Inhabiting Consumption: A Spatial Perspective on Consumer Experience and Market Life

This dissertation develops a spatial perspective on consumption, examining how embodied experience, collective practice, and infrastructural design shape the ways consumers move, feel, and participate in markets. Across three empirical essays, the thesis argues that space is not a neutral backdrop to consumption but an active force that organizes consumer behaviour. By combining multi-modal qualitative methods (including ethnography, videography, netnography, in-depth interviews), the research demonstrates how consumption emerges through the interaction between bodies, atmospheres, and built environments. The first essay explores aesthetic experience in outdoor sport consumption, focusing on rowing practices along the Po River in Turin. Drawing on embodied phenomenology, the study shows how beauty and well-being arise from rhythmic alignment between the athlete’s body and the environmental textures of the river. Five recurrent image-schemata (merging, resistance, suspension, synchrony, and afterglow) reveal that aesthetic pleasure is rooted in action and bodily negotiation. The essay offers a relational account of aesthetic experience and provides actionable insights for designing multisensory sport and leisure environments. The second essay investigates how festival-goers collectively produce atmospheres and belonging during Club to Club in Turin. The study conceptualizes festivals as choreographies of affect in which attendees continuously adjust posture, distance, and movement to maintain a sense of coherence and comfort. Five micro-practices (proxemic positioning, kinetic alignment, haptic boundary work, semiotic camouflage, and temporal anchoring). demonstrate how audiences co-create spatial order and emotional tone. The essay advances a processual understanding of consumption-as-practice and highlights implications for event management, crowd design, and experience orchestration. The third essay examines air travel from the standpoint of autistic travelers, treating airports and aircraft as infrastructures that shape normative expectations of behaviour, emotion, and sensory tolerance. Drawing on netnography, key-informant interviews, and videographic analysis, the study identifies a cycle of infrastructural exclusion driven by sensory overload, procedural inflexibility, and the delegation of care to families and individuals. The findings show that inclusion fails not because of inadequate awareness, but because infrastructures are built around narrow assumptions of the legible traveler. This essay reframes accessibility as a matter of system reliability and anticipatory design rather than empathy or accommodation. Taken together, the three essays contribute a unified conceptual and methodological framework for studying consumption through space. The dissertation shows that embodied, collective, and infrastructural processes are tightly interlinked: aesthetic attunement, affective choreography, and infrastructural responsibility represent three levels at which markets make space meaningful and, at times, exclusionary. The thesis therefore advances marketing and service research by demonstrating the importance of spatial, sensory, and material dynamics in shaping consumer wellbeing, participation, and inclusion. Practically, the research offers concrete guidelines for experience designers, event organizers, and mobility providers