Persuasion architectures: Consumer spaces, affective engineering and (criminal) harm
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Author | Theo Kindynis |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619894674 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619894674
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619894674
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Persuasion architectures:
Consumer spaces, affective
engineering and (criminal)
harm
Theo Kindynis
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Abstract
Drawing together recent theoretical work from both within and beyond criminology, this
article considers the role of strategically designed consumer spaces in eliciting potentially
criminogenic and harmful dispositions and behaviours. First, the article introduces
recent work in cultural geography and urban studies, which has drawn attention to the
manipulation of affect through spatial design. Second, by way of example, the article
considers how such strategies are deployed in three types of consumer environments:
shopping malls and retail spaces; casinos and other gambling environments; and the so-
called night time economy. Third, the article engages such developments theoretically. It is
suggested we rethink the distinctions and interrelationships between human subjectivity
and agency and the built environment. The implications of this proposed conceptual
reorientation are explored—first, for our understandings of agency, intentionality,
moral responsibility and political accountability; and second, for criminological thinking
around embodied difference, power and exclusion.
Keywords
Affect, agency, consumer spaces, cultural criminology, urban space
Introduction
While the changing sensibilities and subjectivities associated with consumerism have
long been engaged by criminologists, it is only relatively recently that critical and cultural
Corresponding author:
Theo Kindynis, Goldsmiths, University of London, Warmington Tower, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK.
Email: t.kindynis@gold.ac.uk
894674TCR0010.1177/1362480619894674Theoretical CriminologyKindynis
research-article2019
Article
2021, Vol. 25(4) 619–638
criminologists have come to focus their attention directly on the interrelationships between
consumer culture, crime and harm (Hayward and Smith, 2017; see, for example, Hall
et al., 2008; Hayward, 2004). Following the 2011 England ‘consumer riots’ (Treadwell
et al., 2013), the relationship between a pervasive culture of consumption, the cultivation
of antisocial subjectivities, and the potential for this to manifest in harmful behaviours
could hardly be more stark. In the wake of the riots, criminology has seen a renewed inter-
est in the nexus between criminality and consumer culture (Moxon, 2011; Smith and
Raymen, 2017). Recent years have also seen an emergent interest—again, particularly
among critical and cultural criminologists—in space. For much of the discipline’s history,
criminologists have tended to regard the built environment as ‘an inert material backdrop,
or an aesthetic surface upon which criminal activities can be mapped’ (Campbell, 2013:
18). However, recent work drawing on the insights of the ‘spatial turn’ in social theory,
has begun to offer more nuanced accounts of the lived experience and socio-cultural com-
plexities of space and its interrelationships with crime and social control (Campbell, 2013;
Hayward, 2012). At the same time, criminologists have begun to interrogate and prob-
lematize the centrality accorded to human actors and agency. An array of broadly post-
structuralist theory has furnished criminologists with the requisite conceptual language to
locate crime and its control within hybrid networks or ‘assemblages’ of bodies, spaces,
technologies and affect (Brown, 2006; Haggerty and Ericson, 2000).
The present article draws together these three emergent strands of criminological
thinking in order to theorize the role of strategically designed consumer spaces in modu-
lating potentially criminogenic and harmful dispositions and behaviours. The article pro-
ceeds as follows. First, the article introduces recent work in cultural geography and urban
studies, which has drawn attention to the manipulation of affect through spatial design.1
Second, by way of example, the article considers how such strategies are deployed in
three types of consumer environments: shopping malls and retail spaces; casinos and
other gambling environments; and the so-called night time economy. In each of these
settings, it is shown how design strategies are enrolled in order to elicit physiological and
psychological traits conducive to consumption. Also considered is the extent to which
such design strategies are capable of modulating the potential for criminogenic and
harmful dispositions and behaviours. Third, the article engages such developments theo-
retically. It is suggested that the increasing prevalence of what I call ‘persuasion archi-
tectures’ necessitates that we rethink the distinctions and interrelationships between
human subjectivity and agency and the built environment. The implications of this con-
ceptual reorientation are explored—first, for our understandings of agency, intentional-
ity, moral responsibility and political accountability; and second, for criminological
thinking around embodied difference, power and exclusion.
Engineering affect
Recent work in cultural geography and urban studies has drawn attention to an emergent
‘biopolitical strategy’: namely, ‘the engineering of affect through urban design’ (Miller,
2014a: 14; see, for example, Adey, 2008; Allen, 2006; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Thrift,
2008). Put simply, certain bodily and emotional dispositions are now being actively
designed or ‘scripted’ into (urban) space. Architecture and design are increasingly
620 Theoretical Criminology 25(4)
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