ABSTRACT
Place reinvention has been used to capture how places change meaning as a consequence of continuous and strategic processes of place making and identity building. Place reinvention directs attention towards the relationship between symbolic and imaginative changes, and the planned regeneration or place making initiatives. Place reinvention is related to the overall changes going on, also beyond the economic sphere, involving place perceptions, how people identify with place and how place conceptions are manipulated through place narratives. The narratives can be organized under the following headings: industrialization or cultural and experience economy turn, place promotion, identity, urban rurality and centre-periphery. The rhetoric on reindustrialization is also diverse. This rhetoric is situated in different types of discourses: public, political and academic. One is rooted in old social democratic values, valorizing industrial labour and manufacturing industry. Narrative analysis has been acknowledged as having a position in social sciences that is long overdue in arriving.
