City of Signages, or Learning from Shopfronts: Tracing the Commercial Surface on Streetscapes of Berlin, Yokohama, and Sydney

Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Williams, Christian Cameron
dc.date.accessioned	2020-08-31T02:53:20Z
dc.date.available	2020-08-31T02:53:20Z
dc.date.issued	2019
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/142427
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.	en_AU
dc.description.abstract	Shopfronts and their signage represent almost all commercial premises: from cheap diners to high-end restaurants, from convenience stores to franchises and the megastores of global brands. They are an omnipresent expression of the urban visage and the backdrop to the everyday performance of the urban streetscape. Yet, the agency of shopfronts and shopfront signage has been neglected in material and spatial interpretations of the urban condition. Within dominant discourses on the architectonics of the urban surface, they are considered to be a false, flat or superficial cloaking of the real nature of the city. They are viewed as an aesthetic conundrum, a tragedy of the commons, and even, an outrage. This research explores the problem of the neglected yet omnipresent fabric of shopfronts, how their signage can be studied, and what their study can contribute to current architectural discourse on the everyday city. It encompasses a re-examination of their formation within the pages of urban history and on the commercial streetscapes of modern cities. The research is informed by a background in architecture and environmental graphics and further seeks to harness interdisciplinary approaches from sociology, visual communications, material and consumer studies. Historiographic and empirical forms of analysis are combined to interrogate and illustrate if and how the present-day architectonics of shopfront signage have been shaped by local, cultural, and architectural logics. The thesis is structured in two parts. The first part of the research contributes a spatial history of commercial signage which explores a series of shifting currents between architects, designers, sign makers, advertisers, urban planners and artists and their relationship with the cultural, economic and physical fabric of the street and city. The spatial history forms an armature for the second part of the thesis which involves an empirical study of shopfront signage on continuous four-kilometre streetscapes of three cities – Berlin, Yokohama, and Sydney. The empirical method combines extensive photographic fieldwork, detailed content analysis, and data visualisation, to investigate the patterns and tendencies that can be found within data-thick, socio-spatial readings of the material and socio-spatial agency of shopfronts and the way they dress the city. The detailed and contrasting encounters with commercial streetscapes, and their visualisation, make explicit the importance of the shopfront as an urban category and offer a way of reconceiving the urban surface to account for the significant morphological contribution of everyday commercial architectonics.	en_AU
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/142427/2/02whole.pdf
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/ppc
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.title	City of Signages, or Learning from Shopfronts: Tracing the Commercial Surface on Streetscapes of Berlin, Yokohama, and Sydney	en_AU
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

Shopfronts and their signage represent almost all commercial premises: from cheap diners to high-end restaurants, from convenience stores to franchises and the megastores of global brands. They are an omnipresent expression of the urban visage and the backdrop to the everyday performance of the urban streetscape. Yet, the agency of shopfronts and shopfront signage has been neglected in material and spatial interpretations of the urban condition. Within dominant discourses on the architectonics of the urban surface, they are considered to be a false, flat or superficial cloaking of the real nature of the city. They are viewed as an aesthetic conundrum, a tragedy of the commons, and even, an outrage. This research explores the problem of the neglected yet omnipresent fabric of shopfronts, how their signage can be studied, and what their study can contribute to current architectural discourse on the everyday city. It encompasses a re-examination of their formation within the pages of urban history and on the commercial streetscapes of modern cities. The research is informed by a background in architecture and environmental graphics and further seeks to harness interdisciplinary approaches from sociology, visual communications, material and consumer studies. Historiographic and empirical forms of analysis are combined to interrogate and illustrate if and how the present-day architectonics of shopfront signage have been shaped by local, cultural, and architectural logics. The thesis is structured in two parts. The first part of the research contributes a spatial history of commercial signage which explores a series of shifting currents between architects, designers, sign makers, advertisers, urban planners and artists and their relationship with the cultural, economic and physical fabric of the street and city. The spatial history forms an armature for the second part of the thesis which involves an empirical study of shopfront signage on continuous four-kilometre streetscapes of three cities – Berlin, Yokohama, and Sydney. The empirical method combines extensive photographic fieldwork, detailed content analysis, and data visualisation, to investigate the patterns and tendencies that can be found within data-thick, socio-spatial readings of the material and socio-spatial agency of shopfronts and the way they dress the city. The detailed and contrasting encounters with commercial streetscapes, and their visualisation, make explicit the importance of the shopfront as an urban category and offer a way of reconceiving the urban surface to account for the significant morphological contribution of everyday commercial architectonics.

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