Position paper on symbolic dimension of large urban projects and mega-events

ANNE-MARIE BROUDEHOUX ; FERNANDA SÁNCHEZ; JAJAMOVICH, GUILLERMO

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Mega Events, Mega Projects and Urban Democracy; 2012

Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales (CEUR-CONICET), L'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) y el Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IPPUR/UFRJ)

More than 40 years ago, French sociologists like Baudrillard, Barthes and Debord annonced the coming of the society of the image and the spectacle, where appearances would come to have primacy over substance and all social relations would be mediated by the spectacle. Today, in the context of global neoliberal hegemony, we cannot underestimate the power of the image, the importance of the « symbolic dimension» in this new political economy of sign in which the value of goods and services rests more on intellectual and symbolic inputs than on raw material and labor. Cities have been themselves transformed products that must be marketed and sold to investors, tourists and consumers. City leaders have engaged in different actions into order to make their cities attractive : repackaged, redesigned, cleaned up and branded. That’s why both large projects and sporting mega-events have emerged as important issues in urban research agenda in this market-friendly era. In order to produce a coherent and easily digestible product, and to built a more marketable urban identity, local « imagineers » have sought to simplify a complex urban reality and erase -- or at least conceal -- major irritants that could stains their city’s reputation and compromize their costly image construction efforts.