Approaching Life in the London Garden Centre

Acquiring Entities and Providing Products

Bibliographic Data

ID4951909
AuthorsRussell Hitchings (0000-0002-1171-8064, University of Hull)
Year2007
Volume39
Issue2
Pages242-259
Publication date2007-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/a38120
OpenAlexW2093830222
LanguageEN
Citations received15
References cited40

For some geographers, the world has become imaginatively alive with arrays of new nonhumans. Yet how well these vocabularies actually adhere to personal practice is something which could be better explored. Recent accounts of consumption, meanwhile, are committed to closely observed contextual experience. Yet, physical things can seem somewhat subdued in these accounts. With these ideas in mind, in this paper I align a geographical embrace of material vitality and an in-depth approach to practised consumption. I report on a period of ethnographic work with seven garden centres in London to reconsider the ways in which contemporary urbanites encounter the items on sale there. In the London garden centre there are some different ways of approaching life and some changing cultures of control, as the rumbling agencies that certain products purvey are both openly enjoyed and nervously negated. Exploring the unease associated with this situation and its impact upon personal behaviour and physical format, I reflect, in particular, on the current experience of plants. The conclusion that follows is potentially perverse as, although we can benefit from being with life, it seems that, in certain city spaces at least, we now deal better with that which is more dead

Aesthetics · Art · Consumption (sociology · Environmental ethics · Ethnography · Period (music · Social science · Sociology · Vitality · Work (physics · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability

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