The Television Guide

In conjuction with growing urban populations and improved forms of transportation, widened boulevards and metros, we began to see the rise of department stores, gallerias, and arcades. This was the origins of consumerism and lifestyles based on elegance of consumption. By the 1920s a mass mediated popular culture was emergent that would become highly intertwined with marketing advertising and consumerism. While the growth of consumption-based lifestyles was slowed by the Depression and then by WWII, the postwar decades would witness the proliferation of consumerism exhalted by the rise of television. Advertising and marketing began to denounce the problems of “civilization” and promised that with the purchase of certain products, the person would attain health, riches, beauty, love -- in short, a better life. But, the current culture of constraint at the time was unlikely to encourage consumption. Thus advertising, in the guise of movie plots, began to manifest glamorized identities based on consumption. The corollary of this privatized hedonism is a greater indifference to adverse social, political and environmental conditions.


Urban economics has traditionally viewed cities as having advantages in production and disadvantages in consumption. The role of urban density in facilitating consumption is extremely important. As firms become more mobile, the success of cities hinges more and more on cities’ role as centres of consumption. Empirically, high amenity cities have grown faster than low amenity cities. Urban rents have gone up faster than urban wages, suggesting that the demand for living in cities has risen for reasons beyond rising wages. The rise of reverse commuting suggests the same consumer city phenomena.