consumption society essay

Consumption and Society

Consumption and Society  publishes articles that advance understandings of consumption as a societal phenomenon, embedded in, and constitutive of, socio-economic, material and cultural configurations. The field of consumption studies was an early touchstone for major debates on macro-social change, especially around the issues of globalisation and aestheticization. Following in this tradition,  Consumption and Society  aims to revitalise the relevance of consumption studies for the societal challenges of the 21st Century. The journal contributes to debates on contested aspects of consumption, such as environmental impacts, digitalisation, the shifting balance of collective versus private consumption, commodification and inequalities. Read more about Consumption and Society. 

Frequency: January,   May, September

‘Definitely plan to read them’: cultural goodwill as habitus of a middle class-in-the-making in Czech Republic

Sustainability, class and social change: implications for sufficiency studies, living with oral appliances: consumption, health and oral care practices, the impact of low-carbon consumption options on carbon footprints in the nordic region, strong daily routinisation, weak energy flexibility: a survey study of the stability and adaptability of everyday energy practices, expressions of high status: a comparative synthesis by jean-pascal daloz (2022), book symposium, swamped in dinosaurs with led lights: negotiating sustainability in a high-consumption society, can sufficiency become the new normal exploring consumption patterns of low-income groups in norway, understanding interrelated practices and their climate-related consequences: exploring food, mobility and housing in everyday life, welfare within planetary limits: deep transformation requires holistic approaches, volume 3 (2024): issue 1 (jan 2024).

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Aims and scope Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Testimonials Contact us

Aims and scope

Consumption and Society  publishes articles that advance understandings of consumption as a societal phenomenon, embedded in, and constitutive of, socio-economic, material and cultural configurations. The field of consumption studies was an early touchstone for major debates on macro-social change, especially around the issues of globalisation and aestheticization. Following in this tradition,  Consumption and Society  aims to revitalise the relevance of consumption studies for the societal challenges of the 21st Century. The journal contributes to debates on contested aspects of consumption, such as environmental impacts, digitalisation, the shifting balance of collective versus private consumption, commodification and inequalities.

Consumption and Society  is affiliated with the  European Sociological Association's Research Network on the Sociology of Consumption (ESA RN5)  and the  Sustainable Consumption Research & Action Initiative (SCORAI) Europe , as well as the  British Sociological Association’s Consumption Study Group . A key feature of the journal is to reflect the pluralism of these networks, as well as of the field of consumption studies more broadly. While anchored in the sociological understanding of consumption, the journal welcomes submissions from a diverse range of cognate disciplines and fields, including: anthropology, geography, gender studies, history, marketing and Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), media and communication studies, political science, Science and Technology Studies, and environmental social sciences.

The Editors invite empirical , theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of consumption as a societal phenomenon. Diverse methodological and theoretical approaches are welcome. Principally,  Consumption and Society  publishes peer reviewed, theoretically informed empirical papers, as well as purely theoretical contributions. The journal also publishes other formats, including Keyword Essays, Book Review Essays, Book Reviews and Conversations. The Editors welcome proposals for Special Issues and Special Sections to promote novel research agendas, as well as proposals for innovative and novel formats.

Consumption and Society  actively seeks contributions from beyond Europe and North America and is committed to promoting scholarship from the Global South. The journal is also committed to supporting emerging, early career researchers.

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion statement outlines the ways in which we seek to ensure that equity, diversity and inclusion are integral to all aspects of our publishing, and how we might encourage and drive positive change. 

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Testimonials 

"Consumption is an increasingly important part of contemporary life, contributing to the most urgent problems facing the globe - climate destabilization, inequality, and the failures of capitalism. Scholars' previous paradigms for understanding consumption are increasingly inadequate, as we grapple with profound changes to how people live. This new journal will be an important outlet for the latest theory and research, and will help us to redefine the field." Juliet Schor , Professor of Sociology, Boston College, USA

"From the perspective of sustainable consumption as a scholarly field, this journal is a welcome venue for serious scholars to exchange ideas and report significant research findings."  Halina S. Brown , co-founder of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) and Professor Emerita of Environmental Science and Policy, Clark University, USA

Editorial enquiries:

Editorial team:  [email protected]

Open Access, subscriptions and free trials:

Bristol University Press:  [email protected]

Read our instructions for authors for guidance on how to prepare your submissions. The instructions include the following: 

What are we looking for? How to submit an article Ethical guidelines Copyright and permissions Style Alt-text References English language editing service Open Access Self-archiving and institutional repositories How to maximise the impact of your article Contact us

Visit our  journal author toolkit for resources and advice to support you through the publication process and beyond

What are we looking for?

Consumption and Society  publishes original research articles, keyword essays, book review essays, book symposia, book reviews, and conversations.

• Research Articles:  We invite theoretically informed empirical papers, as well as theoretical and methodological pieces, that contribute to the understanding of consumption as a societal phenomenon. Papers should be no more than 8,000 words including any references, tables, figures etc. but not including the abstract (250 words). All research articles undergo a  double anonymous peer review  process.

If you are interested in contributing pieces in any of the following categories, please  contact the Editors  to discuss. The following types of contributions are reviewed internally by members of the Management Board. 

• Keyword Essays  explore a concept, term, or other keyword of importance to consumption studies. They should be between 3,000 – 4,000 words, not including the abstract (250 words) and bibliography; they are published alongside two commissioned responses/discussions of approximately 1,000 words each.
• Book Review Essays  review three or four related books of relevance to the field and should be no more than 3000 words.  
• Book Symposia  are a dialogue between at least two people reviewing the same book or books and the overall word count should be approximately 4,000 words.
• Book Reviews  discuss the contribution of a recently published book in approximately 1000 words.   
• Conversations  present exchanges on the work of one of more scholar(s) or practitioner(s), discussing conceptual, empirical and policy-relevant implications of research and practice; they should be no more than 4,000 words and can take the form of an interview or a discussion.  
• Commentaries  cover viewpoints over a contemporary issue that is relevant to the journal’s scope, in the form of an opinion piece on advancements in research, or on the relevance of consumption studies to current affairs. They can be commissioned by the journal, but we also consider unsolicited submissions which can range from 1,000 to 3,000 words.

The Editors welcome innovative proposals for other non-standard formats, as well as for journal special issues.

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How to submit an article

All submissions should be made online via the  Consumption and Society  Editorial Manager website:  https://www.editorialmanager.com/consoc/default1.aspx

Initial manuscript submission via Editorial Manager

Manuscripts must be in Word or Rich Text Format (not pdf). New users should first create an account, specify their areas of interest and provide full contact details.

Preparing your anonymised manuscript

Your initial submission must consist of the following  separate files :

• A cover page  including: the article title, author name(s) and affiliations (institution affiliation and country only, no department details required), the article abstract up to 250 words, up to 5 key words/short phrases and the article word count.  A cover page template is available to download here.
• A fully anonymised manuscript  which does not include any of the information included in the cover page. It should not include any acknowledgments, funding details, or conflicts of interest that would identify the author(s). References to the authors' own work should be anonymised as follows: "Author's own, [year]". Please note that submissions that have not been sufficiently anonymised will be returned.
• If you have any Figures and Tables  these must be uploaded as separate files at the end of the manuscript. Please indicate where they should be placed in the text by inserting: ‘Figure X here’ and provide numbers, titles and sources where appropriate. 
• Alt text:  In order to improve our accessibility for people with visual impairments, we ask authors to provide a brief description known as alt text to describe any visual content such as photos, illustrations or figures. It will not be visible in the article but is embedded into the images so a PDF reader can read out the descriptions. Guidance on how to write this is available here:  Bristol University Press | Alt-text guidance for authors .

For help submitting an article via Editorial Manager,  please view our online tutorial. Once a submission has been conditionally accepted, you will be invited to submit a final, non-anonymised version via Editorial Manager.

Checklist: what to include in your final non-anonymised manuscript:

A cover page including:

• Title : short and concise running title and, if necessary, a (short) informative subtitle;
• Author  names and affiliations;
• Abstract : no longer than 250 words, outlining the central question, approach/method, findings and take home message;
• Up to 5 keywords ;

The main manuscript including

• The non-anonymised text of your article:  8,000 words including the bibliography for peer-reviewed articles, but not including the abstract (250 words).
• Key messages : Each research article must include 3-4 ‘key messages’ summarising the main messages from the paper in up to four bullet points. The contribution made by the paper to the field should be clear from these key messages. Each bullet point must be less than 100 characters. These points may be used to promote your article on social media.
• Funding details : list any funding including the grant numbers you have received for the research covered in your article as follows: ‘This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].’ 
• Conflict of interest statement : please declare any possible conflicts of interest, or state ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest’ if there are none.
• Acknowledgements : acknowledge people who have provided you with any substantial assistance or advice with collecting the data, developing your ideas, editing or any other comments to develop your argument or text. 
• Figures and Tables : should be submitted as separate files. Figures should ideally be in an Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) file format. Please indicate where figures and tables should be placed in the text by inserting: ‘Figure/Table X here’ and provide numbers, titles and sources (where appropriate).
• Alt Text : In order to improve our accessibility for people with visual impairments, we now ask authors to provide a brief description known as alt text to describe any visual content such as photos, illustrations or figures. It will not be visible in the article but is embedded into the images so a PDF reader can read out the descriptions. Guidance on how to write this is available here: Bristol University Press | Alt-text guidance for authors .
• Supplementary data : Supplementary data can either be submitted with the manuscript or hosted in a data repository (such as figshare) and cited as a reference in the article.
• Journal Contributor Publishing Agreement:  please upload a scanned copy of the completed and signed  agreement with your final non-anonymised manuscript. The  Journal Contributor Publishing Agreement can be downloaded here .

Editorial review process

All submissions are first desk-reviewed by the editor(s) who will assess whether the manuscript fits the aims and scope as well as the quality standards of the journal. Papers that are selected to be sent out for review will be evaluated through double-anonymous peer review by at least two referees. Consumption and Society aims to return the reviews along with an initial decision within two months of submission.

Keyword essays, Book reviews, Book symposiums and Conversations are not externally peer reviewed; each contribution is reviewed by two journal editors.

Please also read our  Journals Editorial Policies  and  Ethical Guidelines .

Ethical guidelines

At Bristol University Press we are committed to upholding the highest standards of review and publication ethics in our journals. Bristol University Press is a member of and subscribes to the principles of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) , and will take appropriate action in cases of possible misconduct in line with COPE guidance.

Find out more about our ethical guidelines.  

Copyright and permissions

Consumption and Society  is published by Bristol University Press. Articles are considered for publication on the understanding that on acceptance the author(s) grant(s) Bristol University Press the exclusive right and licence to publish the article. Copyright remains with the author(s) or other original copyright owners and we will acknowledge this in the copyright line that appears on the published article.

Authors will be asked to sign a journal contributor agreement to this effect, which should be submitted online along with the final manuscript. All authors should agree to the agreement. For jointly authored articles the corresponding author may sign on behalf of co-authors provided that they have obtained the co-authors' consent.  The journal contributor agreement can be downloaded here .

Where copyright is not owned by the author(s), the corresponding author is responsible for obtaining the consent of the copyright holder. This includes figures, tables, and excerpts. Evidence of this permission should be provided to Bristol University Press.  General information on rights and permissions can be found here .

To request permission to reproduce any part of articles published in  Consumption and Society,  please email:  [email protected] .

For information on what is permissible use for different versions of your article please  see our policy on self archiving and institutional repositories .

• British English spelling and punctuation is preferred.
• Non-discriminatory language is mandatory. See our guidelines to sensitive language (Appendix C of document).
• Explanatory notes should be kept to a minimum. If it is necessary to use them, they must be numbered consecutively in the text and listed at the end of the article. Please do not embed notes in the text.
• Please do not embed bibliographic references in the text, footnotes, live links or macros; the final submitted file should be clear of track changes and ready for print.
• Tables and charts should be separated from the text and submitted in a Word or Excel file, with their placement in the text clearly indicated by inserting: ‘Table X here’. Please provide numbers, titles and sources (where appropriate).
• Figures, diagrams and maps should be separated from the text and, ideally, submitted in an Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) file. Figures created in Word or Excel are acceptable in those file formats. If the figures, diagrams and maps are in other formats (i.e. have been pasted into a Word file rather than created in it) please contact  [email protected]  for advice. Please indicate where figures should be placed in the text, by inserting: ‘Figure X here’ and provide numbers, titles and sources (where appropriate).

In order to improve our accessibility for people with visual impairments, we are now required to ask authors to provide a brief description known as alt text to describe any visual content such as photos, illustrations or figures. It will not be visible in the article but is embedded into the images so a PDF reader can read out the descriptions. See our guidance on writing alt-text .

Download the endnote output style  for Policy Press and Bristol University Press Journals.

