New urban imaginaries in the branded city: Towards a critical and comparative approach

“Urban branding” in a pervasive aspect of contemporary, market-oriented urbanization processes globally, yet remains little understood from a critical or comparative perspective within urban sociology.  In this presentation I synthesize existing literature on the topic, and offer a theoretical framework that situates the phenomenon within critical urban studies. 

A wealth of literature is emerging on urban branding in many fields. In media/cultural studies urban brands are analyzed, like corporate brands more broadly, as “market cultural forms” that mediate production and consumption in a symbolically-oriented global economy.  Research on urban design, architecture, and planning addresses how iconic, all-encompassing “brandscapes” extend corporate identities and market logics into the built environment.  In urban studies —from geography to sociology—branding is understood as the entrepreneurial practice of marketing “culture-led” developments like arts districts and entertainment destinations in the name of interurban competition. 

In this presentation, I seek to bring these illuminating approaches into conversation, and to push them further. Rather than afix urban branding to the realm of culture, marketing, media, and/or design alone, I argue the practice is always, also embedded in urban political economy and governance, and so of central concern for urban social justice struggles. This relationship becomes particularly apparent in times of urban crisis. Drawing on research in post-crisis New York, New Orleans, and Buenos Aires, I address links between utopian urban re-imagining projects and broader forms of market-oriented restructuring.  I link these findings to insights in critical urban studies about the strategic, globally variegated role of the urban scale in neoliberal restructuring.  Ultimately I argue for an integrated approach that addresses the combined role of imaginary and material processes within capitalist urbanization generally, and that posits the reclamation of utopian imaginaries from the realm of the brand as central to recent urban social justice movements in Argentina and the U.S..