This article analyzes the entanglement of social impacts of bottom-up urban branding processes on local hyperdiverse communities, through an ethnography of a neighborhood of Milan recently named by a group of residents as “NoLo.” Indeed, existing literature has broadly investigated urban rebranding as a tool used by policy makers to foster social change and economic capital, imposing top-down transformations. Nevertheless, a gap in the bottom-up place rebranding processes exists. We inspect it through the aforementioned case study and by combining place branding literature, the loss of place identity and theories on empowerment. Empirically, we analyze the socioeconomic processes and the actors that enabled the rebranding, discussing the positive externalities and the criticalities in terms of marginalization of weaker social groups and cultural hegemony. As for the theory, we contribute to the literature arguing that a bottom-up process is not enough to avoid a loss of place identity, as it can lead to selective empowerment.

本文通过最近被一群居民命名为“NoLo”的米兰街区的民族志，分析了自下而上的城市品牌塑造过程对当地超多元化社区的社会影响。事实上，现有文献广泛研究了城市品牌重塑作为政策制定者用来促进社会变革和经济资本的工具，实施自上而下的转型。然而，自下而上的地方品牌重塑过程中存在差距。我们通过上述案例研究并结合地方品牌文献、地方身份的丧失和赋权理论来对其进行检查。根据经验，我们分析了促成品牌重塑的社会经济过程和参与者，讨论弱社会群体边缘化和文化霸权方面的正外部性和关键性。至于理论，我们对文献做出贡献，认为自下而上的过程不足以避免地方身份的丧失，因为它会导致选择性授权。