Urban Boosterism Research Articles

Pasts of the Present

In light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects and reconstructions of cultural heritage buildings, this paper analyses two large-scale reconstruction projects at iconic historical locations in Japan: the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki. Since the 1990s, the two projects have recreated long-lost built environments, gradually transforming the sites, turning them into museums and exhibition spaces and giving rise to thorough reform of the surrounding urban fabric. In this paper I trace the involved agents’ motivations to engage in historical reconstruction from early-phase experimental efforts to legitimise the sites’ protected status to present-day politico-economic mobilisations of important historical locations to boost city attraction values. In this way, I link these two unfolding projects in Nara and Nagasaki to issues of urban boosterism, heritage production and the facilitation and commodification of tourist experiences of past realities. Approaching the reconstructions as contemporary heritage in traditional guise, the paper argues that both sites revolve materially, spatially and thematically around the master-metaphors of flow, growth and intercultural connectivity that characterise the present age. Elucidating processes of authentication and intersections of ideological and economic interests in and around the two sites, the paper asks in what ways Japanese cities exploit lost iconic localities and reconstructed heritage under post-industrial conditions marked by globalisation and intense cultural-economic competition.

Exploring the rationalization, functional integration and socio-spatial implications of Zimbabwe’s New Capital City (NCC)

ABSTRACT The development of new master-planned cities is a popular approach to decongest major metropolitan areas in different African countries, including Zimbabwe. This paper is an exploratory analysis of Zimbabwe’s New Capital City (NCC), being created roughly 20 kilometers outside Harare. Specifically, the paper analyzes the design of the NCC, the principles underpinning its production, the different rationalities used by policymakers for its legitimation, as well as the socioeconomic and spatial implications. Based on review of secondary literature, plans, and interviews with city planners and other professionals, the paper finds that the creation of Zimbabwe’s NCC represents urban boosterism, an active promotion of a city through development of large-scale urban development schemes and creating a new image for the city. The production of the new city is also underpinned by neoliberal motivations and imported ideas of urban planning which disregard the local planning urban context, where poverty and informality are prevalent. The creation of new master-planned cities must therefore strive to address these contemporary urban challenges rather than exacerbating them. The paper contributes to scholarly debate on the production of new master-planned cities in Africa and the Global South more broadly.

Capital city boosterism as policy legitimation: A discursive perspective of Egypt's New Administrative Capital

This article examines the legitimation of capital city relocation from a discursive perspective. It specifically focuses on how policymakers in developing countries often use boosters' language to legitimize the relocation of capital city functions. Drawing on critical discourse analysis as a theoretical frame and Egypt as a case, this article examines the ways in which government and property developers have succeeded in weaving the logics of the New Administrative Capital (NAC) into Greater Cairo's broader development discourse. The study highlights policy actors' legitimation strategies, locating them within the broader urban boosterism and south-south policy transfer literature. By emphasizing on policy actors' use of texts and imagery at the local level, the article demonstrates how discourse, as an instrument of power and control, is used by policy entrepreneurs to perpetuate non-participation in Global South urban policy-making. • Policy makers in developing countries often use discourse to legitimize mega projects. • Discourse can be an instrument of power and control where the interest of the public in urban projects are concerned. • Through discourse, non-participation of citizens may be perpetuated. • In Egypt, government has successfully used discourse to legitimize the New Administrative Capital despite the lack of real citizen participation.

Hamburg's Spaces of Danger: Race, Violence and Memory in a Contemporary Global City

AbstractGermany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right‐wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg's urban boosterism relies on, while simultaneously obscuring, the same structures of racial violence that embolden reactionary movements. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Allan Pred, we present an archaeology of Hamburg's landscape, uncovering some of its ‘spaces of danger’—sites layered with histories of violence, many of which lie buried and forgotten. We find that these spaces, when they become visible, threaten to undermine Hamburg's cosmopolitan narrative. They must, as a result, be continually erased or downplayed in order to secure the city as an attractive site for capital investment. To illustrate this argument, we give three historical examples: Hamburg's role in the Hanseatic League during the medieval and early modern period; the city under the Nazi regime; and the recent treatment of Black African refugees. The article's main contribution is to better situate issues of historical landscape, collective memory and racialized violence within the political economy of today's global city.

