Nike Town: a Corporate Situationism
Since the late 1990s, the world’s leading brands have used sophisticated communication techniques to give their image a set of values, an attitude, a way of life. Nike is one of the international brands using the branding techniques theorized by Naomi Klein in 2000 in the book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (ed. Knopf Canada, Picador, 2000). Nike approaches these techniques by mimicking counter-culture and discreetly taking possession of the urban space. In the era of intangible capitalism, are Western cities not the commercial achievement of the Situationist conception of urban space which condemned the disenchanted urbanism of the modern functional city and intended to “affirm the city as a laboratory of a playful revolution in everyday life “? Friedrich von Borries is an architect, curator and professor of design theory.
