cities as popular places

Selling Cities

Belmont Area Revitalization PlanThe Belmont Area Revitalization Plan is a planning effort sponsored and funded by the City of Charlotte and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission. This project focused on revitalizing one of Charlotte’s oldest inner city neighborhoods into a safe and sustainable community.

Theming urban space

The Cosmic City

Urban imagineering

• Blending imagination with technical know how• Theming of goods and services• Making place through themed urban design• Material and discursive representations of space

coupled with aggressive marketing and promotion strategies – to sell cities

• New emphasis on “culture”• Changing geographies of capitalism

The urban architecture of theme and spectacle

• Urban development strategies that rely on the culture of consumption

• Towards the comodification and consumption of “culture”

• Reuse of old infrastructures• Simulated tradition with available artifacts

and relics• Obscures city reality and history

Baltimore’s Inner harbor

Baltimore

• Inner harbor – symbolic centerpiece of city’s regeneration

• “regional playground” of city’s deteriorating waterfront

• The “festival marketplace”• Nostalgic representation of historic public life• “Harborplace”• From “armpit of the east Coast” to “Cinderella

city”