Rebranding the “Big Apple” and the “Big Easy”

Abstract

Abstract This chapter analyzes the strategic and commercial representation of urban space following 9/11 and Katrina—a practice referred to as “post-crisis rebranding”. It first focuses on identifying the “retooling of branding infrastructure” that occurred in both cases, involving new public-private synergies, creative and corporate hires, local-global networking, technological upgrades, and an expanded role of public funding and governance for city marketing. Second, it analyzes the “redesign of the representational universe” of both cities that was made possible by this retooling. Initially, urban rebranding efforts centered on “disaster tourism” and triumphalist marketing of redevelopment projects. Over time, these rebranding efforts shifted to a representational strategy that avoided all reference to disaster and focused instead on explicitly post-crisis and utopian narratives of cultural diversity and urban sustainability. This rebranded landscape has served to frame, reify, and legitimize the controversial, contested, and uneven political and spatial interventions of crisis-driven urbanization.