{"title":"More than ‘creative’: analyzing place branding strategies and Chinese migration in the City of Prato, Italy","authors":"A. Del Bono","doi":"10.1080/13504630.2022.2114892","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In a progressively urbanized world, the modes of governamentality adopted by city administrations increasingly focus on the adoption of strategic functions. Environmental safeguard, circular economy, and urban innovation, for instance, have been referred to, in the case of the Italian city of Prato, as the city’s orientation ‘towards the future’. Some of the ambitious projects that have characterized the recently adopted governance model of Prato relate in fact to urban forestation, connectivity, the realization of more public space and the application of ‘creativity’ as a driving force for urban development. Significantly, too, representations of Prato (as of today one of the most studied examples of migration from China to Europe) have been tied to images of a conflictual multiculturalism and to the liminal spaces of social relations within which Chineseness has often been relegated. In this article, I use secondary data and first-handedly retrieved information through qualitative methods to describe how the recent place branding project promoted by the municipality based on the concept of ‘creativity’ has particularly targeted a neighborhood named Macrolotto Zero, marked by decades of migration from China. In doing so, I discuss how the formulation and application of the place brand have generated frictions between stakeholders, as well as new transcultural alliances. These speak to the challenges of achieving a condition of living with difference in the city and provide a still-underexplored platform from which city-making processes and social identities can be analyzed.","PeriodicalId":46853,"journal":{"name":"Social Identities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Identities","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2022.2114892","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ETHNIC STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACT In a progressively urbanized world, the modes of governamentality adopted by city administrations increasingly focus on the adoption of strategic functions. Environmental safeguard, circular economy, and urban innovation, for instance, have been referred to, in the case of the Italian city of Prato, as the city’s orientation ‘towards the future’. Some of the ambitious projects that have characterized the recently adopted governance model of Prato relate in fact to urban forestation, connectivity, the realization of more public space and the application of ‘creativity’ as a driving force for urban development. Significantly, too, representations of Prato (as of today one of the most studied examples of migration from China to Europe) have been tied to images of a conflictual multiculturalism and to the liminal spaces of social relations within which Chineseness has often been relegated. In this article, I use secondary data and first-handedly retrieved information through qualitative methods to describe how the recent place branding project promoted by the municipality based on the concept of ‘creativity’ has particularly targeted a neighborhood named Macrolotto Zero, marked by decades of migration from China. In doing so, I discuss how the formulation and application of the place brand have generated frictions between stakeholders, as well as new transcultural alliances. These speak to the challenges of achieving a condition of living with difference in the city and provide a still-underexplored platform from which city-making processes and social identities can be analyzed.
期刊介绍:
Recent years have witnessed considerable worldwide changes concerning social identities such as race, nation and ethnicity, as well as the emergence of new forms of racism and nationalism as discriminatory exclusions. Social Identities aims to furnish an interdisciplinary and international focal point for theorizing issues at the interface of social identities. The journal is especially concerned to address these issues in the context of the transforming political economies and cultures of postmodern and postcolonial conditions. Social Identities is intended as a forum for contesting ideas and debates concerning the formations of, and transformations in, socially significant identities, their attendant forms of material exclusion and power.