Shopping center: space consumption, everydayness and fetishism

Author(s)

Magno de Lara Madeira Filho

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Rio Claro. 2016-02-19.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Instituto de Geociências e Ciências Exatas. Rio Claro
• Defense date: 2015-12-18
• Advisor: Silvana Maria Pintaudi

Abstract

This thesis aims to discuss the place of the shopping mall in the space production process, identifying, through a historical analysis, the metamorphosis and the new meanings acquired by this spatial form. Before becoming a commercial space, the mall is a major real estate investment linked to financial capital. However, more than a consumption space it becomes a consumption of space stuck to the quotidian time, which allows such commercial form to become a concrete element of subjectivity process engendered by the space produced by the commodity form, which in turn reproduces and expands the commodification of the urban, allowing the analysis of reifying social relations characteristic of a historical moment where the consumption values gain centrality in the reproduction of urban society. The subjectivity held by the space commodity is illuminated with the theoretical and practical concept of fetishism of space, able to determine ways to use the space engendered by the market, revealing behaviors, ways of acting and thinking produced with the sole purpose of enabling the acceleration and reproduction of capital as well as to enhance the quotidian capitalist content imposed on the urban society in constitution. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 12/08282-2 - Imaging space consumption in the contemporaneity: Project for a critical study of Urban Geography
• Grantee: Magno de Lara Madeira Filho
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate