If we want our high streets back we have to stop thinking like consumers Do you think of yourself as a "user"? As a "viewer"? A "consumer"? During a debate recently I said that in discussions about "us," the collective public, I prefer to describe us as citizens first and consumers second. Many of us might feel it is far easier to think of ourselves as consumers more than citizens, given how exclusive and detached the machinery of government feels and how insubstantial the levers of democracy. The relentless grind of consumerism - don't create, but acquire - is so wrapped up with lifestyle that our spending and hoarding preferences are part of our identity. We shop as entertainment. A creeping, lazy, unquestioning consumerism pervades and undermines our citizenship. Advertising plays a role in this, setting an irrelevant, fake-life veneer over the mundane but simple joys of our real and proper lives. It uses the language of instruction and demands of us that we BUY NOW or TALK TO US TODAY. It uses a visual language that lies to us, presenting a "dream family" of models that had never met before. At its best, advertising is only wry or clever or sentimental or beautiful, though even then it never has our interests at heart. It gives us all the answers, capsuled, so that we only have to obey and never ask questions. This industry has hijacked the word "creative," which now describes an idea for selling something to us. New advertising is arguably worse, logging and mining every sentiment and detail in our emails, our searches online and in the posts we share with friends on "free" social networks. That promise of relevant, even useful targeted advertising still hasn't materialised; we get targeted with ads for things we have already bought instead. Even those sites that could intimately tailor ads for us still don't. Same-day delivery by drones will help people to buy faster. In this context, then, the debate about us as consumers versus citizens was in the context of the death of the high street, though apparently more about the idea of one than the physical entity. The high street has become a byword for some kind of traditional community hub, as if the centre of our domestic lives still revolves around it. It is wrapped up with intricate nostalgia, the charm of a Ladybird book era when housekeepers took baskets to the butcher, baker and possibly the candlestick-maker. A disgruntled audience member moaned about his high street in Newbury, Berkshire. Nothing worth saving here - it's all kebab shops, betting shops and charity shops. Most high street shoppers might say the same; boarded-up shops, the same cookie-cutter chain stores, endless, endless coffee shops at best. The causes are varied. Beyond a flat economy and property prices that have made it hard for small businesses, the internet has presented huge competition. Amazon, eBay, the supermarkets - the UK is superb at shopping online and just as good at doing that on mobiles; it is estimated that we will have spent £107bn online by the end of the year. Contactless payment, augmented reality and even same-day delivery by drone - all of these technologies will help retailers make money, find new ways to keep people buying, faster and simpler, keep grinding the wheel. We are cash poor and time poor and the internet is efficient for functional shopping. At the same time, this drive towards faster, machine-processed retail has triggered a revival in personal and physical shopping. It has long been joked in tech industry circles that "physical is the new digital," but crafted, handmade, homemade goods have a new potency when we all live with the mirage of digital. Even the trend for hand-drawn fonts seems to be trying to claw something back from the pristine screen. But technology is not the biggest enemy of the high street. What we valued in that nostalgic sense of place was a feeling of belonging, or community. The one place where people you know would head on a weekend, to eat, do chores, catch up and shop. Council planning laws would seem to have a role in the decline of these public spaces, with big malls and already dated out-of-town shopping centres better fulfilling the need for some. The growth in coffee shops is interesting: spaces where people can meet and talk and read. If retail continues to demand our shopping attention, our councils face a planning challenge for our physical high streets. There is already more retail space than there are retailers, so what do councils do with these spaces? We are struggling even to keep hold of our libraries, that rare enough mainstay of our town centres, yet by this community-centric theory of consumer revolution, they should be more relevant than ever. What if we ask ourselves what we might want, need or use in the town centres near us? And then how does the answer differ if we ask as citizens, rather than consumers?