Peter Brooks’ Unavoidable Impact project highlights the unequal prevalence of billboard advertisement in deprived areas across the UK.
Increasingly our personal and public spaces are being handed to corporations for their profit, and at the expense of our mental health and comfort.
At Portcullis House in early March for the launch event for the Unavoidable Impact project hosted by Barry Sheerman MP, we heard from several speakers alongside Peter Brooks on their research and experiences of the impacts of these advertisements.
Including, Caroline Lucas on the environmental impacts of digital billboards; Professor Emma Boyland on the psychological impacts of obtrusive advertising on child health; Julia Williams and her story of the digital billboard Clear Channel placed in front of her residential window; and Dr Elizabeth Nixon on her work on the tactics advertising companies will use to subvert planning legislation.
It is clear we need to find a way to limit the abilities of these harmful advertiser to profit from our spaces, mental health and discomfort, hence why I would recommend people support organisations like Adfree Cities in their mission.
My contribution.
Having heard about a previous project of mine aggregating and analysing media news headlines, Pete came to me in early 2023 asking for help scraping meta data from millions of planning permission application documents, filtering for those relating to advertising and locating them.
Luckily from a technical point of view, this task is a nice extension to the existing project. Both a using a parameterised job based system, running on AWS hosted message broker system RabbitMQ, with both the handler (EC2) and the workers (Lambda) written in Golang.
What next?
Pete and I have started a new project, drawing from our past work. I would recommend giving Pete a follow over on Linkedin, or signing up to the mailing list here to stay up to date.