Praxitopia : How shopping makes a street vibrant

During recent decades, shopping’s geographical manifestations have altered radically and the presumed ‘death’ of town centre retailing has become a public concern. The social, cultural, and economic backgrounds of this decentralisation of retail and its effects on city life have been studied comprehensively. However, to date, few studies have examined the changing dynamics of non-mainstream shopping geographies, particularly local shopping streets. How shopping is enacted in such places, and shopping’s part in shaping them, has been largely overlooked. Aspiring to fulfil this knowledge gap, this dissertation examines shopping activities on Södergatan, a local shopping street in a stigmatized ‘super-diverse’ district of Helsingborg, Sweden known as Söder, and contributes to the literature on shopping geographies by drawing on a sociocultural perspective.The study draws on practice theory and focuses on shopping as the main unit. The analysis is built on a sensitivity to the interrelationships existing between social practices and place, emerging from the epistemic positioning resulting from the identification of 'modes of practices'. In order to grasp the enmeshed character of shopping, which is complicated by cultural, spatial, temporal, material, and sensorial layers, video ethnography was employed as the primary research collection method, in combination with go-along interviews, observation and mental-mapping.The research reveals five major modes of shopping practice which jointly represent a typology for understanding shopping in terms of being enacted in the street; i.e. convenience shopping, social shopping, on-the-side shopping, alternative shopping, and budget shopping. This thesis also shows that the bundling of these modes of shopping shapes the street into a vibrant part of the city by interrelating with the shopping street’s sensomaterial and spatiotemporal dimensions in complex and multifaceted directions. Consequently, the local shopping street is conceptualized as a praxitopia, a place co-constituted through social practices

Migrant Entrepreneurs in Malmö : The Case of Restaurant Owners from Turkey

The aim of this thesis is to give a detailed account of migrant entrepreneurs in Malmö, their daily patterns, their unique experiences, the distinct strategies they develop, the challenges they face, and their relationship with ‘regulation and ‘advice’ organizations. In addition, unique ways of ‘making’ a restaurant via food and other material items are discussed and illustrated. It is also underlined that the only method to achieve a broad understanding of migrant entrepreneurs is through qualitative research, which is generally seen inferior by policy makers

Praxitopia : Co-constituting a vibrant local street through shopping

In the last decades shopping’s spatiotemporal manifestations are changed radically in conjunction with proliferation of car usage, internationalization of retail sector, and construction of out-of-town malls (Wrigley & Lowe, 1996; Mansvelt, 2005; Kärrholm & Nylund, 2011; Aslan & Fredriksson, 2017). However, the main empirical focus laid mostly on the mainstream and spectacular geographies of shopping; there is little literature on how shopping is enacted in “other” retail geographies, and how these geographies are co-constituted through enactments of shopping (cf. Jones et al., 2007; Rabikowska, 2010; Hall, 2012; Findlay & Sparks, 2012; Kuppinger, 2014; Carmona, 2015; Zukin et al., 2016; Clossick, 2017). Södergatan, a local shopping street in the ‘superdiverse’ southern part of Helsingborg, Sweden, was chosen as a case study for the study, which aims to contribute to the literature on retail geographies from sociocultural perspectives, through studying how enacted modes of shopping shape a local street into a lively urban space. The study draws on “practice theory”, which supplies a profound conceptual vocabulary and dynamic epistemological gaze for concentrating on shopping as the main analytical unit (Schatzki, 1996, 2019; Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002; Warde, 2005, 2014; Shove et al., 2012). In order to grasp the enmeshed character of shopping in the street, complicated by cultural, spatial, temporal, material, and sensorial layers, video ethnography is employed as the umbrella research method (Pink, 2007). The research shows that there are some major modes of shopping that are enacted in the street; framed and analysed as convenience shopping, social shopping, shopping-in-destination, alternative shopping, and budget shopping. It is also shown that this mix of modes of shopping, bundling with each other, co-constitute the street into a meaningful and vibrant part of the city, by interacting with the shopping street’s sensomateriality in the states of engagement formulated as “onness”, “throughness”, “withness”, and “inness”, as well as entangling with its spatiotemporality in the directions of interrelation of “verticality”, “horizontality”, “circularity”, and “linearity”

How do consumers make the cultural geography of a 'low-end' street? : The case of Sodergatan: a high street at the urban margins

This research examines the practices of consumers that are made possible by a 'low-end' street, and how these shopping practices in turn shape and maintain a high street at the urban margins. It locates itself within the academic inquiries of cultural geographies of retail.Södergatan is the field of the study, the main shopping street in the stigmatized southern part of city of Helsingborg in Sweden, which was first established as a working-class neighborhood. Never enjoyed being a legitimate part of the commercial city center, the street has further been excluded recently due to contemporary retail restructuring. Today it mostly hosts so called immigrant entrepreneurships, service-based premises and convenience stores. Södergatan is a typical neighborhood commercial street, which can be found in almost any city. In this sense, the research takes the mission of shedding light to consumer dynamics of long-neglected, unglamorous, yet indispensible, organic parts of urban life.The study theoretically draws upon “practice theory”, that has been proven to supply a solid framework in exploring people’s everyday shopping activities. The major method employed will be “video-ethnography” because of its capability to synchronically appreciate consumer practices, consumer reflections and the material environment of the street

Recording Consumer Practices : A Practical Application in Helsingborg

Practice theory roughly argues that the material world and the cultural world continuously interact and co-constitute one another. However, existing research methods on consumer behaviors tend to separatethese two dimensions and show a preference toward concentrating on only one of them. Video ethnography as a medium has the potential to capture these two worlds—to combine the symbolic and material, the practical and the discursive, the doings and the sayings. In particular, recording a shopping tour of a consumer as a “walk and talk” session has the ability to capture complex data: the material environment, the context, goods, bodily expressions and words. Two challenges with this method, ethical concernsand technical concerns with camera will be discussed