Bristol University Press uses a custom version of the Harvard system of referencing:

• In-text citations: give the author’s surname followed by year of publication in brackets;
• List all references in full at the end of the article and remove any references not cited in the text;
• Book and journal titles should be in italics;
• Website details should be placed at the end of the reference;
• Spell out all acronyms in the first instance.

Example of  book reference : Aghtaie, N. and Gangoli, G. (2015)  National and international perspectives to gender based violence , Abingdon: Routledge.

Example of  journal reference : Williamson, E. and Abrahams, HA. (2014) ‘A review of the provision of intervention programmes for female victims and survivors of domestic abuse in the UK’,  Journal of Women and Social Work , 29(1): 178-191.

Example of  chapter within edited / multi-authored publication : Hester, M. (2012) ‘Globalization, activism and local contexts: Development of policy on domestic violence in China and England’, in MT Segal, EN Chow and V Demos (eds)  Social production and reproduction at the interface of public and private spheres , London: Emerald, pp 273-294.

Example of  website reference : Womensaid (2016)  What is domestic abuse? ,  https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/ .

Editorial Management Board

Marlyne Sahakian , Co-Editor,  University of Geneva, Switzerland  Stefan Wahlen , Co-Editor,  University of Giessen, Germany Dan Welch , Co-Editor,  University of Manchester, UK  Manisha Anantharaman , Associate Editor, SciencePro, France David Evans , Associate Editor,  University of Bristol, UK Ben Fine , Associate Editor,  SOAS,   University of London, UK Irmak Karademir-Hazir , Associate Editor,  Oxford Brookes University, UK  Tally Katz-Gerro , Associate Editor,  University of Haifa, Israel  Alan Warde ,   Associate Editor,  University of Manchester, UK  

Regional Editorial Representatives 

Africa:  Samuel Bonsu ,  Ghana Institute of Management & Public Administration, Ghana East Asia:  I-Liang Wahn ,  Tunghai University, Taiwan Latin America:   Tomas Ariztia , Universidad Diego Portales, Chile South Asia:   Czarina Saloma-Akpedonu , Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, Philippines

Editorial Advisory Board

Tomas Ariztia , Universidad Diego Portales, Chile Philip Balsiger , Institute of Sociology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland Samuel Bonsu , Ghana Institute of Management & Public Administration, Ghana Alison Browne , University of Manchester, UK Anna Davies , Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier , Sciences Po, France.  Arne Dulsrud , Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway Antonietta Di Giulio , University of Basel, Switzerland Frances Fahy , National University of Ireland, Ireland Francesca Forno , University of Trento, Italy Doris Fuchs , University of Munster, Germany Laurence Godin , Université Laval, Québec, Canada Mary Greene , Wageningen University, Netherlands Rafi Grosglik , Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Bente Halkier , University of Copenhagen, Denmark Arve Hansen , University of Oslo, Norway Eva Heiskanen , University of Helsinki, Finland Lotte Holm ,  University of Copenhagen, Denmark Emily Huddard Kennedy , The University of British Columbia, Canada María José Ibarrola-Rivas , Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico Tullia Jack , Lund University, Sweden Peter Jackson ,University of Sheffield, UK Eivind Jacobsen , Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway Charlotte Jensen , Aalborg University, Denmark Mikko Laamanen , Emlyon Business School, Lyon, France Senja Laakso , University of Helsinki, Finland Adrian Leguina ,   Loughborough University, UK Giullio Mattioli , Technical University of Dortmund, Germany Steven R. McGreevy , Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Japan Janna Michael , Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands  Lucie Middlemiss , University of Leeds, UK Barbara Muraca , University of Oregon, US Filippo Oncini , University of Manchester, UK Marie Plessz , National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), France Henrike Rau ,  Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, Germany Anders Rhiger Hansen , Aalborg University, Denmark Inge Røpke , Aalborg University, Denmark Roberta Sassatelli , University of Bologna, Italy Julia Steinberger , University of Lausanne, Switzerland Dale Southerton , University of Bristol, UK Yolanda Strengers , Monash University, Australia Frank Trentmann , Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Hilje van der Horst , Waginengen University, Netherlands Gordon Walker , Lancaster University, UK Rick Wilk , Indiana University Bloomington, USA Terhi-Anna Wilska , University of Jyväskylä, Finland Dunfu Zhang , Shanghai University, China Di Zhu , Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China

Call for Special Issues and Themed Sections Call for papers Contact us

Call for Special Issues and Themed Sections

The Editors of Consumption and Society invite proposals for Special Issues or Themed Sections, in the format described below. The Editors will announce their initial decisions on proposals received, and indicate those accepted for development and planned publication, at the latest four weeks after submission. 

What are we looking for in a Consumption and Society Special Issue or Themed Section? 

• The aim of a Special Issue or Themed Section is to bring together a set of cutting-edge research articles that develops a specific debate or topic on a theme relevant to the remit of Consumption and Society . This may include articles presenting theoretical, conceptual and/or empirical material. Read the Aims and Scope of the journal to learn more .
• A Special Issue or Themed Section must be integrated around a common theme and must take forward scholarly debate.
• Special Issues of Themed Sections should be international in scope unless specifically focusing on a geographical region and should aim to include authors from beyond the Global North.
• A Special Issue should contain 6 to 8 manuscripts, each of a maximum of 8,000 words including the bibliography, but not including the abstract.
• A Themed Section should contain 4 or 5 research articles, with the same word count.
• Special Issues / Themed Sections should be made up of invited contributions and guest editors should commission authors before submitting a proposal.
• Special Issues / Themed Sections may also contain special formats, such as conversations, keyword essays or commentaries, in addition to research articles. A list of the journal’s non-standard formats can be found in our Author Instructions .

How to present a Special Issue / Themed Section proposal for Consumption and Society

A special issue / themed section proposal must include ALL the following information:

• Title : This should clearly reflect the field and content of the proposal.
• Details of guest editor(s) : Provide contact details, institutional affiliations, and a short academic profile (of up to 150 words) for each proposed guest editor.
• Description : In no more than 750 words, outline the intellectual focus of the proposed, stating how its proposed content engages with significant issues, and the contribution it will make to the field of consumption studies.
• Draft contents page : This should set out the structure of the Special issue / Themed section, listing the titles and authors of each proposed research article and other formats.
• Article abstracts : An abstract for each article to be included in the collection must be provided.
• Timetable statement : Please include your timetable for initial submission, review, re-submission, copyediting, etc. Securing a full set of papers and other items usually takes 12-15 months from invitation to progress to acceptance. This includes a three-month production period (e.g. typesetting, final proofing etc.).  Guest editors will need to keep to agreed timescales. Peer reviewed papers normally require at least one set of revisions, and allowance must be made for review processes and for authors to amend drafts of their papers.
• Maximising impact : Please consider how you intend to promote and disseminate the Special Issue or Themed Section (blogs, events, conferences, other social media, etc.). An editorial statement outlining ten useful ‘top tips for impact’ is available at: http://policypress.co.uk/journals/maximise-your-impact .

What do we like to see in a Special Issue or Themed Section? 

• Editorial Article written by the guest editor(s) : Special Issues must include an editor(s)’ introduction; this will usually be shorter than a full paper. Guest editors should confirm their intention to provide an Editorial Article which must be accepted for publication at the production deadline for the journal. Guest editorials will be reviewed by the Editors.
• Consumption and Society Keyword essay : Proposers should indicate whether they plan to provide a keyword essay, including an abstract by the main author(s) as well as suggested names for discussants.
• Conversations : Proposers might also list at 2-3 possible experts relevant to the topic of the Special Issue / Themed Section, for an interview format.
• Other formats are also possible, please send your idea with your proposal.

How will proposals be assessed? 

A Special Issue / Themed Section selection committee, comprising the Co-Editors and selected members from the management board, will review all proposals received and make decisions based on the following criteria: 

• International appeal and relevance to consumption studies; this is vital given the focus of the journal.
• Intellectual significance, originality, and rigor:

-    Does the proposal seek to challenge dominant assumptions? -    Will it set the agenda in terms of future debates? -    Does it have novel, timely or innovative dimensions? -    Does it aim to fill a significant gap in the current literature?

• Profile of contributors; Consumption and Society  is committed to supporting scholars from all backgrounds, disciplines and parts of the world. Proposals that include a mix of established scholars and ‘rising stars’, and which are internationally inclusive, are particularly welcome.
• Guest Editors

-    Are the proposed guest editors experts in the field? -    Do they have a track record of producing cutting-edge research? -    Is their timetable realistic? -    Have they explained how they will steer and manage the development of the Special Issue / Themed section? -    Do they have the time and capacity to dedicate the required level of attention to this project?

The editorial process 

If a proposal is accepted, a timeline will be established between the guest editors and journal editors. It is vital that agreed timelines are met.   Guest editor(s) will be expected to manage the process of: 

• Initially considering papers.
• Identifying peer reviewers and, using the journal’s ‘Editorial Manager’ (EM) system, sending papers out to review, in consultation with Consumption and Society 's editors (an online tutorial in using EM will be provided, and support is available from the Journal’s Editorial Assistant).
• Communicating peer reviewers’ comments to the authors, via the EM system.
• Deciding whether revised papers need to be reviewed again.
• Making a provisional decision to accept or reject and conveying this, via EM, to the Co-Editors (Marlyne Sahakian, Stefan Wahlen and Dan Welch).

The Editors will aim to publish the Special Issue/ Themed Section according to the original agreed timeline, but proposers should note, and inform all potential contributors, that Consumption and Society ’s Editors may decide to:

• Run the Special Issue / Themed Section in a later issue than originally planned.
• For Special Issues, accept only some of the papers and put them instead in a Themed Section that also includes manuscripts from other contributors.
• Accept only one or two papers and present them as regular contributions to the journal.
• Decide that none of the papers meets the quality standards or targeted content of the journal.

Call for papers

Be among the first to publish in Consumption and Society and revitalise the relevance of consumption studies for the societal challenges of the 21st Century.

Consumption and Society publishes articles that advance understandings of consumption as a societal phenomenon, embedded in, and constitutive of, socio-economic, material and cultural configurations. The journal contributes to debates on contested aspects of consumption, such as environmental impacts, digitalisation, the shifting balance of collective versus private consumption, commodification and inequalities. While anchored in sociological understandings of consumption, the journal welcomes submissions from a diverse range of cognate disciplines and fields, including: anthropology, geography, gender studies, history, marketing and Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), media and communication studies, political science, Science and Technology Studies, and environmental social sciences.

We invite theoretically informed empirical papers, as well as theoretical and methodological pieces, that contribute to the understanding of consumption as a societal phenomenon. Diverse methodological and theoretical approaches are welcome. Submissions may be up to 8000 words. The journal also publishes other, shorter, formats, including Keyword Essays, Book Review Essays, Book Reviews and Conversations.. If you are interested in contributing non-standard pieces, please contact the Editors   to discuss – we welcome proposals for innovative ideas and novel formats. The Editors also welcome suggestions for Special Issues and shorter Special Sections (three or four related papers), to promote novel research agendas.

The Editors aim to encourage inclusivity and diversity in Consumption and Society . The journal is actively supportive of submissions from early career scholars. We will promote scholarship from the Global South, and our Editorial Advisory Board includes Regional Representatives for Africa, Latin America and East and South Asia. See our full Editorial Board . We welcome suggestions for Special Issues or Special Sections that showcase scholarship from, and focus research on, specific geographical regions.

Consumption and Society is an online journal and accepted papers will be published from August 2022 as soon as the editorial process is complete. We are committed to a timely, intellectually rigorous, and collegial editorial and reviewing process.  If you are interested in submitting to the journal, please see our instructions for authors, or contact the Editors to discuss non-standard submissions or ideas for Special Issue and Sections. 

If you would like to discuss your submission you can reach the Editorial team at  [email protected] .

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Society and consumption

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The Sociology of Consumption

Peathegee Inc / Getty Images

• Key Concepts
• Major Sociologists
• News & Issues
• Research, Samples, and Statistics
• Recommended Reading
• Archaeology
• Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• M.A., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• B.A., Sociology, Pomona College

From the sociological perspective, consumption is central to daily life, identity, and social order in contemporary societies in ways that far exceed rational economic principles of supply and demand. Sociologists who study consumption address questions such as how consumption patterns are related to our identities, the values that are reflected in advertisements, and ethical issues related to consumer behavior.

Key Takeaways: The Sociology of Consumption

• Sociologists who study consumption look at how what we buy relates to our values, emotions, and identities.
• This area of study has its theoretical roots in the ideas of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber.
• The sociology of consumption is an active area of research studied by sociologists around the world.

