Place, modernity, and the consumer's world

To create successful consumer places, a retail store may be designed to look like the Australian outback. A museum may have the appearance of a department store. Travel tours may wend through "native" communities that stage "traditional" behavior. Umberto Eco calls this "authentication," or "instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake." In Place, Modernity, and the Consumer's World, geographer Robert Sack explores this phenomenon along with other problems of modernity, mass consumption, and advertising to present a dynamic picture of how space and place define the world of the consumer. He begins with the geographical premise that space and place provide a means by which we make sense of the world and through which we act. He expands this premise to form a relational framework for geographical analysis which is used to show how space is embedded in the realms of meaning, nature, and social relations. He proceeds to demonstrate how places are defined by the ways in which they bring together and transform these three realms. Sack then turns to the consumer's world, the shopping malls, department stores, theme parks, and resorts that form "the everyday landscape of mass consumption." He looks at how these places - together with the advertising that idealizes the way products are supposed to create places and contexts - are constructed and how they intentionally alter aspects of reality in such a way as to create those disorienting qualities associated with "postmodernism." Finally, Sack considers place as both an empirical and a moral concept, and establishes a geographical basis for making moral judgments about it. Using that framework, he finds that places of consumption impair judgment because they disguise the relationships between meaning, nature, and social relations.