Introducing Commercial Spaces

Abstract

Any encounter with television, the internet, or urban streetscapes would suggest that we are living in the age of advertising. But the ubiquity of advertising in the west has been the focus of comment for centuries and many have claimed theirs as the ultimate era of advertising. In 1758, Samuel Johnson reputedly said that ‘ads are now so numerous that they are negligently perused’, and that ‘the trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement’ (cited in Williams 1980: 172). Notwithstanding the hyperbole surrounding its power and scope certain characteristics of advertising can be identified, one of which is its long association with cities (see Wischermann and Shore 2000). Lewis Mumford (1945: 228) noted the significance of the growth of bureaucracy for urban development such that ‘a new trinity dominated the metropolitan scene: finance, insurance, advertising’. Indeed, cities have been understood as agglomerations of people and commerce, and as sites of the centralisation of power as Mumford describes. But urban life was also thought to offer up city populations to the devices of the mass media, of which advertising was considered the most pernicious. Wirth (1964) describes how the changes to community wrought by urban capitalism resulted in the increasing significance of the media: ‘it follows, too, that the masses of men in the city are subject to manipulation by symbols and stereotypes managed by individuals working from afar or operating invisibly behind the scenes through their control of the instruments of communication’ (Wirth 1964: 82).