Consumption's Wide-Ranging Influence

The sociology of consumption is about far more than a simple act of purchase. It includes the range of emotions, values, thoughts, identities, and behaviors that circulate the purchase of goods and services, and how we use them by ourselves and with others. Due to its centrality to social life, sociologists recognize fundamental and consequential relationships between consumption and economic and political systems. Sociologists also study the relationship between consumption and social categorization, group membership, identity, stratification, and social status . Consumption is thus intersected with issues of power and inequality, is central to social processes of meaning-making , situated within the sociological debate surrounding structure and agency , and a phenomenon that connects the micro-interactions of everyday life to larger-scale social patterns and trends.

The sociology of consumption is a subfield of sociology formally recognized by the American Sociological Association as the Section on Consumers and Consumption . This subfield of sociology is active throughout North America, Latin America, Britain and the European continent, Australia, and Israel, and is growing in China and India.

Research Topics on Consumption

• How people interact at sites of consumption, like shopping malls, streets, and downtown districts
• The relationship between individual and group identities and consumer goods and spaces
• How lifestyles are composed, expressed, and slotted into hierarchies through consumer practices and identities
• Processes of gentrification, in which consumer values, practices, and spaces play a central role in reconfiguring the racial and class demographics of neighborhoods, towns, and cities
• The values and ideas embedded in advertising, marketing, and product packaging
• Individual and group relationships to brands
• Ethical issues tied to and often expressed through consumption, including environmental sustainability, the rights and dignity of workers, and economic inequality
• Consumer activism and citizenship, as well as anti-consumer activism and lifestyles

Theoretical Influences

The three “founding fathers” of modern sociology laid the theoretical foundation for the sociology of consumption. Karl Marx provided the still widely and effectively used concept of “commodity fetishism,” which suggests that the social relations of labor are obscured by consumer goods that carry other kinds of symbolic value for their users. This concept is often used in studies of consumer consciousness and identity.

Émile Durkheim: Cultural Meaning of Material Objects

Émile Durkheim’s writings on the symbolic, cultural meaning of material objects in a religious context have proved valuable to the sociology of consumption, as it informs studies of how identity is connected to consumption, and how consumer goods play an important role in traditions and rituals around the world.

Max Weber: Consumer Goods' Growing Importance

Max Weber pointed to the centrality of consumer goods when he wrote about the growing importance of them to social life in the 19th century, and provided what would become a useful comparison to today’s society of consumers, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . A contemporary of the founding fathers, Thorstein Veblen’s discussion of “conspicuous consumption” has been greatly influential to how sociologists study the display of wealth and status.

European Theorists: Consumption and the Human Condition

European critical theorists active in the mid-twentieth century also provided valuable perspectives to the sociology of consumption. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s essay on “The Culture Industry” offered an important theoretical lens for understanding the ideological, political, and economic implications of mass production and mass consumption. Herbert Marcuse delved deeply into this in his book One-Dimensional Man , in which he describes Western societies as awash in consumer solutions that are meant to solve one’s problems, and as such, provide market solutions for what are actually political, cultural, and social problems. Additionally, American sociologist David Riesman’s landmark book, The Lonely Crowd , set the foundation for how sociologists would study how people seek validation and community through consumption, by looking to and molding themselves in the image of those immediately around them.

More recently, sociologists have embraced French social theorist Jean Baudrillard’s ideas about the symbolic currency of consumer goods and his claim that seeing consumption as a universal of the human condition obscures the class politics behind it. Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu’s research and theorizing of the differentiation between consumer goods, and how these both reflect and reproduce cultural, class, and educational differences and hierarchies, is a cornerstone of today’s sociology of consumption.

Additional References

• Zygmunt Bauman: Polish sociologist who has written prolifically about consumerism and the society of consumers, including the books Consuming Life ; Work, Consumerism and the New Poor ; and Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
• Robert G. Dunn: American social theorist who has written an important book of consumer theory titled Identifying Consumption: Subjects and Objects in Consumer Society .
• Mike Featherstone : British sociologist who wrote the influential Consumer Culture and Postmodernism , and who writes prolifically about lifestyle, globalization, and aesthetics.
• Laura T. Raynolds : Professor of sociology and director of the Center for Fair and Alternative Trade at Colorado State University. She has published numerous articles and books about fair trade systems and practices, including the volume Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization .
• George Ritzer: Author of widely influential books, The McDonaldization of Society and Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals of Consumption .
• Juliet Schor : Economist and sociologist who has written a series of widely cited books on the cycle of working and spending in American society, including The Overspent American , The Overworked American , and Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.
• Sharon Zukin : Urban and public sociologist who is widely published, and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces , and the important journal article, “Consuming Authenticity: From Outposts of Difference to Means of Exclusion.”
• New research findings from the sociology of consumption are regularly published in the    Journal of Consumer Culture and the  Journal of Consumer Research .
• Introduction to Sociology
• Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge
• An Introduction to Environmental Sociology
• The Sociology of the Internet and Digital Sociology
• How Do Sociologists Define Consumption?
• All About Marxist Sociology
• Famous Sociologists
• The Sociology of Education
• The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
• How to Be an Ethical Consumer in Today's World
• Max Weber's Three Biggest Contributions to Sociology
• Sociology of Work and Industry
• The Challenges of Ethical Living in a Consumer Society
• What Does Consumerism Mean?
• Sociology Of Religion
• How Emile Durkheim Made His Mark on Sociology

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Why do we buy what we buy?

A sociologist on why people buy too many things.

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What’s at the root of modern American consumerism? It might not just be competition among the brands trying to sell us things, but also competition among ourselves.

An easy story to tell is that marketers and advertisers have perfected tactics to convince us to purchase things, some we need, some we don’t. And it’s an important part of the country’s capitalistic, growth-centered economy: The more people spend, the logic goes, the better it is for everybody. (Never mind that they’re sometimes spending money they don’t have, or the implications of all this production and trash for the planet.) People, naturally, want things.

But American consumerism is also built on societal factors that are often overlooked. We have a social impetus to “keep up with the Joneses,” whoever our own version of the Joneses is. And in an increasingly unequal society, the Joneses at the very top are doing a lot of the consuming, while the people at the bottom struggle to keep up or, ultimately, are left fighting for scraps.

I recently spoke with Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College, about the history of modern American consumerism — what it’s rooted in, how it’s evolved, and how different groups of people have experienced it. Schor, who is the author of books on consumerism, wealth, and spending, has a bit of a unique view on the matter. She tends to focus on the roles of work, inequality, and social pressures in determining what people buy and when. In her view, marketers have less to do with what we want than, say, our neighbors, coworkers, or the people we follow on social media.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

When I think of the beginning of what I perceive as modern American consumerism, I tend to go back to the 1950s and post-World War II, people moving to the suburbs in the cookie-cutter homes. But is that the right place to start?

Scholars differ on how to date consumerism. I would say we need to go back a bit earlier to the 1920s, which is when you get the development of mass production, which is what makes mass consumption possible. This perspective differentiates the 20th century from the earlier period, in which you have shopping and you have consumer fads. But what changes beginning in the 1920s is that the production technologies make it possible to produce things cheaply enough that eventually you can get a majority of the population consuming them.

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Read more from The Goods’ series .

In addition to the things that are happening in factories, the automobile is the leading industry where you move from stationary production to a moving assembly line and big declines in costs. You also have the beginnings of the modern advertising industry and the beginnings of consumer credit.

Then it stalls out, of course, because of the Depression and the war. What happens in the 1950s is the model gets picked up again, this time with major participation by the federal government to spur housing, road building, the auto industry, education, and income. We get into durable goods and household appliances. As we know, that’s really confined to white people post-war.

I imagine it’s changed across the decades, but why do we buy things, often more than we need?

Scholars have different answers to this question. Economists just assume that goods and services provide well-being, and people want to maximize their well-being. Psychologists root it in universal dimensions of human nature, which some of them tie back to evolutionary dynamics. I don’t think either of those are particularly convincing.

The key impetus for contemporary consumer society has been the growth of inequality, the existence of unequal social structures, and the role that consumption came to play in establishing people’s position in that unequal hierarchy. For many people, it’s about consuming to their social position, and trying to keep up with their social position.

It’s not necessarily experienced by people in that way — it’s experienced more as identity or natural desire. But I think our social and cultural context naturalizes that desire for us.

If you think about the particular things people want, it mostly has to do with being the kind of person that they think they are because there’s a consumption style connected with that. The role of what are called reference groups — the people we compare ourselves to, the people we identify with — is really key in that. It’s why, for example, I’ve found that people who have reference groups that are wealthier than they are tend to save less and spend more, and people who keep more modest reference groups, even as they gain in income and wealth, tend to save more.

Increases in inequality trigger what I’ve called “ competitive consumption ,” [the idea that we spend because we’re comparing ourselves with our peers and what they’re spending]. It can be hard to keep up, particularly if standards are escalating rapidly, as we’ve seen.

I want to dig into this idea of competitive consumption. How are we competing with each other to consume?

We have a society which is structured so that social esteem or value is connected to what we can consume. And so the inability to consume affects the kind of social value that we have. Money displayed in terms of consumer goods just becomes a measure of worth, and that’s really important to people.

How do we pick our “reference groups” if it’s not necessarily by wealth?

We don’t know too much about it. The argument that I made in [my book] The Overspent American was that in the postwar period, we had residentially-based reference groups. So it was really your neighborhood. People moved to the suburbs, and they interacted with people in the suburbs. Those were reference groups of people of similar economic standing because housing is the biggest thing that people buy, and houses tend to cost the same amount roughly within a neighborhood. Family and friends and social networks have always been really important.

Then the next big thing that happens is that you get more and more married women going into the workforce. That really changes reference groups, because they go from a flat social structure in the suburbs to a hierarchy in the workplace, particularly if you’re talking about better-remunerated work and white-collar work. People interact with people above and below them in the hierarchy. So people were exposed to the lifestyles of the people above them in the informal socialization that goes on in the workplace.

Then there is the impact of media, and increasingly now, social media. It’s the friends that you don’t actually know, the Friends on TV.

The reference groups change under different socioeconomic dynamics, but it mostly has to do with who you’re in contact with — what you’re seeing in front of you, so your neighbors, your coworkers, what you’re seeing on TV, in movies, on social media.

I think the key point here that differentiates this approach from that of many people who think about consumption is that it is not saying that it’s primarily driven by advertising. It’s not a process of creating desire where it didn’t exist. Critics of advertising say it’s just making people want stuff they don’t need and doesn’t have value to them. And you have to think, “Okay, why do they keep doing that? Why do they keep falling for the advertisements?” Many of the things that people desperately want are not particularly advertised. My approach is rooted in really deep social logic.

It can be very rational and compelling for people to do something that in the end doesn’t necessarily make them all that better off but that failing to do requires really a major effort and going against the social grain in a very big way.

People aren’t buying a house because they saw a commercial for it.

Exactly. It’s because their sibling got one and their best friend got one. Everybody they know is getting a house, and then they think, “Okay, am I just going to be a renter?”

How has the role of women evolved in consumerism? Women are often driving what to buy, right?

Men still dominate in certain kinds of purchases, and particularly the big ones. Women were responsible for everyday purchasing: food and apparel and things like that. There’s that old binary that “men produce, women consume,” which comes out of the differences in roles we have in our economy to a certain extent.

It’s fascinating, though, because I did some work trying to estimate models of differences between men and women and various kinds of consumption, and I never found any gender differences. But if you are looking at data from marketers, you see a disproportionate amount of spending done by women.

What about Black Americans? You alluded to this earlier, but they were at least left out of the ’50s version of consumerism.

The literature on Black Americans’ consumption is not large. If you look at it as a whole, you get a couple of things.

The biggest takeaway is that Black consumers are not that different from white consumers. Now, they do spend on different things, but it’s not like there are two types of consumers, whites and Blacks, and they have different orientations and dynamics. You have differences that are occasioned by some of the dynamics of structural racism — for example, the lower rates of Black homeownership. You’ve got some particular things that you see in part due to the high urban population. Urban dwellers spend more on shoes because they walk a lot more.

You have dynamics among Black consumers that are driven in part by racism. So, for example, sartorial choices in which middle-class and upper-middle-class Black people will have to spend more on their wardrobes in order to avoid being stigmatized in retail settings, the so-called “shopping while Black phenomenon.” Cassi Pittman Claytor, a sociologist at Case Reserve Western University, wrote a wonderful dissertation [ now a book ] on middle-class and upper-class Black people in New York City, and one chapter is on the shopping while Black question. Some of the consumption choices are driven by the attempts to manage racism and stigma in the workplace and outside of it.

Another important phenomenon around the racial discourse in consumption goes back to the period of enslavement of Black Americans in which consumption was a prohibited activity. You see the linkages from the period of enslavement where you’ve got white moralistic discourses against consumption [by] African Americans. A lot of this is in the context of poverty and poor Black people, and the illegitimacy of their consumption choices. And that’s still present today. It’s a really pernicious line of discourse back to enslavement and the ways in which whites attempted to control consumption [by] enslaved people.

