Mike Crang

This book investigates the current and potential roles of food consumption to address sustainability challenges in China.Focusing on the megacity of Guangzhou, it looks at sustainability and food from the perspectives of government, commercial, and third sector actors, and through the lived experiences of consumers. It charts the rapidly transforming landscapes of retail across urban China and the ways they are shaping and are shaped by everyday food consumption practices. Using a multi-method research approach of quantitative and ethnographic data, it provides readers with a rich and comprehensive understanding of the relationships and tensions between contemporary practices of food consumption and pressing sustainability challenges. It unpacks the complex foodscape in contemporary Chinese cities, from traditional wet markets to online deliveries, from supermarkets to farmers markets and alternative food providers, to understand the values and practices promoting and hindering sustainability in food consumption.The book is intended for academics from advanced undergraduate level through to Masters, postgraduates and scholars across key social science disciplines including Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and Business, and internationally given the global interest in the focus on China.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Cultural Geography is the first book to introduce culture from a geographical perspective. It tracks the ideas, practices and objects that together form cultures - and how these cultures form identities for individuals and populations. Crang examines a range of scales as he considers the role of states, empires and nations, firms and corporations, shops and goods, books and films, in creating identities.Cultural Geography looks at the way different processes come together in particular places and how those places develop meanings for people, whether at a global scale or the intimate scale of everyday life. Specifically designed for use on modular courses this text features clear writing, boxed case studies, chapter summaries, further reading guides and a glossary of key terms.

This book responds to moves to rematerialize the social sciences, to attend to the stuff of daily life but challenges the social sciences to think beyond objects as stable things. It forwards the argument that objects need to be seen not as stabilising things, or immutable mobiles – as time stilled and materials fixed and conserved in the object form – or even always in the making, as becoming but as unbecoming things. It argues that objects are better seen as things coming apart, as en route to becoming something else, some stuff else, somewhere else. It locates these arguments in economies of demolition, disposal and reincarnation, focusing on object death, materials recovery and re-fabrication, and the sequestration and unleashing of materials classified as wastes. It uses as its exemplar case the classic immutable mobile, the ship – one of the most durable and complex of fabricated objects. It illustrates these arguments through global ethnography conducted in various settings around the world, including South Asia and the EU.

First Published in 1998. The so-called 'cultural tum' in contemporary geography has brought new ways of thinking about geography and culture, taking cultural geography into exciting new terrain to produce new maps of space and place. Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective, focusing on how cultures work in practice and looking at cultures embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena. Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex, and Crang examines a wealth of different cases and approaches to explore the experience of place, the relationships of local and global, culture and economy and the dilemmas of knowledge. Considering the role of states, empires and nations, corporations, shops and goods, literature, music and film, Crang examines the cultures of consumption and production, how places develop meaning for people, and struggles over defining who belongs in a place. Cultural Geography presents a concise, up-to-date, interdisciplinary introduction to this lively and complex field. Exploring the diversity and plurality of life in all its variegated richness, drawing on examples from around the world, Crang highlights changes in current societies and the development of a 'pick and mix' relationship to culture.

First Published in 1998. The so-called 'cultural tum' in contemporary geography has brought new ways of thinking about geography and culture, taking cultural geography into exciting new terrain to produce new maps of space and place. Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective, focusing on how cultures work in practice and looking at cultures embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena. Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex, and Crang examines a wealth of different cases and approaches to explore the experience of place, the relationships of local and global, culture and economy and the dilemmas of knowledge. Considering the role of states, empires and nations, corporations, shops and goods, literature, music and film, Crang examines the cultures of consumption and production, how places develop meaning for people, and struggles over defining who belongs in a place. Cultural Geography presents a concise, up-to-date, interdisciplinary introduction to this lively and complex field. Exploring the diversity and plurality of life in all its variegated richness, drawing on examples from around the world, Crang highlights changes in current societies and the development of a 'pick and mix' relationship to culture.