ABSTRACT

The hard branding of the culture city looks to the power and practices of commercial branding and its packaged entertainment and emporiums. Jackson in particular suggests that the pejorative public-private dialectic may be unhelpful, and that: notions of consumer citizenship need to be carefully situated in and socially differentiated. New cultural facilities also suffer the fate of brand decay and the high maintenance, that is reinvestment, required to retain market share. The development of city-centre and redundant industrial and docklands areas of cities, creating new settlements, festival waterfronts, and centres of government control and business, can be seen as an early form of branding the city by the imposition of the post-medieval grid, boardwalk and promenade. In the past these reclaimed city centre spaces housed national institutions government offices, palaces, museums and galleries and public squares, such as the imperial palaces in Vienna and Paris, the museum island in Berlin.