The creative spatio-temporal fix: Creative and cultural industries development in Shanghai, China

As the idea of creative city becoming a universal panacea for economic stagnancy and urban boosterism, the heavy dependency on creative fixes has widely spread to cities around the globe through urban networks and neoliberal urban policies. Since the late 1990s, Shanghai has expeditiously embraced the idea of making creative city and enthusiastically promoted the development of creative and cultural industries (CCIs). This research proposes the idea of ‘the creative spatio-temporal fix’ to interpret Shanghai’s CCIs development over the last decade: under an overarching framework of creative entrepreneurial governance, the creative reconfiguration of the built environment (spatial fix) and temporal deferral of crisis and long term speculation on land (re)development (temporal fix) are in place to cope with the crisis of capital accumulation. Two rounds of creative spatio-temporal fix are discerned and epitomised in the case of Red Town, an iconic CCIs zone in Shanghai. Drawing on policy analysis and in-depth fieldworks, this study scrutinises into the creativity of the spatio-temporal fix and the spatiality and temporality of the creative fix in Shanghai. The findings are threefold. First, CCIs development is underwritten by a multi-scalar entrepreneurial network and its alliance with SOEs landlords and private developers. Second, the creativity of the spatio-temporal fix can be seen in the creative institutional design enabling CCIs development and forming an alliance with the SOE landlords, as well as the strategic speculation on the theme of creative city. Third, the spatiality and temporality of the creative fix are manifested in the temporal deferral of the crisis of deindustrialisation and limited spatial reconfiguration at the first stage, and a radical spatial restructuring with a temporal fix introducing financial capital at the second stage.

Sensationalizing the Urban West: City-Mysteries and Urban Boosterism

Sensationalizing the Urban West: City-Mysteries and Urban Boosterism

Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War ed. by Andrew W. Slap, Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War ed. by Andrew W. Slap, Frank Towers Peter A. Coclanis Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War. Ed. Andrew W. Slap and Frank Towers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-22630-020-7, 302pp., paper, $30.00. Given the sizable quantity of historical scholarship on the American Civil War, it is surprising that so few scholars over the years have focused their energies on the relationship between the war and the nation’s cities. Although it is often said of mature scholarly fields that additional works tend to fill “much needed gaps,” this is hardly the case with Confederate Cities, an important new collection of essays edited by Andrew W. Slap and Frank Towers. Indeed, after finishing the volume, one is at once excited by what one has learned and left yearning for more. As the book’s title suggests, the authors of the essays Slap and Towers include here are interested, broadly speaking, in cities—primarily, though not exclusively those in the Confederacy—during the war. All of the contributors seek “to use the lens of the city to re-examine main themes of the Civil War” and, in so doing, to analyze the ways southern cities affected the war and/or how the war affected southern cities (1). The angles of scholarly refraction differ considerably among the authors, but, taken together, the quality of the scholarship in Confederate Cities testifies amply to the wisdom of the editors’ organizational conceit. Confederate Cities consists of eleven essays (including one by each of the editors), as well as a substantial introduction and a brief conclusion by the editors (both of which are well executed), and an elegiac foreword by David Goldfield, the most distinguished urban historian of the U.S. South. The essays in the volume are set in one of five discrete sections or parts: “The Big Picture,” “Secession,” “Gender,” “Emancipation,” and “A New Urban South.” [End Page 70] The individual essays, not surprisingly, vary somewhat in scale, scope, and quality, but each contributes significantly to our understanding of the urban dimensions of the Civil War. Individual readers will surely have their own favorites in what is at the end of the day a very strong collection. One cannot begin to do justice to each of the essays in a short review, so it must suffice to mention the range and purview of Confederate Cities and highlight a few of the essays that resonated most with me. After Slap and Towers’s table-setting introduction, two well-known scholars of the Civil War era—Matthew Gallman and David Moltke-Hansen—place the cities of the Confederacy, or, more precisely, the cities of the South, in broad context, focusing on long-term patterns relating to urban growth and urbanization (the latter of which denotes a relative increase in the urban proportion of a given area’s population), and on both the effects of the Civil War on southern cities and of southern cites on the Civil War. Although Gallman and Moltke-Hansen emphasize different themes and don’t always agree, both of these essays are superb. The above section is followed by two essays—one by Towers and the other by T. Lloyd Benson—demonstrating, in the first case, the complex and compound ways urban boosterism played out in the secession crisis, and, in the second, how gender/household metaphors contributed to nationalism and nation-building not only in the South but also in Canada and Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Part 3 of Confederate Cities, devoted to gender, comprises two excellent essays. In the first, Michael Pierson deftly employs a clever rhetorical strategy—reconstructing the debauched way Union lieutenant Stephen Spaulding spent his time in New Orleans on July 4, 1862—to shed light on the culture of masculinity in Civil War America. In the second, Keith Bohannon intervenes powerfully in the emerging literature on women’s bread riots in the South in 1863 via close examinations of several such “riots” in cities and towns in Georgia. The three essays included in part 4 all deal with the changes associated with / promoted by...

