Vegan Cityscapes: Dynamics of Nonhuman Personhood, Vegan Visibility, and Plant-based Eating in the Urban Space

Cities are spaces in which consumerism, multiculturalism, and protest must often comingle. Often concentrated in urban spaces, veganism—which advocates alternative consumption, multispecies multiculturalism, and resistance to harmful foodways and multispecies relationships—offers an interesting case study of urban consumerist and anti-consumerist dynamics. Using textual discourse analysis of signs, posted menus, advertisements, and window displays collected between 2021 and 2022 in one university town in southeast England, it is considered how veganism in an anti-vegan, anthropocentric society might be able to persist, perhaps even thrive, in capital-serving cityscapes. Findings suggest that veganism is reduced to a form of consumption that aligns with capitalist and state interests, avoiding animal rights messaging that would, presumably, threaten hegemonic structures. Yet, this study also considers if the saturation of vegan signage could be subversive in normalizing veganism. These complexities are considered in the context of geographical and sociological research on cities as sites of both corporate co-optation of consumption-based protest and social change.