Review: The visible, the invisible and the 'in-between' in the politics of city branding

摘要

The tendency to strategically represent contemporary cities and their paths of development through selected signs, symbols and narratives has clearly increased over the past 30 years, not without criticism and growing attention from the academic community. Under the 'city branding' label, a variety of contributions pertaining to different disciplines and responding to varied, dissonant research philosophies and epistemological standpoints have crowded the debate, which has, in fact, remained highly fragmented and overall largely under-theorised. In this context, Alberto Vanolo's book builds an articulate argument on the politics of representation, putting forward two interconnected ideas. First, an evocative and resonant metaphor is proposed: the 'metaphor of ghosts', which explains the kaleidoscopic nature of city brands by pairing the visible-and so often positive, optimistic and glossy official brand of the city-with the invisible and with the 'in-between', the ghostly presences ('semi-transparent' presences, as the author writes) inhabiting urban spaces. These ghosts, for instance, rise from the recent industrial past and haunt abandoned factories, the legacy of a shrinking industrial base, or are found in the slums, left at the margin of the urban ima-ginaries, scary symbols of uneven development and social injustice. What is made visible by official storytelling hides the unacknowledged faces of the urban reality. This visible world evokes and creates ghosts, which, according to the author, are impalpable entities that are never killed.