What about anti-consumerism? How has that evolved, the people who try to reject consumerism?

There’s a long history of consumer rejectors. You have it in the 19th century as well, and often these were religious groups or sects of people who went into intentional communities, like the Shakers.

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To me what’s interesting about anti-consumerist movements of the current period is that there’s a certain kind of mainstreaming going on of them. They’re growing. My work is focused on the connections between work choices and consumer choices. So with downshifters, these are people who made decisions to work less and consume less, and it was often the decisions around work that were driving them. Many of them were not people who wanted to consume less in and of itself, but they wanted to take control of their time. And they were willing to make that trade-off.

You do have this minimalist movement now where the stuff is first, though it has a whole story around not getting tied to a burnout job. It’s connected with financial independence and this big “FIRE” movement — financial independence, retire early — and that’s really mainstream. It has much less of a countercultural aspect of it.

You’ve got people coming from the ecological side of things, like buy-nothing groups, and some of these are really big now. They have an ethic of anti-consumerism.

What we’re not sure about is how much participating in one of these actually reduces people’s consumption of new items. But people who participate in buy-nothing groups, most of them don’t buy nothing.

Has the conversation around consumerism and the environment picked up? Should we be talking about consumerism more in the context of saving the planet?

I think we should, and there are two parts to it. One is consuming differently, and the other is not consuming as much. So, volume and composition. To meet climate targets, we need to do both.

There are also issues of inequality of consumption. Look at the inequalities of income and wealth, which have led to these really gross disparities — the excess consumption of people at the top and the deprivation of huge numbers of people both domestically and abroad. It’s not just the bottom, it’s a big swath of the population that doesn’t have enough. So the distribution of consumption is really key, and a lot of the discourse around climate ignored that for a long time. The Green New Deal really put it at the center — it doesn’t lead with a critique of consumerism by any means, but it’s about meeting people’s needs and equity. It has a lot of implications about how we live.

The climate situation does compel us to look differently. In Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth , a book I wrote which is now 10 years old, one of the things I looked at was the volume of consumption of consumer goods over the decade before the crash [ahead of the Great Recession]. There was a massive speedup in what I call the cycle of acquisition and discard, just the volume of things people were buying. The fast fashion model that we saw in apparel happened in all sorts of other items, too.

The crash led to a hangover in which you haven’t seen that acceleration again, but it was just a period that showed how dysfunctional the consumer system has become.

Did the Great Recession change how we’re behaving and what we’re buying?

It really slowed down that cycle of acquisition and discard. From 1991 to 2007, the number of pieces of apparel people were buying, on average, went from 34 pieces of new apparel a year to 67. That number hasn’t really budged in the last 10 years.

We haven’t had a massive discontinuity in how the consumption system is operating, but people had less money. And that’s part of the rejecter dynamic — when it’s more difficult for people to participate in that system, either because of its growing cost or their own incomes stagnating, they are likelier to reject it.

It will be interesting to see whether there are any wider impacts of Covid and the fact that people lived with not much more than basic necessities for a while. My own view is that the work patterns are really key in driving consumption. The standard economic view is that it’s the consumer decisions and desires that drive work patterns, and I don’t think that’s the way it works. I think that work patterns actually end up driving consumption.

People make decisions about work, and the hours of work and the incomes associated with them are fixed with the decision. In general, if I decide to take my job as a professor, it has a salary that goes with it, and then that’s what drives my consumption decisions because it drives my income.

If I can’t work this hard anymore, I’m going to go part-time and my income gets cut in half, then I have to adjust my consumption. And that’s not to say it doesn’t go in the other direction — if I want to buy a house, I am going to work some more. But this is my analysis of how the work and spending sides fit together, which is that the work side is a little more dominant.

So we are entering a moment where lots of people have been sitting at home for a year and a half, and as you said, there’s a lot of pent-up demand. Plenty of people I know are ready to spend. Is it odd that we’re responding to the end of a crisis by spending money?

We’re just talking about the people who have it. One of the things about the pandemic is that it made the inequalities in income and spending power more visible to many Americans.

You had so many people who just were struggling through the pandemic to meet basic needs. If you think of that as a working-class phenomenon, you also had this middle-class phenomenon of people whose salaries continued. They were stuck in their houses, so the money was coming into their bank accounts every month and they didn’t have much to spend it on at all. There are people with considerable disposable income right now. We’re going to see a burst of spending now, and we’ll see how long it lasts.

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The Consumer Society

423 pages 6 x 9

Neva R. Goodwin

Frank Ackerman

David Kiron

The Consumer Society is an essential guide to and summary of the literature of consumption and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the deeper economic, social, and ethical implications of consumerism.

Note To The Reader Authors Of Original Articles Foreword Acknowledgments Volume Introduction PART I. Scope And Definition -Overview Essay -Summary Of Asking How Much Is Enough -Summary Of Consumption, Well-being, And Virtue -Summary Of The Original Affluent Society -Summary Of The Limits To Satisfaction: Examination -Summary Of Will Raising The Incomes Of All Increase The Happiness Of All? -Summary Of The Expansion Of Consumption -Summary Of New Analytic Bases For An Economic Critique Of Consumer Society -Summary Of Consumption: The New Wave Of Research In The Humanities And Social Sciences PART II. Consumption In The Affluent Society -Overview Essay -Summary Of Traumas Of Time And Money In Prosperity And Depression -Summary Of The Insidious Cycle Of Work And Spend -Summary Of Work, Consumption, And The Joyless Consumer -Summary Of The Study Of Consumption, Object Domains, Ideology, And Interests And Toward A Theory Of Consumption -Summary Of Notes On The Relationship Between Production And Consumption -Summary Of The Political Economy Of Opulence -Summary Of The Increasing Scarcity Of Time -Summary Of Social Limits To Growth: The Commercialization Bias -Summary Of Changing Consumption Patterns: The Transformation Of Orange County Since World War Ii PART III. Family, Gender, And Socialization -Overview Essay -Summary Of The Domestic Production Of Monies -Summary Of Sitcoms And Suburbs: Positioning The 1950s Homemaker -Summary Of Gender As Commodity -Summary Of Gender And Consumption: Transcending The Feminine? -Summary Of Meanings Of Material Possessions As Reflections Of Identity -Summary Of Friendship Or Commodities? The Road Not Taken: Friendship, Consumerism, And Happiness -Summary Of Playing With Culture: Toys, Tv, And Children's Culture In The Age Of Marketing PART IV. The History Of Consumer Society -Overview Essay -Summary Of The History Of Consumption: A Literature Review And Consumer Guide -Summary Of Changes In English And Anglo-american Consumption From 1550 To 1800 -Summary Of Pictorial Prints And The Growth Of Consumerism: Class And Cosmopolitanism In Early Modern Culture -Summary Of The Quaker Ethic: Plain Living And High Thinking In American Culture -Summary Of The Consumer Revolution Of Eighteenth-century England -Summary Of Consumerism And The Industrial Revolution -Summary Of Learning To Consume: Early Department Stores And The Shaping Of The Modern Consumer Culture (1800''"1914) -Summary Of From Salvation To Self-realization: Advertising And The Therapeutic Roots Of Consumer Culture -Summary Of The Consumer's Comfort And Dream PART V. Foundations Of Economic Theories Of Consumption -Overview Essay -Summary Of Materialism And Modern Political Philosophy -Summary Of The History Of Economics From A Humanistic Perspective -Summary Of Capital, Labor, And The Commodity Form -Summary Of Institutional Economics And Consumption -Summary Of Keynes' Economic Thought And The Theory Of Consumer Behavior -Summary Of A Reformulation Of The Theory Of Saving -Summary Of Bandwagon, Snob, And Veblen Effects In The Theory Of Consumers' Demand -Summary Of The Standard Of Living And The Capacity To Save -Summary Of The Imperatives Of Consumer Demand And The Dependence Effect PART VI. Critiques And Alternatives In Economic Theory -Overview Essay -Summary Of Alternative Approaches To Consumer Behavior -Summary Of The Separative Self: Androcentric Bias In Neoclassical Assumptions -Summary Of Economics, Psychology, And Consumer Behavior -Summary Of The Psychology And Economics Of Motivation -Summary Of The Neglected Realm Of Social Scarcity -Summary Of The Demand For Unobservable And Other Nonpositional Goods -Summary Of Change And Innovation In The Technology Of Consumption -Summary Of Procrastination And Obedience PART VII. Perpetuating Consumer Culture: Media, Advertising, And Wants Creation -Overview Essay -Summary Of The Distorted Mirror: Reflections On The Unintended Consequences Of Advertising -Summary Of Modern Consumerism And Imaginative Hedonism -Summary Of Social Comparison, Advertising, And Consumer Discontent -Summary Of Limits To Satisfaction: Diagnosis -Summary Of Goods As Satisfiers -Summary Of Introduction To Fables Of Abundance -Summary Of Advertising -Summary Of The Emergence Of American Television: The Formative Years And Toward A New Video Order: The 1980s -Summary Of Television And The Structuring Of Experience -Summary Of Theories Of Consumption In Media Studies -Summary Of Household Debt Problems: Toward A Micro-macro Linkage PART VIII. Consumption And The Environment -Overview Essay -Summary Of The Allocation And Distribution Of Resources -Summary Of Market And Nonmarket Determinants Of Private Consumption And Their Impacts On The Environment -Summary Of Consumption: Value Added, Physical Transformation, And Welfare -Summary Of Creating The Affluent Society -Summary Of Natural Resource Consumption -Summary Of The Environmental Costs Of Consumption -Summary Of Creating A Sustainable Materials Economy PART IX. Globalization And Consumer Culture -Overview Essay -Summary Of Development And The Elimination Of Poverty -Summary Of Third World Consumer Culture -Summary Of Positional Goods, Conspicuous Consumption, And The International Demonstration Effect -Reconsidered -Summary Of Advertising In Nonaffluent Societies: Galbraith Revisited -Summary Of The Culture-ideology Of Consumerism In The Third World -Summary Of Transnational Advertising: Some Considerations Of The Impact On Peripheral Societies -Summary Of Transnational Corporations And Third World Consumption: Implications Of Competitive Strategies -Summary Of Gross National Consumption In The United States: Implications For Third World Development PART X. Visions Of An Alternative -Overview Essay -Summary Of Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren -Summary Of Alternatives To Mass Consumption -Summary Of Exiting The Squirrel Cage -Summary Of How To Bring Joy Into Economics -Summary Of Qualitative Growth -Summary Of The Poverty Of Affluence: New Alternatives -Summary Of A Culture Of Permanence -Summary Of Living More Simply And Civilization Revitalization Subject Index Name Index

Suggestions

News from the Columbia Climate School

Environmental Sustainability and Consumption

Steve Cohen

One of the politically destructive strands of environmental advocacy criticizes material consumption and attempts to make people feel guilty for air travel and other forms of behavior that pollutes the environment. Taylor Swift is attacked for flying to her many places of work by private jet. Billionaires are attacked for flying in private jets to climate conferences. Families owning SUVs are criticized for owning large, fuel inefficient vehicles. The argument seems to be that we should sit alone in the dark with a candle if we want to protect the planet. The goal appears to be to slow down the economy and reduce economic growth. My view is that this is not a realistic nor effective way to achieve environmental sustainability. The world of over eight billion people is a complicated and interconnected place and the world economy needs to function if we are to have material necessities and security from armed conflict. Consumption is not the problem and attacking consumers is a losing political strategy.

The political pressure to maintain and grow wealth in both developed and developing nations is real and ferocious. As James Carville famously said during Bill Clinton’s first presidential run: “It’s the economy, stupid.” There is a reason that economic wellbeing is nearly always the top issue in a presidential campaign. People want and demand the necessities of life and more. The absence of economic growth leads to political instability which in turn can result in armed conflict and terrorism. Human society and culture, economic development, politics, and environmental quality are interconnected and interdependent systems. We need to change the nature of consumption and economic growth, not economic growth itself. We need to understand and reduce the environmental impact of consumption, but we also need empathy for people who live differently than we do. Meat may have a higher carbon footprint than vegetables, but in some cultures, its significance is not simply as source of protein. Until we create a jet fuel that is renewable, consumers have no choice but fly on jets that use fossil fuels. If someone has the resources and need to fly private, attacking that consumption is no way to build political support for environmental sustainability.

