Transaction spaces : consumption configurations and city formation

City formation and urban everyday life consumption are formed by each other. This book explores these relationships from two angles by using various commodities and places as methodological examples. First, different commodities, consumption projects and associated spaces are explored. This involves shopping for clothes in fashion retail shops, browsing for books in bookstores as well as drinking coffee at cafés. Second, spatial practices of producers and users of consumer service spaces in the context of property development, urban politics and everyday life in Stockholm city centre are analysed. Transaction Spaces is a conceptual and explorative analysis of how commodity transaction situations are configured and constrained in time and space, and, how consumer service spaces for commodity transactions are formed in cities and how they are part of city formation. Throughout, commodity transactions are understood as socially and economically situated material projects and as projects performed by consumers, acting together with producers, in the urban drama. The thorough and multifaceted analysis in this book produces a comprehensive and valuable conceptual perspective on the relationships between consumption, city formation and urban everyday life. Lukas Smas is a researcher at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University. Trained in Human Geography and with a Master's Degree in Urban and Regional Planning, this is his doctoral dissertation.