Sustainability and waste management of the 2015 prince George Canada winter games

Urban boosterism is increasingly being employed by cities around the world to garner provincial, national or even international attention. In an effort to rebrand and market itself as a ‘Winter City’, Prince George, Canada hosted the 2015 Canada Winter Games. However, urban boosterism focuses on economic influx and financial sustainability with little attention to environmental sustainability. Hosting mega-events like these results in a significant influx of visitors over a short period of time. To accommodate for this extreme change in a city’s population, it is important to consider the concomitant environmental burden, particularly in terms of waste over the period of time and the need to dispose of it safely and properly. To examine the environmental impact of hosting this event, a waste audit was conducted on four of the venues to determine how much and what types of waste was accumulated. The largest contributor to the waste stream was food waste, occupying more than 1/3 of the entire samples that was accumulated in the volunteer lounges. This study focuses on the consideration of waste types and areas in mega-events.

Urban boosterism in closed contexts: spectacular urbanization and second-tier mega-events in three Caspian capitals

This paper presents a case study of urban boosterism in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan – three resource-rich states around the Caspian Sea. Boosterist projects are typically justified through the injunction of, “build it and they will come.” This cliché is a staple of how urban planners and elites seek to justify development schemes that lack an obvious demand. And while the logic underpinning urban boosterism hinges on a high degree of openness and freedom of movement – both for capital and people – it is a tactic increasingly being used in closed and otherwise illiberal states. Understanding the effects of this development is an important task as a growing number of urban planners in nondemocratic but resource-rich countries seek to develop spectacular new urban landscapes and position their cities as “world class” hubs for international mega-events – even if these are smaller, second-tier events. Exploring event-oriented urban development in Astana, Ashgabat, and Baku, we show how boosterist narratives are being re-deployed in closed contexts to promote the image of a benevolent and “magical state,” as well as solidifying authoritarian political configurations and a selective engagement with market capitalism.

