Advertising Commercial Spaces And The Urban

About this book

This book provides the first detailed account of contemporary outdoor advertising and its relationship with urban space. Going beyond accounts of urban 'place marketing' or advertising cities to tourists, the book asks: What can the outdoor advertising industry tell us about the commercial production of urban space? What does an analysis of these industry practices reveal about contemporary capitalism? How do ads and billboard structures interface with spaces of the city? What forms of 'urban vernacular' do they provide? The book presents an analysis of industry practices as 'commercial experiments' that engage with capitalism as performative, adaptive and open. Extending debates on non-representational theory, it analyses advertising texts, structures and spatiality through 'fabulation': a form of vernacular that sees animation, or the life of capitalism, in urban spaces. What do ads say about urban space, and what can those spaces reveal about advertising and capitalism?