Explanation of Commodity Fetishism, Consumerism, and Urban Consumption in Middle Cities (Case Study: Rasht and Qazvin)

The leisure industry is largely tied to activities related to reproduction and consumption and gives meaning to daily life. The life of this industry is the domination of space, and through the occupation of space, the dissolution of space, the liberation of space, and the integration of space, it ensures its survival and the forces of capitalism that it preserves. Urban fragmentation, rupture, urban differentiation, and polarization are partly the result of such commodity fragmentation, consumption and consumption of urban terrains and regions, and the salient features of this process. In Iran, as in many other countries, with the dominance of the service-based economy the flow of commodity and consumption is dominated and land use in the process of occupation, dissolution, reconstruction, integration and the like are gradually being served. However, not all cities and regions have experienced and are experiencing this tendency in the same way. Therefore, the theoretical and experimental issue of this article is the focus on consumerism and related urban land use in the middle cities of Iran and the adoption and expansion of this trend in these cities. Considering that in urban planning texts, the relationship between commodity wealth, consumer culture, and urban consumption is not yet clearly explained, so the principle of the study is to explain this relationship and present an analytical model to measure its realization and objectivity in the middle cities. The method of the research in terms of practical purpose and because of the connection of economic, social, and cultural factors and its physical representation is explanatory. Therefore, based on the spatial model of the consumer city obtained by EFA (by 9 factors and 40 variables beside significant Bartlett's test and KMO of 0.87), two provincial capitals, which are both middle cities of country, have been selected, and comparative comparisons are carried out using CFA and structural equations of path analysis. Stabilization of the model was done by confirmatory factor analysis with the goodness of fit indices which resulted in a model with 7 latent variables of the first order and 42 and 22-second order latent variables for Rasht and Qazvin, respectively. Since the standard factor loads in the two models are more than 0.4 and the t-values are higher than the absolute value of 1.96, one would conclude that the relationship between latent and explicit variables is significant. Moreover, the results show that Qazvin and Rasht, are both consumer cities and the spatial representations of consumer culture are evident in at least four components, namely: department stores, discount shops, soft infrastructure as well as passages and shopping malls. Undeniably, there are differences in each of the variables, which well explains the cultural and geographical differences between the two middle cities in terms of urban consumerism. As a final point, a comparative comparison of the two cities based on structural equations shows that consumerism, is influenced by the traditions and indigenous culture of the city, and differences such as the amount of indoor and outdoor consumption spaces confirm the matter.