City branding, financialization and mercadification of the city: new strategies of capital reproduction

City branding, financiarización y mercadificación de la ciudad: nuevas estrategias para la reproducción del capital

Abstract

This article proposes to establish a dialogue between territorial marketing and the commodification of space, evaluating the imagery construction strategies of the shop-window city / spectacle city¹. We will analyze, albeit briefly, the spatial transformations promoted by “urban entrepreneurship”, which increasingly articulate the construction and sale of the city's image as a fundamental part of the capitalist accumulation process. It should be noted that the specificities of urbanization and financialization will also be considered. So, we ask: would marketing innovations be related to the space commodification process? How can we think of city marketing as part of the innovation economy? The answers to these questions will allow - in the course of the article - the identification of strategies used by territorial marketing in urban transformations, as well as the understanding of the mechanisms that involve city branding.

Keywords:
financialization; city branding; shop-window city; spectacle city