Advertising, information, and space: Considering the informal regulation of the Los Angeles landscape

Abstract

This article analyzes a municipal inventory of billboards within the City of Los Angeles. It has long been rumored that thousands of the billboards in the city were illegal; since completing their inventory, city agents now claim that only a fraction of billboards are illegal. I argue herein that a close reading of the inventory reveals over half of the billboards in Los Angeles either lack permits or are out of compliance with their permits and are thereby illegal. While some city agents work to strengthen the city's regulation of signage, others fail to enforce sign laws, protect the signs from appearing illegal, and push to rewrite the sign code to legalize technically illegal signs. I argue that these contradictory actions evidence informality as the city's mode of regulating signage, and I seek to understand how state actors, as unique individuals, play a part in the creation of this informal landscape. Using theories on advertising and urban space, and drawing in information theory to understand the concatenation of information and space, I tie the varied experiences, knowledges, and actions of individual state actors to the overarching informality of the state's regulation of outdoor advertising.

The material geographies of advertising: Concrete objects, affective affordance and urban space

“…A second strand of literature argues that to conceive of advertising-city relations we need to start from outdoor advertising as a situated process, one that unfolds as a complex, morethan-representational encounter between multiple bodies, times and spaces (Cronin, 2010;Sedano, 2016;Young, 2014). On a first level, this signals an attempt to move beyond those accounts taking outdoor advertising as primarily textual objects (such as Iveson, 2007;Kwate and Lee, 2006;Rosewarne, 2007) and uniform objects (including Chmielewski et al, 2016;Relph, 1976).…”

“…On a second level, this conceptual shift complicates accounts that take human beings as homogeneously and consistently susceptible to advertising texts and images (see, for instance, Rosewarne, 2005Rosewarne, , 2007. Instead, as Sedano (2016) tells us, such understanding involves attending to human bodies as variously co-constituting the advertising encounter. Each body attends to and experiences urban advertising differently because it is uniquely 'imbricated by the action and energy of memory, thought, and feeling' (Sedano, 2016: 227).…”

“…In developing the argument, the paper primarily contributes to an expanding geographical interest in advertising and outdoor advertising more specifically. Geographers are starting to challenge the notion of advertising as an inert backdrop to contemporary life, or as the manipulative injection of semiotics into passive bodies (see for instance Jhally, 1990;Williamson, 1978) to consider, in a more nuanced fashion, the multi-layered urban (Cronin, 2008a(Cronin, , 2008bIveson, 2012;Young, 2014), temporal (Cronin, 2006) and embodied (Cronin, 2010;Sedano, 2016) lives of outdoor advertising. Following in this vein, I echo Cronin who approaches outdoor advertising 'representations not as immaterial shadows or mirrors of reality, nor as mere semantic resources' (Cronin, 2010: 95).…”

‘Sensor’ship and Spatial Data Quality

“…The creation of new sign categories to avoid the ban on off-site signs has been a tactic of urban and industry decisionmakers. The inventory itself obscures the fact that many of the pole, wall, and roof signs in the city are unpermitted and illegal (Sedano, 2016). The limited scope of the inventory to only a handful of the many types of off-site signs that now adorn cityspace appears to be another tactic in this overall strategy.…”

“…Almost immediately, outdoor advertising companies challenged these laws in court. The three corporations that own the lion's share of billboards in the city held up the inventory program for years, and even after the city was legally cleared to restart the program, political pressures kept the city from commencing work and, later, releasing its results (Sedano, 2016). This article describes a project to employ volunteered geographic information (VGI) to map off-site signs in Los Angeles.…”