cities as popular places
Selling Cities
Belmont Area Revitalization Plan
The 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
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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”