As you move about myriad city spaces, you will probably recognise the regularity and intensity with which you are being exposed to a whole plethora of brands. Perhaps most noticeable will be all manner of advertising display. Ads plastered across roadside billboards or building walls, integrated into street furniture, consuming an entire section of a metro station, on – or even entirely covering – a bus or a tram, or spotted on private motor vehicles with no other apparent purpose but pulling around a hoarding boasting ad display. But brands appear in the city not only in advertising. Urban environments are increasingly understood as key venues of ‘brand building’ and ‘brand management’. These emerging techniques are often highly multisensory, involving the more general construction of brands through a combination of visuality, tactility, taste and smell. They are being applied to everything from large-scale urban events, to architectural design, to retail shops, to ordinary consumer objects. Altogether, the proliferation of brands raises questions about the highly commoditised nature of the cities we live in, not to mention how we might respond politically. In this episode, we explore different dimensions of what we will call ‘urban brandscapes’: how urban environments more generally are infused with branded character, feel and atmospheres.
Thinkers discussed: David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); Anne Cronin (Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban / Calculative Spaces: Cities, Market Relations and the Commercial Vitalism of the Outdoor Advertising Industry / Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity Rhythms); Emma Arnold (Sexualised Advertising and the Production of Space in the City); Iain Borden (Hoardings); Kurt Iveson (Branded Cities: Outdoor Advertising, Urban Governance, and the Outdoor Media Landscape); Marc Gobé (Emotional Branding: A New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People); Liz Moor (The Rise of Brands); Van Troi Tran (Thirst in the Global Brandscape: Water, Milk and Coke at the Shanghai World Expo); Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form); Scott Lash and Celia Lury (Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things)
Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
Media, Technology & Culture 07 (2nd Edition): Embodied Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 06 (2nd Edition): Infrastructural Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 05 (2nd Edition): Computational Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 04 (2nd Edition): Live Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 03 (2nd Edition): Domesticated Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 02 (2nd Edition): Communication Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 01 (2nd Edition): Cultural Technologies
Publicly Sited Update: New Podcast on The Mediated City; plus Media, Technology and Culture 2nd Edition
Media, Technology and Culture 09: Algorithmic Technologies
Media, Technology and Culture 08: Participatory Technologies
Media, Technology and Culture 07: Embodied Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 06: Infrastructural Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 05: Computational Technologies
Media, Technology& Culture 04: Live Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 03: Domesticated Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 02: Communication Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 01: Cultural Technologies
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