Cecilia’s two new publications: culture, city branding and urban regeneration

Cecilia has just published an article in the journal Urban Studies entitled ‘Cities for sale: Contesting cultural policies and city branding in Buenos Aires’. The article examines the role of culture in shaping and contesting city branding strategies and urban cultural policies drawing on in-depth interviews with policy makers and community cultural centres. Discussing different notions of culture underpinning contrasting imagined cities she shows how a particular entanglement between politics, businesses and urban marketing in Buenos Aires gives way to ongoing contestations over the city brand, configuring the possibilities and distribution of potential benefits.

Recently Cecilia also got the article ‘Unsettling the role of culture as panacea: The politics of culture-led urban regeneration in Buenos Aires’ published in the journal City, Culture and Society. Drawing on a case study – the redevelopment of the post office palace into a commemorative cultural centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina – she offers an in-depth account of the policy process by which industrial heritage is redeveloped through a cultural rhetoric. The analysis revealed how the recycling of the post office building enabled multiple meanings of culture to emerge and circulate within a range of policy, architectural, urban regeneration, real estate and media discourses. The article formulates a sociological critique of culture’s function as a panacea and examines the disputes over its symbolic and practical function in the city.