Veganism in the city: capitalist assimilation or multispecies resistance?

Cities are spaces in which consumerism, culture, and protest must often comingle. Often concentrated in urban spaces, veganism—which advocates alternative consumption, multispecies multiculturalism, and resistance to harmful foodways and unequal multispecies relationships—offers an interesting case study of urban consumerist dynamics. Using semiotic 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 might be able to persist, perhaps even thrive, in capital serving cityscapes. Findings suggest that veganism is strained by the marketplace function of the city. Veganism is reduced to a form of consumption that aligns with capitalist interests, and anti-speciesist representations of veganism are lacking. Yet, this study also considers if the prevalence of vegan signage could be moderately 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 protest and social change.