Liquid Streets: Bauman and the Death of the Dumfries High Street

The first of a series of philosophical roundtable discussions in Dumfries. Join us for an evening of contested opinions, half-remembered continental philosophy, and genuine civic concern, as we use Bauman's liquid modernity as a lens to interrogate the decline of Dumfries town centre

• Solid vs. liquid institutions — what the high street represented when commitments (to a shop, a landlord, a customer) were built to last
• Consumption without commitment — online retail, footfall vs. "click-through," and whether Bauman predicted Amazon before Amazon existed
• Is this decline, or just liquidity doing what liquidity does? — a provocation for the room to disagree with
• What (if anything) is owed to a town centre — moving from diagnosis toward what a post-liquid high street could look like

No prior Bauman required. Skepticism, tangents, and going off-topic into Debord or Marx are all welcome — this is a roundtable, not a lecture.