Adsensory Urban Ecology (Volume Two)

Book excerpt: Adsensory sign technology, which depicts the human body as both object and subject of inscriptive advertising technologies, is integral to a western capitalist insurantial financialisation of health and wellbeing. Developing further the theme of adsensory technologies of the sign, in conjunction with Daniel Bell’s theory of the codification of knowledge as an axial feature of the structuring of post-industrial society, this book explores gentrification in heterotopic post-industrial urban spaces. It brings together case studies from the City of Bath’s decommissioned Bath Press print works; London’s Trafalgar Square busking community and its dialectics of audio-sensory gentrification; and London’s Brick Lane and its gentrification of street art. These studies illustrate, empirically, the extent to which advertising adsensory technologies have become integral to the gentrification of post-industrial urban spaces. Several of the case studies engage critically with the empirical observation that, in the post-industrial urban ecology of inner-city regeneration, adsensory technologies extend avariciously into the infrastructure of neoliberal, managerialist gentrification. In addition, the book explores the forms of capital accumulation which are emerging from the integration of adsensory technology into the gentrification of post-industrial urban spaces, and examines a new form of capital accumulation in inner-city gentrification, predicated on the (de)generative integrity of adsensory financialisation.