Bryan Mark

I am an urban geographer who studies contemporary urban cultures. My work is interested in the cultures of consumers and consumption in cities, neighbourhood gentrification, and the role of technology and corporate digital platforms in augmenting urban inequality. My previous graduate work traced the hipster gentrification of Ossington Avenue in west downtown Toronto through a cultural critique of an ice-cream boutique, exploring in part the dynamic between Instagram, anxiety, and the phenomenon of queuing for highly aesthetic small-batch food retail products. My SSHRC-funded doctoral research aims to ethnographically examine the urban experiences of digital creators and the digital mediation of urban change in Toronto, highlighting entanglements between platform algorithms, content curation, and gentrification.

Publications 

Bain, A.L. and Mark, B. (2020) Re-imaging, re-elevating, re-placing the urban: gentrification and the transformation of Canadian inner cities. In M. Moos, R. Walker, and T. Vinodrai (eds) Canadian Cities in Transition: Understanding Contemporary Urbanism. Sixth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 277-291.

Mark, B. (2023) Aestheticizing hipster retail infrastructure: from Neapolitan to cosmopolitan. In Alison L. Bain and Julie A. Podmore (eds) The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, 161-170.