VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

The paper details the process of accumulation and exploitation of urban space through the outdoor advertising industry. Here, we pay particular attention to the lack of democratic involvement available to local residents to influence how their cities are used. Based on publicly available data on the UK advertising industry and archival information from all 315 English councils, we argue that outdoor advertising represents a hidden and developed example of what David Harvey describes as accumulation by dispossession. We empirically trace 1) what and how value is generated and accumulated by the outdoor advertising industry, 2) the process by which public space is transferred to corporate media owners, and 3) how citizens’ are dispossessed of their statutory rights to engage in this process. Specifically, we suggest that citizens’ right to oppose the presence of advertising hardware in urban space – the physical artefacts such as billboards, digital screens and bus stops – is converted in the regulatory systems into a consumer right that accepts cities as growth machines. In this way, we move away from scholarly studies of subvertising in order to focus on the processes by which advertising media comes to exist, and proliferate, in urban public space. Our analysis illustrates how accumulation by dispossession can work in post-modern consumer cultures. Our key finding is to expose the ways that institutions and policy designed to provide democratic control of public space are being subverted to prevent such control. We thus outline strategies through which those tools might be reclaimed as part of the ‘right to the city’.