ABSTRACT
Cities are spatial manifestations of broader social forces and struggles. The built environment and architecture play their part as both metric and motor of change. In the West for the past 250 years the urban environment has been created by industrial capitalist modernity. Space has been restructured in line with changes in capitalism. ‘Selling places is now a well-known feature of contemporary urban societies’ (Philo and Kearns 1993: 18). In the past 30 years most of the developed and developing world, including the so-called BRIC emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China), have joined in the competitive marketing of places as social and economic opportunities seeking capital investment. Places have become commodities and ‘converted into products to be sold in competitive markets’ (Philo and Kearns 1993: 19). Related to this is the globalisation of what sociologist John Urry (2002: 115) calls the ‘tourist gaze’: ‘all sorts of places (indeed almost everywhere) have come to construct themselves as objects of the tourist gaze . . . not as centres of production or symbols of power but as sites of pleasure’. Hence, in central Beijing in 2006, although a Starbucks coffee franchise was forced to close in its Forbidden City (a World Heritage site) location after some tens of thousands of people campaigned against its presence, just around the corner was a more legitimate retail outlet: a Beijing 2008 Olympic Games official store.