Our goal should be to consume products and services with the least possible planetary impact. While I think Taylor Swift should travel any way she wants, I am less happy with the revival of vinyl records that she and her fellow pop artists are promoting. It’s true that vinyl recordings produce better sound quality than streaming music, but streaming music has a very small environmental impact and the manufacturing of vinyl results in significant toxic chemical pollution. Streaming is an adequate form of recorded music, and if better sound quality is sought, listeners might consider attending a live concert. Nevertheless, consumption of vinyl records is growing. According to Rachel Lerman of the Washington Post:

“Music fans may love the immediacy of streaming music, but that hasn’t stopped them from bringing vinyl records mainstream. Revenue from vinyl jumped 10 percent to $1.4 billion in 2023, and outsold CDs for the second time since 1987, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Kacey Musgraves are leaning in, releasing vinyl albums with new colors, cover art and, sometimes, exclusive tracks.”

Musicians like Neil Young may argue that vinyl is an important medium to realize their artistic vision, but they should understand and acknowledge the environmental cost they are incurring. In other words, there is an alternative to vinyl, and environmentalists should encourage its use. Still, I would not spend any time or effort fighting this form of consumption, instead I would promote the positive environmental virtues of streaming. If someone wants to buy a vinyl record, they can always find another way to protect the planet.

More and more of our GDP is in services and among those services are design, game development, entertainment, education, web design and other forms of consumption that have very little impact on our environment. The main resource they consume is energy and as we decarbonize our energy system that impact will be lower. The nature of consumption in the developed world is changing. One of the most visible changes is the amount of time people spend viewing and interacting with their smart phones and computers. Those behaviors are forms of economic consumption that add to our quality of life and add to the GDP but have little negative environmental impact.

Activities that add to human wellness are also forms of economic consumption. Riding a bicycle, playing ball, going to a gym, engaging a trainer or physical therapist are also forms of consumption that are growing but have little environmental impact. A fully equipped gym has lots of equipment that requires manufacturing that probably caused pollution, but all that equipment is shared, reducing the per capita impact of our consumption.

The goal should be to channel consumption, not end it and certainly to stop shaming people who consume. The arrogance of advocates shaming consumption needs to be understood. A suburban family with an SUV or a person living in a rural area with a pickup truck have different transport needs than an urban vegan who rides a bike to work. We need to build empathy and understanding of people who live differently than we do. Rather than attacking consumption and consumers, we should promote research and public policy that reduces the environmental impact of consumption.

Some of our efforts to channel consumption to reduce pollution have backfired. The transition from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles (EVs) has seen useful approaches to public policy along with misguided efforts. When we transitioned from horses to motor vehicles, we did not tax or ban the horse. The motor vehicle was simply a better way to get around. The motor vehicle never got tired or sick, it didn’t defecate in the street, and once there were enough gas stations on the road, its range was virtually limitless. Government subsidized the new technology by building paved roads and highways. It also regulated driving and auto safety. In the 21 st century an analogous policy might be the effort to subsidize charging stations for elective vehicles. Tax credits for electric vehicles were a useful way to lower their price before they achieved economies of scale. Government purchases of EVs by the U.S. Postal System and grants for electric school busses were other useful ways to accelerate EV adoption. But laws to eventually ban the purchase of internal combustion engine vehicles in California, and national regulations requiring a company’s fleet of vehicles to achieve gas milage efficiency that could only be achieved with huge increases in EV sales, are in my view, misguided policies. They open advocates of environmental sustainability to the charge that they are telling consumers what to buy. That is probably because they are telling consumers what to buy. It would be difficult to design a policy more counterproductive. People will buy EVs when they are better and less expensive than current vehicles. These are big-ticket purchases and people will not by EVs until they are convinced they meet their needs. All that California’s ban on the internal combustion engine will achieve is increased sales of traditional motor vehicles in Nevada and other states bordering on California. Compulsion is the wrong approach. It stimulates political opposition that can be avoided by focusing on carrots rather than sticks.

Limiting consumer choice, like shaming consumption gives environmental sustainability a negative image. We need to promote a positive vision of environmental sustainability. Environmental sustainability enables consumption that does not destroy the planet. It can result in exciting and meaningful lifestyles. Environmentally sound consumption identifies the environmental costs of consumption and seeks to reduce those costs. EVs are far from a pristine technology. The batteries are loaded with toxics and like all manufactured goods today, their production pollutes. But they can run on renewable energy where it’s available, and engineers are hard at work trying to develop battery technologies that do not rely on rare earth metals and can easily be recycled. But the best way to accelerate EV adoption is to make a cheaper and better EV. The best way to achieve environmental sustainability is to develop a circular economy with services and products that have the least possible impact on the environment. Attacking consumption is futile and a waste of effort.

Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.

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Problem of Excess Alcohol Drinking in Society Essay

Introduction, causes of alcohol consumption, consequences, works cited.

For generations, alcohol has held an important place in the spiritual, emotional and social experience of people. For this reason, people drink as a form of relaxation, to mark important cultural events, and as a way of celebrating with friends (Heron 7). Taken in moderation, alcohol does not have any drastic effects on the drinker.

Problems only arise when alcohol is consumed in excess. Each year, nearly 80,000 lives are lost in the United States due to excessive use of alcohol (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention n.p.). It is estimated that in 2006, some $ 223.5 billion was lost due to excessive consumption of alcohol.

There are a number of reasons why people consume alcohol. People drink alcohol as a way of reducing associations in their minds. Alcohol weakens molecules separating neurons in the brains, thereby impairing communication. Consequently, an individual finds it hard to associate ideas. Psychologists also say that we drink as a way of escaping the self. Most people say that they drink alcohol in order to drown their sorrows. Since alcohol impairs communication, people momentarily forget their troubles.

Like other things in life, there are other underlying reasons that shape our drinking habits. For example, some people drink because they feel sad, angry, or lonely.

Others drink as a way of bonding with their friends and loved ones (Heron 8). Therefore, our drinking habits, whether in excess or in moderation, are shaped by hidden motivations. In the case of heavy drinkers, this behavior could be due to the need to address underlying problems, such as difficulty in dealing with low self-esteem, inability to handle strong emotions, and problems with relationships.

Peer pressure is yet another reason why people may start drinking alcohol (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention n.p.). For example, a teenager may start experimenting with alcohol while in college because his friends are also doing it. In this case, he feels compelled to experiment with alcohol so that he can belong with his peers. We also drink since alcohol has become culturally normalized.

The media aggressively promote alcohol consumption to an extent that it has now become culturally normalized. Alcohol is also readily available in supermarkets, bars, and discount stores. In fact, children under the age of 18 years can buy alcohol without some seller requesting to see their IDs first. For these reasons, consumption of alcohol has become normal and socially acceptable.

Effects of alcohol use

The effects of alcohol on the drinker are dependent on a number of factors. First, it depends on the body chemistry. This means that some people can get tipsy quite easily while others need larger quantities of alcohol to get drunk.

The effects of alcohol are also dependent on one’s weight, gender, and age (Masters 21). For example, women tend to get drunk by smaller quantities of alcohol compared with men. Effects of alcohol also depend on one’s weight. Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) is the level of alcohol in the blood that causes one to get intoxicated, and is weight-dependent.

Thus, a man who weighs say, 200 pounds, may be less intoxicated than one who weighs 150 pounds even after both men have consumed the same quantity of alcohol. Among the elderly, the rate at which the liver metabolizes alcohol is slower in comparison with younger people. Other important factors to consider include quantity and type of alcohol consumed, drinking experience, and whether one had eaten or not, before taking alcohol.

The effects of alcohol use on one’s behavior also vary, depending on the amount of alcohol consumed. As one gets drunk, they are talkative, and more confident. As they become more intoxicated with alcohol, their speech is slurred, while their balance and coordination gets impaired. Their reflexes also slows down, and their exhibit unstable emotions.

Excessive consumption of alcohol is associated with immediate health risk that if not addressed, can lead to long-term health risks.

Immediate health risks

Excessive consumption of alcohol is linked violent behavior. Masters (23) reports that nearly 35% of the violent crimes are caused by individuals under the influence of alcohol. Moreover, excessive alcohol use also leads to cases of child neglect and maltreatment (The National Center on Addition and Substance Abuse 4).

Excessive use of alcohol also causes unintentional injuries such as falls, burns, traffic injuries, and drawings (Rehm et al. 41). Risky sexual behaviors such as sexual assault and engaging in unprotected sex are also some of the other immediate health risks of excessive alcohol use (Naimi et al. 1139).

Long-term health risks

If the immediate health risks of excessive alcohol use are not addressed, the victim could suffer neurological impairments, in addition to suffering from various social problems. They are also likely to develop chronic illnesses. Some of the neurological problems attributed to long-term excessive alcohol use include stroke, dementia, and neuropathy (Corrao et al. 615).

Over time, too much of alcohol can also cause psychiatric problems like anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts (Booth and Feng 162). Excessive alcohol use is also linked to liver diseases such as cirrhosis, which is today one of the leading causes of lifestyle-related deaths in the United States (Heron (8).

There are various reasons why people consume alcohol, including peer pressure, to drown sorrows, and to bond with families and friends, among others. Excessive consumption of alcohol causes both immediate and long-term health effects, including violence, involvement in risky sexual behaviors, and neurological and psychiatric problems.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) , Atlanta, GA: CDC, 2012. Print.

Corrao, Giovanni, Vincenzo, Bagnardi and Antonella, Zambon. “A meta-analysis of alcohol consumption and the risk of 15 diseases.” Prev Med , 38(2004):613-619.

Heron, Melonie. “Deaths: Leading causes for 2004.” National vital statistics reports , 56.5(2007):1-96.

Masters, Ruth. Counseling Criminal Justice Offenders, London: Sage, 2003. Print.

Naimi, Timothy, Leslie Lipscomb, Robert Brewer and Brenda Gilbert. “Binge drinking in

the preconception period and the risk of unintended pregnancy: Implications for women and their children.” Pediatrics , 11.5(2003):1136-1141.

Rehm, Jurgen, Gerhard Gmel, Christopher Sempos and Maurizio Trevisan. Alcohol related morbidity and mortality. Alcohol Research and Health , 27.1(2003):39-51.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 24). Problem of Excess Alcohol Drinking in Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alcohol-drinking/

"Problem of Excess Alcohol Drinking in Society." IvyPanda , 24 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/alcohol-drinking/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Problem of Excess Alcohol Drinking in Society'. 24 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Problem of Excess Alcohol Drinking in Society." December 24, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alcohol-drinking/.

1. IvyPanda . "Problem of Excess Alcohol Drinking in Society." December 24, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alcohol-drinking/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Problem of Excess Alcohol Drinking in Society." December 24, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alcohol-drinking/.

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Creating a “Greener,” More Connected Society

Two new approaches from uc san diego lab promote energy-efficient wireless connectivity .

• Xochitl Rojas-Rocha - [email protected]

Published Date

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As the planet grapples with the climate crisis, researchers at UC San Diego have developed new technologies for more energy-efficient wireless connectivity with a reduced carbon footprint. 

Described in two recent papers, a new base station deployment strategy and antenna design offer ways to reduce wireless energy demand and build more sustainable solutions in industry and research. 

“Modern wireless technology continuously poses a dilemma: chasing faster data speeds frequently leads to significantly increased energy usage,” said Dinesh Bharadia, UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute (QI) affiliate and associate professor with the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Our innovations stand as proof of our unwavering dedication to eco-friendly communications. We demonstrate that we can achieve faster data speeds while using less energy, paving the way for a sustainable, interconnected future.”

A sustainable framework

To tackle a challenge of this scale, a team of researchers from Bharadia’s lab started by envisioning a different way to connect to the wireless network. 

Currently, wireless connectivity relies on towers or “base stations” that send out high-powered signals to customers across distances that can average up to a mile long. These signals must be strong enough to compensate for signal loss from striking, scattering or being absorbed by obstacles like buildings or natural parts of the landscape. As a result, the energy demand from base stations, and the corresponding drain on smartphone batteries, have created a significant carbon footprint. 

Headed by Ph.D. student Agrim Gupta and fellow graduate students Adel Heidari and Jiaming Jin of Bharadia’s Wireless Communications, Sensing and Networking Group , the team developed a framework for replacing these tall, high-powered base stations with multiple smaller, lower-powered stations. Dubbed “DensQuer,” the proposed strategy uses Sionna, an open-source “digital twin” technology from Nvidia, to recreate a wireless environment virtually and plot out base station coverage tailored to specific urban landscapes. 

Gupta and colleagues leveraged Sionna’s ray tracing technology to simulate the behavior of wireless signals from proposed DensQuer networks. Their results, backed by real-world data collected on UC San Diego campus, indicate that a more customized network accounting for a city’s features may require fewer, smaller base stations overall. 

Some key results even indicated network power consumption dropped by about three times, while smartphone power consumption also decreased.