“Gentrify? No! Gentefy? Sí!”: Urban Redevelopment and Ethnic Gentrification in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles

“Gentrify? No! Gentefy? Sí!” (Farrell and Medina) is the slogan employed by middle-class Latino bar and start-up owners in Boyle Heights, a predominantly Latino, low-income, and working-class neighborhood in East Los Angeles that “[t]ries to [c]hange, but [a]void the [p]itfalls” (Medina) of gentrification. Alluding to the Spanish word la gente (the people), middle-class Latinos aim to improve the neighborhood from within the community in order to maintain the area’s Latino character and to avoid the displacement, exclusion, and sociospatial polarization typical of gentrification. Analyzing the potential and limitations of gentefication within the framework of neoliberal urbanization, the paper argues that the notion of gentefication marks a deeply ambivalent, contradictory interrelation of bottom-up momentum for neighborhood improvement and top-down real estate development. As upwardly mobile Latinos assert their desire to remain in the urban core, lower-income Latinos are displaced and class frictions within the ethnic community increase. Moreover, the residents’ momentum to positively reconfigure ethnic neighborhoods is often appropriated by redevelopment coalitions that try to render the area attractive for desired consumers via reference to its exotic character. Ethnicity is opened up for consumption as well as urban boosterism, and low-income residents face displacement due to the influx of affluent residents and consumers.

From ‘wannabe’ Silicon Valley to global back office? Examining the socio‐spatial consequences of technopole planning practices in Malaysia

Abstract: Cyberjaya is one of a long line of aspiring science and technology parks in the Asia‐Pacific region that have attempted to create a successful technopole, and in doing so become the ‘Silicon Valley of Asia’. The paper attends to the place‐making strategies through which Cyberjaya was positioned as a new ‘global hub’ for information communication technology and multimedia industries, framed as an extremely ‘sticky place’ (Markusen, 1996). That is, a place within a global economic system where local skills, infrastructure and capital attracts and makes research and development and corporate headquarters reluctant to leave. The paper considers that despite considerable infrastructural investment and state‐led urban boosterism to ‘sell’ Cyberjaya to prospective investors, more than 10 years after its completion in 1999 the development has become little more than a zone of disconnected business process outsourcing industries comprising low value‐added outsourcing activities.

“Build it and they will come”? A critical examination of utopian planning practices and their socio-spatial impacts in Malaysia's “intelligent city”

Cyberjaya was heralded in the mid-1990s as the Multimedia Super Corridor's (MSC) flagship “intelligent city” and designed to prepare Malaysia and its citizens for a giant leap forward into an imagined new “information age.” The urban mega-project constituted a state led response to the much hyped “siliconization of Asia” and was planned to fast-track national development through investment in information and communications technologies (ICTs). The creation of an “intelligent city” replete with science parks, technology districts, green campuses for high-tech companies and a manicured environment for their employees was envisaged to attract investment from multinational companies (MNCs), enabling the country to leapfrog up the development chain and become a global “knowledge economy” hub. Ten years on from the excessive high-tech utopianism and urban boosterism that accompanied the city's launch, the paper promotes qualitative methodologies to addresses the uneven socio-spatial consequences of Cyberjaya's utopian project. The paper argues explores how the “intelligent city” manifested itself as a sensorially impoverished, disconnected business park clone with limited innovative capacity and benefits for wider economic and social development.

Oil Booms and Boosterism

This article examines the intersection of oil industry interests and the growth strategy of local elites in the wake of Ventura, California's oil boom of the 1920s. It amends urban growth machine and civic boosterism theory by showing why cosmopolitan capital may exert influence over parochial politics even if it does not have a direct interest in population increase. The study also finds that oil development sustained long-term quantitative growth for this coastal community, much as Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien found in their study of five towns in the Permian basin of west Texas. Owing to the influence of outside companies, however, boosters failed to develop Ventura qualitatively as a tourist and recreational destination. Indeed, by the 1950s, Ventura more closely resembled inland California oil towns in terms of place than nearby Santa Barbara, which boosters had hoped to emulate.

