Dismantling the advertising city: Subvertising and the urban commons to come

Abstract

Subvertising, a portmanteau for ‘subverting advertising’, is the illicit practice of intervening into urban advertising space, from graffiti scribbles and removed adverts, to full-blown billboard takeovers and digitally hacked adverts. In this article, I draw from 24 months of ethnography with subvertisers to suggest that a particular ideal of public space, that of a ‘regime of order’, is folded into the hegemonic spatial management of urban communication by advertising actors. This ‘regime’ relies on separating worlds from common use, that is, on what Giorgio Agamben has phrased ‘consecration’. As an operation with capacities for ‘profanation’, subvertising makes visible the ‘natural’ appearance of this urban regime, and enacts highly temporary placeholder forms for the communicative commons to come. Contributing to debates on the geographies of public space and publicness, subvertisers show that the possibility of common use does not emerge from property rights, shared value-systems or a pre-determined scope of usage. Instead, common use emerges from the deactivation of the very notions of rights, laws, identity and ends. Here I trace subvertisers’ insistence on taking seriously the charge of openness, incompatibility, contestation, excess and the dysfunctional in urban expression as sources of inspiration and (self-)transformation.

Chaos in Motion: Measuring Visual Pollution with Tangential View Landscape Metrics

“…For example, spatial chaos as a feature of a cityscape's unpredictability, can make the experience of traversing a city attractive. Furthermore, for subvertisers [93], who expect incompatibility, contestation, excess, and the dysfunctional in urban expression, OA emerge as sources of inspiration and (self)transformation [94]. From this perspective, the ordered and predictable city becomes unattractive, while for landscape architects who strive for harmonious and aesthetic spatial forms, the VP emerges as an unfavorable phenomenon affecting visual comfort and VLC.…”

“…What these opposite approaches have in common is consent to the profanation of public space. The former use chaos as a form of communication [94]. The latter quantifies the landscape to propose sustainable solutions against spatial chaos [5,11,23] However, spatial chaos should not be confused with spatial uniformity [95].…”

From grassroots to global action: The role of DIY subvertising in the European citizens’ initiative to #BanFossilAds

“…Crafted using do-it-yourself (DIY) techniques, subvertisements transcend their role as mere tools for manipulating advertisements, becoming intertwined with the defense of social values and the promotion of democratic citizenship. Simultaneously, subvertising serves as a contemporary practice of power-contestation (Dekeyser, 2018), bearing responsibility for advertising saturation, fostering overconsumption and the associated physical and mental consequences in contemporary society.…”

Detroit in memoriam: urban imaginaries and the spectre of demolished by neglect in performative photo-installations

“…69 In more recent work in cultural geography, referring to the work of Naomi Klein, the geographer Thomas Dekeyser calls such practices of intervening into the advertising spaces 'subvertising, a portmanteau for subvertising advertising'. 70 Others refer to similar practices whereby the public space is reclaimed as a form of 'micro political resistance' or what Klein called 'cultural jammers'. 71 Besides advertisement's intention to 'violating reality', visual theorist Paul Messaris also refers to images as evidence of the claims made by advertisements.…”