ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the rise of branded environments in the city and examines how retail brandscapes in particular intersect with and shape aspects of urban life. It begins with a general discussion of brandscaping, outlining key processes and practices involved, the implication of consumer activity, as well as different types of brandscape. The chapter then considers the growing presence of commercial brandscapes in the city and engages key debates regarding their social and cultural impacts, including the role of brands in processes of privatization, commercialization, and homogenization of city space and urban cultures. Addressing these issues, the chapter presents an empirical case study of coffeehouse brands and their brandscapes in Canadian cities. Drawing on a view of brandscapes as embodied and lived experiences, as well as notions of territory and territorialization, the analysis considers the dynamic, performative interplay of brandscapes and their consumers in place. It illustrates how such entanglements give rise to forms of urban sociality and co-generate territories that are configured as socially exclusive middle class spaces through processes of framing and practices of cultural consumption and taste. The conclusion proposes that brandscapes as territorial sorts may be bound up with new forms of socio-spatial division in the city, whereby certain groups inhabit particular branded terrain across and within urban neighborhoods.
