Recent studies on urban change have emphasised the importance of culturally driven initiatives in the development of economic and social change. Concerns, however, have been raised in popular urban studies discourse that these strategies prioritise the economy and tourism over and above the needs of local residents and lead to the redefinition, and even the eradication, of local cultures. This paper looks at the case of the French city of Marseille as host of the European Capital of Culture programme in 2013. It analyses some of the cultural practices that arise at the intersection of a transnational cultural programme and localised cultural acts, and documents how some of Marseille’s residents have responded to the European cultural event through cultural performances that address and highlight community concerns.
Official cultural sectors increasingly deploy cosmopolitan branding efforts, based on the diversity of migrant populations, to market a city as attractive and open. These strategies, meanwhile, continue to coexist with attachments to place as well as a sense of local identification and belonging. In this paper I refer to the way food, and in particular the merguez sausage, is used as a marker to evoke both the cosmopolitan and the local specificities of the city of Marseille, once celebrated as the gateway to France's empire. This work examines cultural initiatives, city streets, film and published Pied-Noir testimonials to argue that the merguez, a spicy sausage associated with North African cuisine, is used as a discursive construction of cosmopolitan branding, attached to a colonial memory, notably Algerian, while coexisting with the formation of local specificities in Marseille.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.