Brand-Driven City Building and the Virtualizing of Space

This book is an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of branding and its transformational effects on the contemporary spatial --and urban--reality. It develops a novel understanding of the rationale behind the construction of large-scale architectural complexes that relate to corporate brands, and of its tremendous cultural effects. The author suggests that what we see today is the creation of  global mass ornaments, of a thorough ornamentalization of the entire globe.rnrnThe origins of this are discussed with regard to examples of corporate brand-building from Europe and China. Additional cases are several simulated spaces in Berlin and the space-branding activities of companies like Apple or Prada. Theoretically, the author develops an innovative poststructuralist framework, combining ideas from Gilles Deleuze with the space philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. He analyzes how the corporate redefinition of space makes the city enter into a mode of virtual urbanity. This idea leads to a notion of a global urban" and the "global mass ornament" ultimately