Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban

ANNE CRONIN is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. She has previously published Advertising Myths, Advertising and Consumer Citizenship, and Consuming the Entrepreneurial City (co-edited).

• Introducing Commercial Spaces The Industry and the City: Knowledge Practices as Commercial Experiments Mobility, Market Research and Commercial Aesthetics The Commodity Rhythms of Urban Space Fabulating Commercial Spaces: Mediation, Texts, and Perception Perceiving Urban Change in Detroit and Manchester: Space, Time and the Virtual The Commercial Vernacular of Advertising: Public Space, Commercialisation and Public Address

'Challenging the conventional critique of advertising as a process that saturates and commercialises space, Anne Cronin focuses on the ubiquitous hoardings, notice-boards and bus-stop panels that constitute outdoor advertising to produce a stimulating, highly original, sophisticated account that significantly extends understanding. Cronin demonstrates that it is a far from exact science as those in the advertising industry acknowledge, for along with many contemporary capitalist endeavours, it is improvisational, intuitive, processual and performative, continually changing as part of the fluid, lived city. Moreover, rather than being simply a means of producing dominant meanings and signs, and persuading consumers to spend money on things they neither need nor want, outdoor advertising is ingeniously conceived as an urban vernacular, a resource through which the city is known, sensed and practised, continuously reproducing forms of the 'public' and public space.' - Tim Edensor, Reader in Cultural Geography, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK