The Commercialisation of Public Space (written 2009)

Commerce is all around us now; we have become inured to the ubiquitous messages adorning screens and billboards citywide, inviting us to consider the newest, most up-to-date product or some heretofore unrepresented service, freshly packaged or merely cast in a different shade. And these frequently garish advertisements have found increasingly obscure and uncomfortably intrusive places to proclaim their message, popping up in pub urinals, on supermarket concourses, and even intruding into our very own students’ union at Goldsmiths (see the Topman placard). Culturally, the issue of product placement was of great concern in the recent Shane Meadows film, Somers Town, as was the question of corporate sponsorship, as small-budget artistic enterprises struggle to source the funds for ever more adventurous proposals. These instances represent a few of the recent inroads advertising has made into our social landscape.

To be sure, public spaces are part of the same economic and social fabric as the commercial sector. Sellers and vendors are everywhere on market stalls or on checkout counters, forming a key element of today’s capital infrastructure. Yet energetic economic activity is in danger of becoming so powerful and pervasive that it threatens the very idea of a shared, public, open space. The pressures of privatisation and commercialisation may be seen to have crossed the line into something crass and debasing, re-casting what was free and accessible into something selective and restricted.

This branding of public space took a step further into the unpalatable the other day when I stepped onto a bus to get ‘out of the bubble’ of New Cross on a trip to a job interview in central London. One of the buses I stepped onto that afternoon was the 168, the service which runs from Hampstead to the Old Kent Road, two public destinations, known and reachable by all, places that define our landscape and are part of the collective imagination. Importantly, however, the route was marked as terminating not just at the public space of the Old Kent Road, but as finishing its journey at ‘Old Kent Road, Tesco’, a fundamentally private, commercialised place, corporate and undemocratic. In other words, the ‘landmark’ of a multinational superstore has become so much a part of our way of life that it has come to circumscribe a bus route and frame our very experience of the world. This represents the next step in the reverence for commerce and an increase in the prominence it is afforded by each and every one of us.

Indeed, the idea of where we live, the essence of who we are, is now constrained and structured in terms of huge, faceless corporate entities. The space is no longer representative or reflective of the surrounding community, but a place where exclusion, division, and a loss of shared identity are common currency. This generic, homogenised space, now all around us, has begun to infiltrate the collective imagination, becoming our most widely understood public language and defining our lives. What do you pick out as the most conspicuous landmark when you find yourself lost in a large town: would it be the civic centre, the magistrates’ court, the old post office? Or would it more than likely be the Tesco Express that’s just opened its doors on the main road? London, like many other cities in the UK, is becoming less distinctive and less meaningful to its inhabitants. We are in serious danger of defining ourselves by these branded, commercial places when the argument that they merit such a lauded position in the social and cultural realm is highly questionable. The 168 bus I rode on only the other day has become a systematic hoarding.

This isn’t just a lazy brand of old-fashioned nostalgia for a bygone era that never was; rather, this is a sincere plea for the reestablishment of the real, valuable symbols of our existence, the spaces that embody a community’s spirit and soul precisely because they have no rules or strictures to limit their sense of ownership. Outside of the market, these true landmarks uphold the dignity and inherent value of the common man or woman, regardless of their capital worth. It is with this achingly bitter sense of regret that I experienced that bus ride the other day. Something vital seemed to be disappearing down the plughole when I realised that a collective public space was being given over to yet another ‘sponsor’, that it was now a thinly veiled excuse for a subtle marketing strategy. Far from being a cut-off, outdated, and irrelevant plea for a rose-tinted socialist future, the necessary vitality and energy which the commercial sector so often injects into our lives needn’t come to be the very means by which we understand ourselves and the world. It is surely now time to draw the line.