To measure exactly how much the proposed smaller, nearby base station network could reduce drain on cell phones, the researchers used an open-source tool recently released by Google to monitor a Pixel smartphone’s energy consumption at three locations, while connected to a base station on the roof of QI’s Atkinson Hall. Coupled with an antenna measuring the device’s transmit power, researchers detected an overall 10-15 decibel decrease in transmit power, corresponding to lower power consumption and a 50% increase in battery life while connected to the network. 

“We want DensQuer to open more conversations about power consumption and 5G,” said Gupta. “What’s the roadmap to the next generation? We want to make that easier for end-users, while also helping the various operators that help create this almost omnipresent, sustainable wireless network.”

Researchers found that approximately 30-40 smaller base stations placed at a reduced height could match the coverage provided by a single, large base station on a cell phone tower. Due to their reduced height, a network of smaller base stations might be deployed across trees and street poles as part of the existing environment. 

The team will next work toward efficiently orchestrating the network at a large scale, while preserving power savings and user experience. 

Their paper, “ Densify & Conquer: Densified, smaller base-stations can conquer the increasing carbon footprint problem in nextG wireless , ” was made open-source to share the strategy widely with partners in industry and academia. 

Streamlining the source

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Another team from Bharadia’s lab, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Colorado, Denver, focused on wireless antenna technology, which currently uses complex systems to connect with user networks. Referred to as Massive Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO), these designs typically require multiple antennas to deliver data to diverse groups of customers simultaneously. While powerful, this technique has also come at the cost of greater carbon emissions. 

The researchers set about designing a new approach to achieve the same output as a MIMO system with less energy demand. Their prototype, “GreenMO,” reduces the number of antennas needed by bundling the data streams collected by those antennas into a single, wideband radio frequency chain instead of many smaller bandwidth chains.

To accomplish this, the team had to design and build their own hardware. They tested GreenMO in Atkinson Hall on the UC San Diego campus, and found it three times as power-efficient as traditional Massive MIMO and four times more efficient in streaming data. In real-world simulations, the amount of power saved jumped to 50% in modern 5G base stations. 

“There have been a few attempts to build a MIMO with a single [radio frequency] chain,” said Gupta, the paper’s lead author, “but to do it with a wideband waveform and obtain throughput results that are close to the current state of our technology at a very low power footprint is something GreenMO showed for the first time.” 

Gupta presented “GreenMO: Enabling Virtualized, Sustainable Massive MIMO with a Single RF Chain” at the 29th Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking in Madrid, Spain. Co-authors and collaborators included Manideep Dunna of the Wireless Communications, Sensing and Networking Group, Eamon Patamasing of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Sajjad Nassirpour and Alireza Vahid of the University of Colorado, Denver. 

In the future, Gupta and his colleagues plan to build a large-scale hardware test-bed combining DensQuer and GreenMO, taking a step toward achieving a sustainable vision for upcoming 6G networks.

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High Culture and Low Culture Disneyland Products

This essay about the intersection of high and low culture at Disneyland explores how the theme park embodies elements of both cultural tiers. It highlights how Disneyland, a symbol of popular culture, integrates high cultural elements like historical motifs and artistic performances into its traditionally low-culture offerings. The essay also discusses how Disneyland’s approach to its products and experiences challenges traditional cultural boundaries, thereby enhancing cultural value and access across diverse demographics.

How it works

High culture and low culture are distinct tiers within a society’s cultural hierarchy, delineating the intellectual interests and preferences of various social groups while highlighting the dynamics of cultural consumption and perception. Disneyland provides an intriguing framework to analyze the interplay and manifestation of high and low culture through its diverse offerings.

High culture typically involves cultural expressions considered elite and intellectually enriching, such as classical music, opera, fine arts, and scholarly works. These forms of culture are often associated with societal elites and require a degree of education and cultural savvy to be fully appreciated.

On the other hand, low culture—or popular culture—comprises more universally accessible entertainment forms like movies, television, popular music, and mass-market literature, catering to a wide audience regardless of their social or educational background.

Established by Walt Disney in 1955, Disneyland is a quintessential example of American popular culture, blending entertainment, fantasy, and aspects of American history into a universally appealing experience, placing it within the low culture category. Yet, examining Disneyland’s offerings more closely reveals the integration of high culture elements, presenting a complex cultural mosaic.

For instance, Disneyland’s theme parks are not merely entertainment complexes; they are elaborately designed environments that incorporate historical and cultural elements, elevating the visitor’s experience to something that could be compared to high culture. The design of Main Street, U.S.A., evokes an idealized version of a turn-of-the-century American town, providing entertainment along with a form of nostalgic education where architecture and history mingle in a typically low culture setting.

Furthermore, Disneyland’s live productions and parades exhibit a level of artistic finesse comparable to high cultural forms such as opera and ballet. These performances feature skilled artists executing intricate musical compositions and choreography, injecting a high cultural flair into a predominantly low cultural ambiance.

Additionally, Disneyland plays a pivotal role in preserving and disseminating cultural narratives by adapting global folktales and fairy tales. This form of storytelling not only makes such narratives globally accessible but also aids in their preservation, similarly to how classical literature functions within high culture.

Moreover, Disneyland deliberately employs its product offerings to blur and bridge the traditional divide between high and low cultures. Through exclusive merchandise, members-only clubs, and luxurious resort experiences, it introduces elements of exclusivity typically linked with high culture. These upscale options create a differentiated consumer experience, distinguishing between general visitors and those who seek or can afford a more elevated experience, thereby challenging the conventional separations between cultural levels.

In conclusion, Disneyland’s products showcase a blending of high and low cultural elements, challenging traditional distinctions between these cultural sectors. By integrating aspects of both cultural realms, Disneyland not only democratizes cultural access but also enhances the perceived cultural value of its products. This combination of high and low cultural elements reflects the evolving nature of cultural engagement and underscores Disneyland’s role in shaping and influencing cultural perceptions and preferences. Through its diverse offerings, Disneyland remains a central figure in the cultural landscape, redefining and enriching our perceptions of high and low culture in contemporary society.

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Travel and Tourism Industry — The History of Moscow City

The History of Moscow City

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Reimagining Design with Nature: ecological urbanism in Moscow

• Reflective Essay
• Published: 10 September 2019
• Volume 1 , pages 233–247, ( 2019 )

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• Brian Mark Evans   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1420-1682 1  

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The twenty-first century is the era when populations of cities will exceed rural communities for the first time in human history. The population growth of cities in many countries, including those in transition from planned to market economies, is putting considerable strain on ecological and natural resources. This paper examines four central issues: (a) the challenges and opportunities presented through working in jurisdictions where there are no official or established methods in place to guide regional, ecological and landscape planning and design; (b) the experience of the author’s practice—Gillespies LLP—in addressing these challenges using techniques and methods inspired by McHarg in Design with Nature in the Russian Federation in the first decade of the twenty-first century; (c) the augmentation of methods derived from Design with Nature in reference to innovations in technology since its publication and the contribution that the art of landscape painters can make to landscape analysis and interpretation; and (d) the application of this experience to the international competition and colloquium for the expansion of Moscow. The text concludes with a comment on how the application of this learning and methodological development to landscape and ecological planning and design was judged to be a central tenant of the winning design. Finally, a concluding section reflects on lessons learned and conclusions drawn.

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1 Introduction

This is the ‘century of the city’ when, for the first time in human history, more people will in live in cities than in rural areas. The UN estimates that by 2050 almost three quarters of the world’s population will live in cities (Evans et al. 2016 , p. 1). The population expansion in the cities of many countries, including those with converging economies, is putting considerable strain on their ecological and natural resources where the ‘process of transition has … abandoned central planning, state-owned housing and decreased investments in public transport’ causing substantial suburbanisation (Ibid, Chapter 3, Part B Economic Transition: from planned to market economies, p. 21). Moscow, the capital of the Russian Federation, is one such city.

This paper is directed to the theme of Town and Regional Plans, identified by the editors for this special issue as one of the several overarching enquiries into the work of Ian McHarg. It focuses on landscape planning and design carried out in the Moscow Region of the Russian Federation in the period 2003–2013 when the City of Moscow was experiencing significant pressure for development from in-migration and reconstruction in the post-soviet era. The international competition and colloquium for the expansion of Moscow staged in 2011–2013 by the Governments of the Russian Federation and Moscow City are reviewed, and the approach of the winning team is discussed. The methodology for landscape planning and ecological design in the successful entry was based on techniques derived from Design with Nature (McHarg 1969 , republished 1992). Although the principal focus is directed to Town and Regional Plans , the text and accompanying figures, where pertinent, also refer to the other themes identified by the editors, notably Ecological Designs and Green Infrastructure.

The paper is structured in five further sections following this initial introduction. The second part examines the challenges and opportunities presented in working in jurisdictions where there are no official or established methods in place to guide regional, ecological and landscape planning and design. The third considers the experience of the author’s practice—Gillespies LLP—in addressing these challenges using techniques and methods inspired by McHarg in Design with Nature in the Russian Federation in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The fourth considers the augmentation of the methods derived from Design with Nature in reference to innovations in technology since its publication and the contribution that the art of landscape painters can make to landscape analysis and interpretation. The fifth part considers the application of this experience to the international competition and colloquium for the expansion of Moscow and explains how the application of this learning and methodological development to landscape and ecological planning and design was judged to be a central tenant of the winning design. Finally, a sixth and concluding section reflects on lessons learned and conclusions drawn.

3 Revisiting Design with Nature and reviewing the methods of McHarg

In researching the challenge before departure for Moscow, the team focused preparation on understanding what was available in published sources about the Russian landscape as well as reviewing methods for landscape planning set out by McHarg in Design with Nature and later by other authors including Michael Hough (Hough 1990 and Hough 1995 ).

‘It took only the merest information to examine and prescribe for the Jersey Shore’ (Ian McHarg, Design with Nature, 1992, p. 31).

The team reread and reviewed McHarg’s rationale, methods and studies in Design with Nature . In particular, the team was interested in his exposition of natural processes and their significance to social value when planning for significant interventions. This is exemplified in the studies of the Jersey Shore and Staten Island. Here McHarg stresses the importance of compiling layers detailing different values that are then compared by overlaying on a light table. The Jersey Shore layers are illustrated in Design with Nature on pp. 36, 38–39, and later, the method is further elaborated in more depth for Staten Island in the chapter ‘Processes as Values’ on pp. 105–107 and 109–113 with a composite diagram on p. 114 (McHarg 1969 , 1992). This was considered important for the Russian project because these methods emphasise the importance of the site ‘as found’ and upon practical analytical and interpretive steps to understand the site through slope, surface vegetation, forest, hydrology and on-site investigation and, where available, published data on soils and geology. In his later work, Hough also stresses the importance of on-site investigation and interpretations, for example in chapter three of Cities and Natural Processes ( 1995 ) focusing on plants and plant communities.

This revision proved invaluable to the team where the landscape architect must address the site ‘as found’ without access to published policies, plans or conceptual studies and must, therefore, focus on strategic and practical methods to record, analyse, interpret and communicate ecological and landscape principles. In these circumstances, there is a need to start by recording existing uses (e.g. agricultural and/or forest land) by on-site interpretation in order to build up an understanding of the landscape ‘as found’ which in turn may inform the extent and degree of intervention considered acceptable, much as McHarg did with the Jersey Shore and Staten Island. This is particularly important where there are no officially published documents or any ‘in-country’ body of practice detailing methods to be followed. This is often evident in the cities of a country in transition from a planned to a market economy where there is, as yet, no settled view of the importance of landscape and ecology to the urban condition and few (often outdated) designated protection areas to safeguard landscape and ecological qualities. In the case of the Russian Federation in 2003, there were numerous protected sites, but the conservation policy and practice was generally outdated in terms of intent, and frequently had often lapsed in management and monitoring due to the loss of professional capacity and the absence of resources in the trauma of the post-soviet transition. In these circumstances, the landscape architect, in effect, begins ‘from scratch’, with the requirement to work from first principles in recording, analysing, interpreting and communicating qualities and principles for the landscape and ecology of the territory.

Preliminary enquiries into the site in the Moscow Region identified that to scale cadastral plans without topographic data would be available together with unrestricted site access and (possibly) oblique aerial photographs taken from a helicopter. In the spirit of charrette working, the team carried with it everything needed to undertake the master plan preparation—this meant traditional design studio tools—pencils, markers, detail paper, drawing pens and instruments and quality tracing papers—and, in the first years of the twenty-first century, laptops and early, lower-resolution, digital cameras, supplemented (perhaps) by Internet access, but with low bandwidth suitable for email but incapable of transmission of large files and data sets.

