Cities for sale: Contesting city branding and cultural policies in Buenos Aires

Abstract

This paper examines the role of culture in shaping and contesting city branding strategies. Throughout the world, the private and public sectors are jointly engaged in branding cities by mobilising a cultural rhetoric with the aim of attracting business, boosting tourism and revitalising urban spaces. Adopting a critical sociological perspective, the paper examines whether or not culture-based city branding brings benefits to community cultural organisations and explores the reasons why this might be the case. Based on the experience of Buenos Aires and drawing on indepth interviews with both policy-makers and community cultural centres, different notions of culture, underpinning contrasting imagined cities, are discussed. The paper argues that city branding, founded on a commodified notion of culture, driven by profit-making goals and oriented towards international tourism, can create an urban vision of consumption to which cultural organisations are opposed. The paper concludes by showing how a particular entanglement between politics, businesses and urban marketing in the Latin American city gives way to ongoing contestations over the city brand and configures the possibilities and distribution of potential benefits.

“PARA ALGO QUE ERA NUESTRO... AHORA ES DE TODA LA HUMANIDAD”: EL PATRIMONIO MUNDIAL COMO EXPRESIÓN DE CONFLICTOS

“…Tanto Buenos Aires como Valencia inician en la década de 1990 del siglo XX una transformación urbana en consonancia con el nuevo modelo hegemónico de metrópoli ligado a una nueva versión del urbanismo empresarial (Harvey 2001(Harvey , 2013 o al llamado capitalismo cognitivo-cultural (Scott 2008(Scott , 2014. Estas políticas se modulan en notables proyectos arquitectónicos, grandes eventos mediáticos, desarrollo inmobiliario, privatización de fondos públicos y marketing urbano (Dinardi 2017;Swyngedouw et al 2002) en busca de la competitividad y la excelencia para entrar en los circuitos globales (Connolly 2013;García 2004;Gold y Gold 2008;Rodríguez y Vicario 2005;Swyngedouw et al 2002). La mundialización neoliberal articulada en la economía de los intangibles y en la industria cultural y del ocio y concretada en la ciudad creativa dibuja nuevos espacios urbanos sobre viejos lugares (Anheier y Isar 2008;Harvey 1998;Throsby 2001).…”

“…Buenos Aires experimenta una transformación significativa en la década del 90, impulsando grandes proyectos de renovación urbana, cuyo máximo exponente puede verse en la transformación de Puerto Madero (Cuenya 2011;Cuenya y Corral 2011;Díaz Orueta et al 2003;Dinardi 2017). Valencia, por su parte, adoptó la tendencia global de la NUP a finales de los 90 (Cucó 2013a(Cucó , 2013bRausell 2010;Rius et al 2016;Santamarina y Moncusí 2013).…”

Cities are Not Products

“…On the other hand, scholars have developed a large body of meaningful situated analysis challenging the idea that branding is a homogeneous phenomenon comprising similar messages, similar strategies and similar rationalities all over the world. The analysis of the ‘selling’ of post‐Mao Beijing conducted by Broudehoux (), the ‘staging’ of the ‘new’ Berlin by Colomb (), the branding of Buenos Aires by Dinardi () and that of Johannesburg by Sihlongonyane (), present very different case studies illuminating about the actual existing practices and phenomena related to city branding. Still, in my view, two elements have limited the diffusion of critical analysis explicitly addressing branding in human geography.…”

Fostering the Economic Tourist Activity of Small Cities by Managing Retail Town Centre Image

“… Culture / history;  Transport and communications;  Architecture  Environment; range of service. Dinardi (2015)  Cultural policies…”