Qualitative study of the consumption of signs in urban spaces (case study: Sanandaj)

This article attempts to interpret the ways through which the consumers construct pleasures, meanings and identities in urban public spaces in Sanandaj, and to explain how these spaces homogenize the consumers. Urbanization provides public spaces imbued with signs and images that send different implications to people. In fact, people are participating in urban public life through consuming these signs and images which in turn affects and changes individual social behaviors. This research, using critical ethnography to study the young consumers in Sanandaj, gathered data through techniques such as direct observation and individual deep interview. The sample was selected by purposeful sampling and the data were analyzed through thematic interpretation. The findings showed that the youth consume signs and images in a mood embed with both resistance and assimilation. At one hand, consuming signs is a way to resist the dominant codes and discourses, and at the other is a way of being assimilated to social codes and meanings produced by culture industry. So we can conclude that consuming images and signs in urban spaces primarily consists of a dialectic called the interaction of individuality and spaces. According to this dialectic, individuals try to resists the rules and codes which are imposed by urban spaces, but in this attempt to resistence they are not completely successful.