Street Furniture as an Assetizing Apparatus: Advertising Concessions, Public Maintenance and the Production of Neoliberal Urban Space in Glasgow

ABSTRACT

Across British cities, everyday street infrastructure is increasingly sustained through revenue‐generating concessions that detach maintenance from direct municipal budgets. This article examines how street furniture in Glasgow has been incrementally reorganized as an assetizing apparatus under prolonged austerity. Drawing on micro political‐economic tracing of committee records, procurement documents and transport authority contracts, it shows how maintenance obligations are displaced from public budgets into advertising‐funded income streams, standardized through procurement and consolidated through concessionary portfolios. Rather than a sudden privatization of public space, assetization emerges as an accretive institutional process operating through commensuration, bundling and contractual duration. The article argues that low‐visibility infrastructures such as bus shelters are key sites where neoliberal urban governance is rendered durable, binding everyday public space to market performance while narrowing democratic contestation over public responsibility.