ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a relationship between the ongoing proliferation and control of retail spaces and the transformation of urban public domains. Activities of consumption and shopping increase, become territorialised, singularised, themed and boxed, but also, through strategies of synchronisation and desingularisation, become seemingly more seamlessly integrated into the urban environment and our everyday lives. We live in a world where retail is both public, retail colonises public space, we circulate with our weekly groceries in large transparent shopping trolleys at the supermarket, and more private, we order more and more goods over the Internet and in the privacy and comfort of our own living rooms. Through a series of essays on territorialisation, the chapter discusses and given examples of how urban public spaces become territorialised by way of consumption and retail. The effects of retailisation on public domain are perhaps not devastating, but they are indeed multiple, sometimes problematic and perhaps even threatening from the perspective of non-commercial activities.
