ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the importance of ethnicity and the cultural economy in the post-Fordist city of the Americas. The combination of place promotion and strategic use of ethnicity in city-marketing are outstanding, as is the fact that these were the first Olympics in which the International Olympic Committee recognized indigenous nations, the four Canadian First Nations of the Vancouver region, as official hosts and partners. The International Olympic Committee has encouraged the use of ethnicity in the marketing of the Games, as in 1999 when they adopted the Agenda 21 for Sustainable Development in Sports, which includes an objective to strengthen the inclusion of women, youth, and indigenous peoples in the Olympic movement. Selling EthniCity assembles contributions from various academic disciplines such as sociology, social anthropology, human geography, history, urban studies, architecture, cultural studies, media studies, and literary studies in order to contribute to the new research paradigm of Inter-American Studies as transnational area studies.
