The Brave New World of the Post-society: The Mass-production of the Individual Consumer and the Emergence of Template Cities

Abstract

Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World (Longman, Harlow, 1932/1991) portrayed a post-human world, a world where human beings were mass-produced like clones and kept in complete happiness through an endless variation of seductions and pleasures. This essay explores parallels in contemporary urban society by analysing why and how we consume—goods, places, and ultimately ourselves—in our daily shopping spaces. In today's post-society, new fashions, representations and make-overs are introduced onto the global market at breakneck speed. Globalization implies an inexhaustible resource for change in local consumption spaces, creating continuous opportunities to transform our personal identities as well as our urban environments. In our world of globalization, hyper-capitalism, and mass-individualism, there seems to be no escape from having and parading a personal identity, no escape from the commercial template for seductive urban shopping spaces. Are we in control of our own destinies? Who are we fooling when we hide in the consumerist maze of fiction and fantasy? What brave new world are we living in?

Acknowledgements

An important part of this article is based on research undertaken by Bas Spierings at the Department of Human Geography at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This contribution, centring on the production of Template Cities, is recently followed by a discussion—focussing on the construction of Barcode Humans—in the edited volume Urban Politics Now. We would like to thank the editors of this special issue in European Planning Studies and BAVO, the editors of the volume, for the intriguing opportunity to reflect on the many different ways in which Brave New World by Aldous Huxley speaks to our contemporary time and age.