"Whose Culture? Whose City?"

Indeed, culture is the “motor of economic growth” for cities and forms the basis of what Zukin labels the “symbolic economy.” The symbolic economy is comprised of two parallel production systems: the production of space, in which aesthetic ideals, cultural meanings, and themes are incorporated into the look and feel of buildings, streets, and parks, and the production of symbols, in which more abstract cultural representations influence how particular spaces within cities should preferably be “consumed” or used and by whom. The latter generates a good deal of controversy: as more and more ostensibly “public” spaces become identified (and officially sanctioned) with particular, often commercially generated, themes, we are left to ask “whose culture? whose city?”