The Global Cultural City? Spatial Imagineering and Politics in the (Multi)cultural Marketplaces of South-east Asia

No longer just epicentres of capital transactions, cities are 'going global' on the basis of integrating economic and cultural activity as an urban regeneration strategy. Place-wars among cities to attract investors have intensified around the production and consumption of culture and the arts, often taking the form of the construction of mega-projects and hallmark events, the development of a cultural industries sector and an upsurge of urban image-making and branding activities. This paper first reviews the discursive underpinnings of the growing aestheticisation of the landscape as part of urban boosterism in the context of south-east Asia. As with other post-colonial cities which have embraced an entrepreneurial regime, spatial imagineering in south-east Asian cities draws on 'local' identity to gain a competitive edge in the global marketplace. This is followed by an examination of the emerging spatial politics, social polarisations and symbolic discontent accompanying cultural regeneration.

Designing Madrid, 1985–1997

The Plan General de Ordenación Urbano de Madrid (PGOUM) of 1985 is a crucial watershed in the planning processes in Madrid. This essay is particularly interested in how the tension between spatial production and consumption played out during a period in which consumption-based strategies of urban growth and design began to supplant the last stand for a radical modernist-based use of urban planning. In Madrid a consumption-based urban boosterism approach to the planning process was inexorably hegemonic but vigorously resisted in certain sectors. Examining how graphic design figured into urban planning battles offers an interesting example of the synergies between capital, the production and consumption of space and cultural creation. Graphic design becomes a crucial element in the process of reshaping the image of Madrid, of re-presenting the city as a modern or post-modern European metropolis. The PGOUM was perhaps Spain’s last great attempt at rational modernist urban planning with an emphasis on social justice. The resistance to capital once played out on the center stage of planning was replaced with slick images, portraying a city of consumption and growth.

Mega‐events, Urban Boosterism and Growth Strategies: An Analysis of the Objectives and Legitimations of the Cape Town 2004 Olympic Bid

Mega‐events are short‐term high‐profile events like Olympics and World Fairs that always have a significant urban impact. They re‐prioritize urban agendas, create post‐event usage debates, often stimulate urban redevelopment, and are instruments of boosterist ideologies promoting economic growth. While mega‐events have normally been the preserve of industrial/postindustrial cities, the bid for the 2004 Olympics by Cape Town, South Africa represented the first bid from Africa, and the most successful bid to date from a developing country. The unique theme of the Cape Town bid was human/urban development — a contradiction given the elitist and commercial nature of mega‐events — and yet a direct response to problems created by the apartheid city. The developmental aspects of the Cape Town bid are assessed in their South African context in order to ascertain whether development was only a legitimation for business interests (or growth machines) or whether and how the mega‐event would contribute to urban restructuring. It is concluded that the bid represented a form of urban/national boosterism that repositioned Cape Town and South African interests in the global economy — particularly relevant given its previous apartheid pariah status. As a pro‐growth strategy advocated by political and economic elites, the Olympic bid was less important as a sporting event at the grassroots than as a symbol of expectations of economic betterment. Whether mega‐events like the Olympics can carry such far‐reaching objectives within their more specific mandates is a matter for further reflection.Les méga‐événements sont des événements à court terme très en vue comme les jeux Olympiques et les foires mondiales qui ont toujours un impact urbain considérable. Ils changent les priorités des programmes urbains, ils créent des débats d'usage après l'événement, encouragent souvent le redéveloppement urbain, et sont les instruments des idéologies de relance qui supportent la croissance économique. Les méga‐événements prennent place habituellement dans les villes industrialisées/post‐industrialisées, mais la tentative du Cap en Afrique du Sud pour obtenir les jeux Olympiques de 2004 représente la première offre de l'Afrique. C'est la tentative venant d'un pays en voie de développement qui à ce jour a été la plus couronnée de succès. Le thème unique de la tentative du Cap était le développement humain/urbain — une contradiction, en vue de la nature commerciale et élitiste des méga‐événements — et cependant une réponse directe aux problèmes créés par la ville apartheid. Les aspects du développement de l'enchère du Cap sont évalués dans leur contexte sud‐africain afin d'établir si le développement était simplement une justification des intérÁts commerciaux (ou machines de croissance) ou si le méga‐événement pouvait contribuer à la restructuration urbaine, et comment. Je conclus que l'enchère représentait une forme de relance urbaine/nationale qui a replacé le Cap et l'Afrique du Sud dans l'économie globale — particulièrement pertinente en vue de son statut précédent d'apartheid paria. En tant que stratégie préconisée par les élites politiques et économiques pour stimuler la croissance, la tentative des jeux Olympiques était moins importante comme événement sportif populaire que comme le symbole d'une attente d'amélioration économique. Il reste à savoir si les méga‐événements comme les jeux Olympiques peuvent atteindre de tels objectifs de grande envergure dans leurs mandats spécifiques.