The landscape team’s ‘charrette kit’ included Design with Nature and monographs published for British post-war New Towns including those by Derek Walker, the Chief Architect and Planner of Milton Keynes (Walker 1982 , 1995 ). Although there are many examples in practice in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s in New Town Masterplans and in Regional Structure Plans in Scotland that evidence the layering method documented in Design with Nature described above, they are often of very technical and scientific nature. By contrast, the Milton Keynes Landscape Masterplan provided inspiration to the work of Gillespies due in no small part to the artistic quality of the graphic representation of both plans and sketches. This is particularly evident in Steen Eilar Rasmussen’s Introduction and in the Landscape and Infrastructure chapter of Walker’s book on the Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes (Walker 1985 particularly Rasmussen pp. 4–5, landscape capacity sketches p 13 and landscape layers pp. 20–23 and at various other locations throughout the publication with further colour representations in Walker later monograph ( 1995 at p. 30, pp. 32–37). The clear influence of this work in respect of landscape capacity and the role of ground cover on Gillespies’ practice can be seen in work later published as landscape design policy advice for the UK Government in Scotland (Gillespies 1994 , the Design Manual at pp. 34–35 and 38–41).

From preliminary meetings with Russian colleagues, it was clear that something more than technical skill would be necessary to convince Russian businessmen, however, well disposed to improving their city, to invest in landscape and ecological designs. Earlier experience through Gillespies practice had shown that the development process in communist and post-communist countries can perceive the presence and sensitivity of the native landscape as a constraint to be overcome: because the native landscape is seen every day, there is a risk that it may be considered to be just that—unremarkable, normal, mundane, everyday—without a proper appreciation of its intrinsic beauty and significant importance to the ecosystem within which it sits. Therefore, in the short time available before that first departure for Russia in 2003, the team undertook documentary research to develop a general knowledge and understanding of the landscape of the Russian Steppes in order to provide insights into its natural and cultural attributes that would provide utility to the team and, ultimately, to the client about the nature and quality of the landscape of the Moscow Region.

4 Landscape insight and interpretation though the artist’s eye: methodological augmentation

In parallel with assembling the technical material, preparations also included the investigation of Russian landscape art. From long experience with artistic and aesthetic appreciation of landscape art following the insights of Berger ( 1972 ), Gregory ( 1976 ) and later Eco ( 2010 , 2011 ), the author had come to appreciate the ‘eye of the artist’ in helping others ‘see’ the everyday and, therefore, assist in communicating the existential attributes of landscape, ecology and climate.

Enquiry revealed evidence of a substantial literature about Russian Art. Two artists in particular stood out—Isaak Levitan (1860–1900) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898). The works of these artists and other Russian contemporaries were exhibited in an international exhibition in the Netherlands and the UK in 2003. In the companion volume to that show— Russian Landscape —there is a substantive reproduction of the works of these artists together with a series of critical essays. In Russian Landscape , Van Os reminds us that there is ‘something reassuring about painted nature’ (Jackson and Wageman 2003 , p. 13) and he and David King stress how Shishkin was, in intricate works, able to convey the detail of the Russian countryside, from the wildflower carpet that fills the forest in the spring, to the icy tundra of winter that provided the backdrop for many of Russian literature’s iconic scenes combining ‘monumental hugeness with unbelievable meticulousness in rendering detail’ (Ibid, p. 16). Levitan’s lyrical, expressive evocations of the Russian countryside and his use of motifs typical of rural Russia (such as footsteps in snow) together with an innovative and impressionist flair earned him the admiration of Chekhov, Stanislavsky and Diaghilev (King 2004 , pp 11, 15 81–82 and 83–97). These artists are little known in the west although the major retrospective exhibition in Groningen and London in the early years of this century has brought them some prominence (Jackson & Wageman 2003 ).

Although less prolific than Shishkin or Levitan, Alexei Savrasov’s painting The Rooks have Returned has a special place in the Russian consciousness and is renowned for its evocation of the ending of the long Russian winter and the hope presented by the long-awaited Spring (Fig.  3 ). But it was Levitan’s work that came to provide a form a Leitmotif for design work in Russia by demonstrating that the natural and cultural landscape he painted remains present in the landscape of the Moscow Region today (Fig.  4 ).

The Rooks have Come (1871) Alexei Savrasov (Tretyakov Gallery Moscow). This painting has great cultural significance for Russians as it encapsulates the annual hope for summer that comes with the spring thaw

On the left, images from the paintings of Isaak Levitan (Top Snowbound Garden, The Russian Museum, St Petersburgh, 1880s, bottom Evening Bells, Tretyakov Gallery, Mosow, 1892); on the right corresponding images from the Moscow Region landscape in 2008 (Gillespies LLP)

It has proved to be a compelling technique to use well-executed and much-loved works of landscape painting as a means to provoke a recognition of landscape legacy in communities, clients and stakeholders and stimulate awareness of the historic and cultural qualities of their landscapes. Together with the Gillespies team, the author has in the past introduced a discourse on landscape history and an artist’s appreciation of landscape to substantiate an understanding of landscape analysis and interpretation. Landscape paintings are also an invaluable tool for furthering the designer’s understanding of cultural, climatic and inherited landscapes. The team was also aware that everything said and written by us about the Russian landscape would be translated into Russian. We hoped, therefore, that a shared appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of the landscape expressed by Russian artists might help build a shared understanding of the landscape and cultural legacy and potential. This was proved to be the case.

The outputs from the first charrette in 2003 were well received by the client and the master plan successfully incorporated structural landscape planning and design and ecological precepts, but the reliance on hand drawing for a Design with Nature method of landscape analysis was difficult to produce in the short time period offered by a design charrette. However, the artistic inspiration and understanding of the Russian landscape derived from the presentation and analysis of Russian painters was well received, supporting the landscape analysis and concepts that had been possible to prepare using a rudimentary form of the layering principles derived from Design with Nature .

As mobile computing power and high-speed Internet access developed rapidly, together with innovation in the use of software (such as Adobe Suite and the Photoshop program in particular), it became possible to enhance the quality of the landscape analysis by using the layering function to produce the layers originally envisaged in Design with Nature in the Jersey Shore and Staten Island studies. As further opportunities opened up to undertake master planning charrettes in the Moscow Region, the landscape analysis was able to be converted more quickly into crisp digital drawings. In turn, these were used as a dimensionally accurate base upon which to hand draw a master plan which in turn could have different aspects of the ecological and landscape design represented on different layers. This proved a compelling analytical and presentational technique. The images in Figs.  5 , 6 and 7 illustrate an example of the landscape analysis and master plan layers for the settlement area of Vidnoye in the south-east of the inner Moscow Region (location shown in Fig.  9 . A further innovation offered by the increasingly effective mobile computer resource, as well as the studio’s capacity to quickly produce high-quality renders, meant that there was also the opportunity to produce realistic computer-aided visualisations of the intended interventions as illustrated in Fig.  8 .

Landscape layers for the site of a new settlement extending to 100 ha at Vidnoye in the south-east of the Moscow Region. The landscape layers have shown basic topography overlain in the second image with an analysis of slope and key views and in the third image existing vegetation and ground cover. The on-site interpretation was assembled on-site and transferred to layers in Photoshop ‘in charrette’ (Gillespies LLP)

Landscape layers showing hand-drawn analysis and interpretation (image 1) transferred to a Photoshop layer (image 2) and preliminary concepts (image 3) (Gillespies LLP)

Final master plan designed in collaboration with architect/urbanists JTP showing the extent of public landscape (image 1), the extent of forest planting on-site (image 2) and the final landscape master plan with public and private landscapes and with all ‘built layers removed (image 3) (Gillespies LLP)

Visualisations showing the existing landscape (left) and as proposed (right). The views are over the lake shown on the east of the plan in Fig.  7 from the proposed apartment blocks on the west side of the lake. The landscape team has employed the concept of ‘borrowed landscape’ in these and other designs for sites in the Moscow Region whereby landscape ‘as found’ and outside of the site boundaries is incorporated into the visual context of the site (Gillespies LLP)

In this way, the team faced up to the challenge and opportunity of addressing landscape and ecological planning and design on the site ‘as found’ by: returning to the methods first established by McHarg in Design with Nature ; working with the design charrette process to provide a mechanism to produce rapid analysis and interpretation of landscape; innovation in the application and use of contemporary software to create both planimetric layers and visualisations of landscape qualities; and further understanding and communication of the Russian landscape through the work of much-loved Russian painters. This collective work led to the establishment of a five-step methodology for landscape and ecological planning and design as follows:

Preliminary landscape and ecological interpretation using analysis of conditions on-site and analysis of the qualities identified by renowned Russian landscape paintings (Fig.  4 );

Recording of landscape and ecological analysis in layers (Fig.  5 );

Hand-drawn conceptual landscape and ecological design and hand-drawn master plan (Fig.  6 );

Digital layered rendering of the landscape master plan (Fig.  7 ); and

Rendering of the landscape echoing the inspiration and character from landscape painting including retention of existing features to clearly demonstrate and communicate the interventions proposed through techniques such as ‘borrowed’ landscape (Fig.  8 ).

5 The international competition and colloquium for the expansion of Moscow

In 2011, a sensationalist headline ‘Moscow to Double in Size!’ appeared in the western media reporting on the latest ambitious plans to emerge from Russia (Elder, the Guardian Newspaper, 2011 ). In fact, careful reading of the articles and a review of the Russian press revealed that the plan by Dimitri Medvedev, then President of Russia, and Sergei Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow, was to double the territory administered by the City of Moscow through a jurisdictional change involving the transfer of a large tract of land from the Moscow Region to the Moscow City. It was not intended that Moscow would double the size of its population, but rather double its administrative area, so that there could be a clearer coordination of territorial planning of the city (Fig.  9 ).

Map showing the expansion area for the City of Moscow (in red) to the south-west of the existing territory of the radial city. The area in red extends to some 1420 square kilometres. The settlement of Vidnoye is shown in yellow on the centre right between Tarychevo and Megagorod (Gillespies LLP)

What was newsworthy, however, was the nature of the process conceived by the President and Mayor. The catalyst for the change would comprise the move of Ministries and Officials of the Federal and City Governments from the congested centre of the existing city to a new site to the south-west of the city, thereby releasing a very significant amount of real estate within the city core for conversion to new hotels, offices and apartments for the needs of Moscow as a burgeoning world city as well as attract investment to address some of the heritage challenges identified above. Also remarkable was that the conceptual thinking behind the plan would be subjected to public gaze through an open, competition among internationally renowned practicing planners and urbanists: a process largely modelled on planning the future form of the Paris metropolitan region (also suffused with thinking from Berlin–Brandenburg, Madrid and the Randstad in the Netherlands: Project du Grand Paris —online).

In late 2011, an open invitation was issued for the procurement of ten international teams (identical to the Project du Grand Paris ), to be retained to conduct, in parallel and in public, a three-stage competitive consultation that would prepare conceptual designs for:

the overall structure of the Moscow Region (the ‘Oblast’) within the central federal Region of the Russian Federation (the ‘Okrug’) (Fig.  1 );

the structure of the newly extended territory of Moscow: i.e. the historical area of the City of Moscow together with the new territories to the south-west (Fig.  2 ); and

a plan for a new Capital District within the new territories.

Each stage was to extend over two months and have two plenary workshops. Apart from these basic criteria, almost no restrictions were placed on the teams: deviations from the brief were permitted, and encouraged, although the organisers (the General Planning Division of the Government of Moscow) demanded reasoned justification for deviations to the brief and failure to provide sufficient argument resulted in a requirement to meet the brief requirements in spirit and to the letter in order to proceed to later stages (Evans 2012 , pp. 14/15).

The ten teams were selected from across Europe, North America and the Middle East. All teams were international, and all had Russian partners as part of the team, thereby ensuring that an element of knowledge exchange became an embedded part of the process. The landscape planning methods described above provided a clear basis to make a successful submission to enter the competition.

Gillespies joined together with long standing collaborators including JTP (referred to above) as well as Urban Design Associates (UDA) from Pittsburgh (USA), Group Ark Architects (Moscow) and Prof Larry Beasley (Canada) with whom Gillespies had collaborated on the capital city plan for Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates in 2009–2010. Transportation Planners Nelson Nygaard (USA), Civil and Structural Engineers Buro Happold (UK) and leading economist Prof Stuart Gulliver (UK) completed the team that formed itself into the consortium entitled ‘Capital Cities Planning Group’ (CCPG). The consortium was led by the collaborative effort of UDA and Gillespies, who also led and delivered the landscape planning and ecological components of the work.

The successful teams were assembled in Moscow in February 2012, and thereafter, for the next seven months, our working lives were preoccupied with Moscow—a stressful, challenging and thrilling process. Monthly formalities between the teams gave way to a collegiate discussion in the conference hall and the cafes and bars of Old Moscow.

At each workshop, each team was afforded time to present their thinking to all the other teams and to an international advisory panel of Russian and international experts drawn from Metropolitan Paris, Berlin–Brandenburg, Madrid and Amsterdam. This process was presided over by the Deputy Mayor and by senior officials from ‘Genplan’, the City of Moscow planning agency.

