City as a Space/Place of Production/Consumption

Abstract

The space/place discourse is prevalent in urban studies since the early writings of the Chicago school. The more writings have led to more complexities and to some extent certain confusion, as place is often used in place of private space or third space. Similarly, reconstructionist view of place make it closer to certain conception of space that is produced and reproduced. It is this kind of closeness in the conception of space and place that drives present study and necessitates addressing a set of questions like; if urban space and urban place are the same entity with different name? How urban space is different from urban place? Can they be differentiates in terms of production and consumption? Can they be defined in terms of absolute and abstract? Or, is it simply a question of scale? Is it to be distinguished on the basis of ‘rational’ or emotional?

The present study is an attempt to address some of these questions using a discourse analysis. It starts with the distinction between city as an entity and urbanization as a process that produces the entity named city. It analyses spatial structure of production, different way the spatial structure have been analyzed and also the changing nature of the spatial organization of city taking certain examples. It tries to analyze the notion of consumption and its possible relation with production and concept of place in the city and the extent of consumption that leads to the state of unsustainable city owing to the limited availability of resources at a given spatial scale.