ABSTRACT
What role might public spaces play in the globalization of cities? Theories of the global city and the entrepreneurial city predict that integration into the labor, capital, and technological networks that comprise the global marketplace will cause urban residents to identify more and more with transnational political, economic, and social groups. And yet how these transformations in individual identification will occur is unclear. Many scholars examine the print and broadcast media looking to see how the state uses these in political campaigns to shape collective identity. Others look at the changing visual and textual rhetoric of the more traditional media of popular culture – film, literature, the visual, and performing arts – to see how domestic and international capital are calling on people to think beyond local and national communities (Ong 1999, Wang 2001, 2003). Left unexplored is the influence of new public spaces and the medium most common in them: advertising.