Figures  10 , 11 , 12 , 13 and 14 illustrate the principal elements of the work:

Visualisations produced as a provocation by the Capital Cities Planning Group during the competition for the expansion of Moscow City in 2012/2013 showing the attrition of the landscape of Levitan by the twentieth-century soviet city as well as a suggestion for landscape retrofitting (CCPG/Gillespies LLP)

Techniques of landscape analysis based on the methods of Design with Nature using the blue–green system of hydrology and forest to produce structure for the strategic plan for expansion area including the intention to re-establish green and blue corridors to support biodiversity and species habitat (CCPG/Gillespies LLP)

An example showing proposals at the detailed scale for the conservation and enhancement of a local watercourse including the expansion of the water body and riparian improvements to support cleaning of the water system, introduction of species rich riparian edge details and the creation of a walking and cycling network along the watercourse in the spirit of McHarg and Hough (CCPG/Gillespies LLP)

Techniques of contextual landscape design based on the methods of Design with Nature using the blue–green system of hydrology and forest to produce structure for the new strategic development plan and overall urban design and architectural concept (CCPG/Gillespies LLP)

In 2012, the Capital Planning Group led by Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh and Gillespies of Glasgow were joint winners of the international competition for the expansion of Moscow, capital city of the Russian Federation. The two diagrams on the left show an integrated landscape and ecological strategy for the existing city (top) and the expansion area (bottom). The plan on the centre shows the integrated landscape and ecological strategy for the combined area, and the plan on the right shows the final development plan for the existing and expanded areas of the city extending to some 2500 km 2 with an existing population of 11.5 million projected to rise to 14 million (CCPG/Gillespies LLP)

The use of Levitan’s representation of the inherited Moscow landscape to stress its importance to the aesthetic and ecological qualities of the city (Fig.  10 );

The opportunities presented by the hydrological system and the forest network to create the intrinsic armature for the overall plan as well as retain the blue and green networks to enhance ecological networks (Fig.  11 );

The importance of retaining and enhancing the hydrological network by the conservation of watercourses (Fig.  12 ) and creation of a series of lakes and cascades to form the fundamental structure upon which to found the urban plan (Fig.  13 ); and

The overall landscape structure for the existing city and the expansion area (Fig.  14 ).

Landscape and ecology were identified by the international jury as being of fundamental importance in the process:

‘It was a mandatory requirement of the Competition Brief to consider and resolve landscape and ecological issues at regional, city and district scales. The natural and ecological value of the Moscow Region was considered by all of the design teams and each had its own approach. The Grumbach team focused on the housing block and park as a historical genotype of the centre of Moscow; the French team L’AUC formulated a ‘city-taiga’ concept; the Capital Cities Planning Group brought the water system to the fore; the Italians Studio Secchi-Vigano formulated ‘a city on a park’ system (Dr Alexander Kolontay, Deputy Director of Genplan) (Evans 2012 , pp. 14/15).

At the conclusion to the process, the submissions of all nine teams remaining in the competition by the final stage were presented in a public exhibition in Gorki Park and an international jury was invited to review and pass comment on the proposals. The jury awarded prizes to two of the teams: to the Grumbach–Wilmotte team from France for their understanding of the metropolis as a whole and to the Capital Cities Planning Group for employing the methodological approach landscape and ecological planning and design described in the earlier parts of this paper (Steadman 2012 ).

Speaking after the results were published, Prof Larry Beasley CM, the strategic planning lead with the CCPG team, stated:

‘Our Group took the principles of sustainability to the very heart of the urban design for the new Russian Federal District in Moscow. We used ecological and landscape patterns as the prime drivers of the urban configuration. All other aspects were shaped by these natural forces and imperatives’ (Beasley 2012 ).

This view was confirmed by Kolontay:

‘The Competition Organisers considered that the CCPG team produced the most original and professional landscape and ecological strategy for the New Moscow’ (Evans 2012 , pp. 14/15).

Acknowledgements

The landscape team from Gillespies Glasgow Studio (Steve Nelson, Graeme Pert, Joanne Walker, Rory Wilson and Chris Swan) led by the author and all our collaborators in the Capital Cities Planning Group.

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Evans, B.M. Reimagining Design with Nature: ecological urbanism in Moscow. Socio Ecol Pract Res 1 , 233–247 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-019-00031-5

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Moscow city hall, moscow post office and court house.

• Location: Moscow Idaho Regional Essays: Idaho Latah County Architect: James Knox Taylor James Knox Taylor Types: post offices courthouses art galleries (buildings) city halls Styles: Renaissance Revival Materials: brick (clay material) architectural terracotta cast-in-place concrete

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D. Nels Reese, " Moscow City Hall ", [ Moscow , Idaho ], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/ID-01-057-0021 . Last accessed: April 22, 2024.

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Located one block off of Main Street, City Hall is a powerful civic statement at the heart of downtown Moscow. Designed by James Knox Taylor, Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury, this Renaissance Revival building served as Moscow’s post office for sixty-three years. Few other Idaho buildings in the early twentieth century cost as much or had as competent an architect. The building became the Moscow City Hall after a period of nearly twenty years of discussion and debate.

What is today the Moscow City Hall was built during the Progressive Era, when the federal government was expanding the civic infrastructure to meet the needs of a rapidly growing country. Taylor, a highly regarded classicist, spent fifteen years as supervising architect of the U.S. Treasury, overseeing the design and construction of more than 800 federal buildings, including this one. This handsome, three-story structure is built of brick, since stone was not readily available in the Moscow area. Here, the red brick is trimmed in ivory terra-cotta. Ground-floor windows are tall and round arched and the central panel of each is made up of double-hung, eight-over-eight sashes. These are flanked with four-pane sidelights and topped by graceful fan windows for a Palladian effect. Second-story windows are six-over-six rectangles, with accented corners and keystones of terra-cotta. The third story is shortened, set off by a terra-cotta course decorated with round discs. The small, third-story windows are shaded by a wide classical cornice with a course of large dentils. The original roof is metal seamed and hipped. The space below the cornice and between the third story windows is richly decorated with terra-cotta panels and patterned brickwork. A Scottish mason named Howard Buchanan was paid double wages to come to Moscow to execute the brickwork. Apparently, Buchanan was so particular about brick selection and laying that he nearly bankrupted the building’s contractor.

The main entrance is in the central bay of a five-bay facade, and is reached by a flight of ten steps. The fan window above the entrance is repeated over the four windows on this story. The main entry originally featured a revolving door that has since been removed. The south end of the building has a similar doorway in a three-bay front. The raised basement is marked by grill-covered openings below the first-floor windows. This public building is one of only five buildings in downtown Moscow that rise to the height of three stories or more, all of which were built by 1912.

In 1973 a new post office building was under construction and the fate of the old post office and courthouse was hotly debated. Local civic activists began a fervent dialogue with city officials and the Department of the Interior to identify possible uses for the stately building. The City of Moscow eventually purchased the building and by 1981 it had been partially refurbished for use as the Moscow Community Center. During the next decade further discussions led to the complete renovation of the building and its conversion to the Moscow City Hall.

The interior of what remains Moscow’s most handsome and sophisticated building has been fully restored. The old courtroom on the second floor, with its finely detailed oak paneling, was turned into chambers for the city council. The lobbies have been turned into a public gallery known as the Third Street Gallery. Only occasionally have historic buildings changed hands and uses in such satisfying ways.

Attebery, Jennifer. Building Idaho, An Architectural History. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1991.

Gordon, Irene ed. Building a National Image: Architectural Drawings for the American Democracy, 1789–1912 . Washington D.C.: National Building Museum, 1985.

Hart, Arthur A., “Moscow Post Office and Courthouse,” Latah County, Idaho. National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, 1973. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, DC. http://history.idaho.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/Moscow_Post_Office_and_Courthouse_73000686.pdf .

Monroe, Julie R. Images of America Moscow. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006.

Neil, J. Meredith. Saints and Oddfellows, A Bicentennial Sampler of Idaho Architecture. Boise, ID: Boise Gallery of Art Association, 1976.

Otness, Lillian W. A Great Good Country, A Guide to Historic Moscow and Latah County, Idaho . Moscow, ID: Latah County Historical Society, 1983.

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• Location: Moscow, Idaho Regional Overviews: Latah County Architect: James Knox Taylor Types: post offices courthouses art galleries (buildings) city halls Styles: Renaissance Revival Materials: brick (clay material) architectural terracotta cast-in-place concrete

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Wet weather but a warm welcome at Glasgow’s Refuweegee – a photo-essay

Katherine Anne Rose spent months documenting the Scottish charity, which welcomes and supports forcibly displaced people with the help of the local community

R efuweegee is a play on the words “refugee” and “weegie”, affectionate slang for a Glaswegian. The charity was founded in December 2015 by Selina Hales, a Glasgow native who wanted to welcome displaced people in the city after seeing news coverage of Syrians escaping war and persecution and crossing into Europe. Glasgow has the largest refugee population in the UK outside London.

The scale and reach of charities such as Refuweegee have rapidly grown over the last few years, in part due to the rising numbers of asylum seekers but also because of the generosity and involvement of the local community. The charity has expanded to a network of more than 200 volunteers across Glasgow.

Refuweege merchandise with the charity’s slogan: ‘We’re all fae somewhere.’

Among other services, Refuweegee provides welcome packs to people newly arrived in the city. It has supplied more than 10,000 packs, which include essentials for Glasgow such as umbrellas and gloves as well as Scottish treats such as Irn-Bru and Tunnock’s tea cakes. It also makes up little backpacks for children that include books, games and toys.

Welcome packs with hand-written letters from the local community

The item that makes them unique is a hand-written letter from a local Glaswegian welcoming them. It is difficult to imagine yourself alone on foreign soil without speaking the native language. The letter is a touching and connecting gesture for people in a new and often distant location. It offers a marked contrast to the anonymous protocols of the asylum system.

The charity also prepares food parcels for families and people living in hotel accommodation where no kitchen facilities are available.

Food being prepared for last year’s Christmas party

One way in which they offer essentials such as toiletries and clothing is by having a “free shop”, a large space filled with donations from local people and companies. Refugees can book a slot to browse the shop and take what they want. Volunteers replenish the stock between appointments, and any gaps in supplies such as toothpaste, deodorants or nappies are often very quickly replenished by the public when a shout-out is put on to their social media accounts.

Lily replenishes the toiletries at the free shop

As someone with young children myself, the little packets with toys and games are a poignant way of imagining the hardship of being forcibly displaced. I have three children who have so many toys and games at home, and yet it can still feel hard to keep them entertained and content. I am reminded of the privileges of my life, the privileges that should be rights for everyone. The freedom to be comfortable, safe and fed. And to play.

Olha Reshetova holds a pysanky workshop. Pysanky is a Ukrainian tradition of egg decoration at Easter

The individual stories that come from the work are remarkable. It has been difficult to capture this photographically because of respect for the privacy of individuals, but hopefully I can can convey something of the care and joy that is given to people whose lives are hard to imagine; people who are trying to live on £8 a week when I have just spent that amount on parking. There are people who have saved their allowance for weeks just to be able to afford the train fare to visit Refuweegee from as far away as Aberdeen.

Stephan and Abdul enjoy the playroom at Refuweegee

Party dresses donated by the local community

I talk to the volunteers at the free shop as they prepare for the next booked slot of 15 people. “One young schoolboy had left his bag on the bus. We were able to put a new schoolbag together with a pencil case. What seems small to us makes a big difference,” says Ellie as she searches for a winter coat that will fit a five-year-old. One family visiting the shop reveals that their little girl is soon to turn two. The staff are able to turn to a rail of party dresses and pick out one for her, complete with hair band and shoes.

A mother checks to see if a dress fits her daughter and, right, Brogan entertains children while their parents browse the free shop

Refuweegee can provide art therapy for traumatised children and English classes for their parents. They are able to do this because local communities make it possible with their donations and their understanding of need.

It is also a space for people to meet, socialise and rest.

Hales told the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee last year that “space” had become one of the most essential things that Refuweegee provides, because people can be isolated in single hotel rooms for long periods.

People take part in the conversation club designed to help people learn and practice English

The space they have created here feels welcoming, and I can imagine the relief that it provides for those who don’t have a place like this elsewhere in their lives.

Refuweegee is a testament to the city’s slogan: “People make Glasgow.” It makes me more optimistic witnessing the efforts of Refuweegee and the local community to support people who need and deserve it.

Awa, a regular volunteer, with her son Abdul and, right, founder Selina Hales

Refuweegee will be taking part in Glasgow Kiltwalk 2024 on 28 April to raise funds to help people access nutritious food. Please click here to donate

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