abrand

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Under capitalism, all is spectacle. Branding is the antithesis of neighbourhood. How can the symbolic language inherent to branding adjust to the reality of a process that includes a local community: those neighbourhood residents who study and work there, plus the daily flux of permanent and temporary occupants. dAb takes up the radical theory of the text, The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, in order to suggest alternatives to work and leisure, in the light of contemporary problematics of technology and the environment in the city. An approach influenced by Lacan emphasizes games of symbolic language in the creation of an urban identity. Branding connects consumer culture to raging capitalism, this global economy that, in North America, leads to incoherent urbanism and banal architecture. How can the slow tempo of long duration, that of architecture and urbanism, influence the rapid cycles of advertising and capital accumulation? The neighbourhood undergoes extremes of spectacle, of population flow, of culture, of temperature. Its urbanism must connect permanent and temporary daily living.  Neighbourhood residents include small shopkeepers, homeless youth, suburban teens, a symphony conductor, civic employees, musicians. One must avoid sterile profiles and offer an intense diversity to correspond to the pivotal place. This approach thus privileges recognition of the full range of occupants of the area, beautiful and ugly. The dAb collective proposes a three-pronged approach, adding the importance of an approach to urban  form that is sensitive to urban acoustics, to the urgent themes of the environment and the questions of an urbanism that is sustainable from both a social and ecological perspective.​