factors of production, corporate social responsibility, necessity, and more, Can we as architects avoid types enabling “makeover consumption” and help members of society become aware of what their consumption patterns say about them and where their goods originate.