Regional Cities or a Region of New Cities?

Urban historians are finally starting to give western cities their due. Several recent volumes about the urban West have focused on the unique and not so unique characteristics of cities in that region. Mansel G. Blackford's The Lost Dream: Business and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890-1920 (1993) has ably demonstrated that western civic leaders used planning at the turn-ofthe-century primarily as a tool for urban boosterism. The failure to implement the plans had to do with divisiveness within the leadership of western citiesa characteristic of cities in the East as well. Roger Lotchin's important Fortress California 1910-1961: From Welfare to Warfare (1992) has provided a convincing argument that California's rapid growth in the twentieth century was closely tied to a well-thought-out strategy to promote martial metropolises. These volumes join the slim but expanding list of scholarship by urban historians, as well as by historians of the West such as Gerald Nash, to provide a much clearer picture of urban development in that region than we had before.' The book reviewed here represents a further maturing of the historiography of the urban West. John Findlay, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington, has added a new wrinkle to the historical literature of the twentieth-century urban West by focusing on cityscapes. He argues that new western cities not only have a distinctive urban form, but they have been more successful in accommodating their residents than is often acknowledged. Drawing on the work of cultural geographers, and a variety of other urbanists and journalists, he suggests that new ways of organizing space in western cities have influenced urban development throughout the nation. Unlike some historians who explain changing urban form by a type of transportation determinism, Findlay approaches the western city not merely as the creation of new technologies, but as being shaped by the aspirations of its western residents. Magic Lands also typifies another recent trend in urban history by claiming that western cities represented a unique urban variation. Findlay joins the list

The Impact of Prairie and Maritime Reformers and Boosters on the Development of Parks and Playgrounds, 1880 to 1930

Abstract Two recent research projects have investigated the development of parks and playgrounds in selected Canadian Prairie and Maritime cities between 1880 and 1930. The central objective in each study was to determine if there were any common threads and links in the patterns of development of municipal parks and playgrounds in the cities, and, if so, what these were. In both studies the urban reform movement and civic boosterism were examined to determine their impacts on parks and playgrounds. The proposition that urban reform and civic boosterism were factors which significantly affected the development of parks and playgrounds was not supported by the research findings. The two sets of cities had some common threads in the development of their parks and playgrounds. The impact of the urban reform movement was evident in creating an awareness of park and playground issues in the cities of both studies. Civic boosterism not only had little impact in both studies, but had extremely limited impact in ...

The museum as destination. The role of iconic museums in urban boosterism

This article discusses how iconic museums function as instruments of city marketing and corporate branding. The overall question is whether the use of iconic museums in urban boosterism is in opposition to the traditional role of museums as part of the enlightenment project. Two different urban contexts are used to analyze the role of museums in the process of city branding. Los Angeles is seen as an example of an “experiencescape”; here the main question is whether the J. Paul Getty Museum can be seen as an antidote to Hollywood hype or if it adds to it. Paris is seen as a “brandscape”, using iconic museum architecture to enhance its global image and generate economic growth; this trend can be traced in the presidential “Grand Projets” initiated since the 1970s and in the more recent corporate branding exercise Fondation Louis Vuitton. The article concludes that even if the enlightenment theme has been toned down, there is still a more traditional “museum mission” behind the iconic façades.