Local Cultures – Global Spaces
Abstract
The global furniture and housewares brand IKEA is known for its classic ‘Big-Blue box’ showrooms, located on the outskirts of cities all over the world. Here customers can discover, test, and purchase products before bringing them home, and enjoy a meal at the restaurant to enhance the shopping journey. Based on its ‘Access for everyone’ principle, in recent years IKEA has developed a new urban retail format that has already been rolled out in cities like Hong Kong and Taipei. The aim is to establish showrooms in areas where people live, move, and work. This paper focuses on IKEA’s urban store format in Hong Kong, revealing its role as a space of hyper-consumption, where local groups have gradually established social spaces, under the constraints of a neoliberal urban ethos. IKEA’s democratic imperative, giving access to testing their furniture in home-like settings, has, perhaps inadvertently, generated ideal settings for informal encounters among specific social groups, such as youth, the elderly, and migrant domestic workers; groups that would not necessarily mix in the city under normal circumstances. Based on unobtrusive observations and interviews with users and brand representatives, the paper a) categorizes informal activities that go beyond normal shopping activities; b) compares them with the Blue-Box format, and with other similar spaces of consumption in the city; and c) discusses them as a tactical reinterpretation of social space by groups in the city, who lack spaces in which to interact.
Dr Caterina Villani is Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at the University College Dublin. Her research investigates three main areas: urban design, transport policy, and critical urban theory. She holds a PhD from the City University of Hong Kong. Before joining UCD, Caterina was a PolyU Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research aims to combine multi-disciplinary approaches to envision more inclusive urban forms and processes.
Dr. Mia Münster is a Research Assistant Professor at PolyU School of Design in Hong Kong. She earned her PhD from Copenhagen Business School and holds master’s degrees in Architecture and Design. Mia has over 20 years of professional experience as a designer and in the field of retail and hospitality design. Mia has published research on optimization of design processes, on the designer’s role in the transition to circular economy, and on the effect of designed spaces on their users. She is currently conducting cross-cultural studies of the design and culture found in commercial interiors.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Wednesday 6th December, 2023