On a recent afternoon, Lauren Leek stood on a typical London shopping street, in front of a Victorian-era pub and a predictable array of corporate-owned food, drink and retail outlets: Starbucks, Joe & the Juice, Subway.
“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic,” said Leek, a Dutch-Australian data scientist who is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.”
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