Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban

'Challenging the conventional critique of advertising as a process that saturates and commercialises space, Anne Cronin focuses on the ubiquitous hoardings, notice-boards and bus-stop panels that constitute outdoor advertising to produce a stimulating, highly original, sophisticated account that significantly extends understanding. Cronin demonstrates that it is a far from exact science as those in the advertising industry acknowledge, for along with many contemporary capitalist endeavours, it is improvisational, intuitive, processual and performative, continually changing as part of the fluid, lived city. Moreover, rather than being simply a means of producing dominant meanings and signs, and persuading consumers to spend money on things they neither need nor want, outdoor advertising is ingeniously conceived as an urban vernacular, a resource through which the city is known, sensed and practised, continuously reproducing forms of the 'public' and public space.' - Tim Edensor, Reader in Cultural Geography, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK