Elsevier

Cities

Volume 117, October 2021, 103315
Cities

City planning, urban imaginary, and the branded space: Untangling the role of city plans in shaping Dallas's urban imaginaries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103315Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Urban imaginaries are embedded in textual narratives, conceptual symbols, and visual renditions.

  • Plan making and city plans are fundamental to legitimizing the power elites' pro-growth urban imaginaries.

  • Planners and architects, as urban imagineers, play a key role in mobilizing the public to approve of place-making projects.

  • Media heavily brands and disseminates elites' growth-oriented urban imaginaries in the public sphere.

  • Elites' imposing urban imaginaries are often at odds with more pressing urban imaginaries based on social justice.

Abstract

Drawing on notions of the symbolic economy and urban imaginary as an inherent dimension of the neoliberal public sphere, this paper examines historicized city plans and their visions, and develops a framework for understanding the role of city plans in shaping urban imaginaries and branded spaces. The paper claims that future city visions, fundamental to plan-making, help legitimize the power elites' growth agendas and ambitions to invest in both symbolic and material flagship place-making projects heavily bolstered and publicized by the media. The study examines this claim in the American context, selecting Dallas, Texas as a unique entrepreneurial city overly concerned with its public image characterized by a long-standing legacy of place promotion and plan-making. Using archival research and semi-structured interviews with key informants, this paper finds that city plans' visions, subservient to the civic elites' cultural tastes, have been instrumental in rallying public support to materialize place-making projects in accord with the city's larger preoccupation with “world-class” status showcased and widely promoted by media outlets. This study concludes by reflecting on the subtle yet tangible link between plan-making and urban imaginaries, an overt tendency of ever more commodified urban spaces, and the paradox it poses to city planning.

Introduction

This paper examines the role that city plans, in particular visioning processes led by municipal planners and architects, play in shaping urban imaginaries and branded spaces for the city. This inquiry is consequential for local governments in the age of urban creative policymaking (Grodach, 2017) crowd-culture branding (Holt, 2016), and authentic urban place production (Zukin, 2010); cities are increasingly dependent on telemediated presence and their urban imaginaries to remain relevant and sustain their local economies. Within the symbolic economy, “urban imaginaries,” as the ways a city can be represented through images, symbols, and narratives (Greenberg, 2000; Zukin, 1996), can overcome a sense of alienation (Bridge & Watson, 2003), transform a city's post-industrial image (Peel & Lloyd, 2008), or contribute to legacies of stigma stemming from negative digital imageries (Audirac, 2018). Neoliberal urban imaginaries, typically associated with city branding, are mostly predicated on possibilities rather than realities of the social world (Davoudi, 2018; Watkins, 2015) with well-known social equity outcomes (Bonakdar & Audirac, 2020).

Urban imaginaries and the politics of representation are central to entrepreneurial policies aimed at city promotion and attracting investment (Hubbard, 1996; Jessop, 1998; McCann, 2003). Recent scholarly contributions have attempted to unpack the relationship between urban imaginaries, place promotion, and city planning. For example, tracing the intellectual lineage of imaginaries, Davoudi (2018) draws on Charles Taylor's the Social Imaginary and Edward Said's Orientalism to define spatial imaginary as “deeply held collective understanding of socio-spatial relations” (101), produced through political struggles and propagated through images, stories, and narratives. While spatial imaginaries hold intersubjective meaning and performative attributes, plan making tools (e.g., visions, scenarios, images, models, maps) perform and enact an imagined future, serving to represent urban imaginaries that typically prescribe an idealized future; plan-making, therefore, as Davoudi (2018) suggests, has been instrumental in materializing such neoliberal fantasies as the resilient city, the smart city, and the global city.

Within the confines of neoliberal strategies to (re)imagine the city, the planning literature points to the ways that planning has been complicit in reifying the elites' growth-oriented urban imaginaries (e.g., Caprotti, 2019; Golubchikov, 2010; Johansson, 2012; Listerborn, 2017; Olesen, 2020; Oliveira, 2015; Potter, 2020). An emerging theme underscores city planning's potential to project a sense of inexorable competition for global status through flagship projects but at the expense of infusing the public discourse with market imperatives quelling emerging imaginaries of resistance (e.g., the just city), whether in Aalborg, Denmark (Olesen, 2020), Glasgow, UK (Caprotti, 2019), or St. Petersburg, Russia (Golubchikov, 2010).

This paper builds on these recent scholarly attempts to investigate the role of planning's urban imaginaries in shaping spatial and social outcomes. By advancing a framework to untangle the nexus between city planning, urban imaginaries, and the branded space, this paper asks: how do the visions of city plans' idealized futures, in which the city's imaginary is represented by textual narratives, visual renditions, and endless mediatic possibilities, serve to legitimize large-scale interventions in the built environment? And, how have these interventions contributed to shaping the city's branded spaces?

This paper explores this question in the American context where, given the global circuits of capital and scarcity of placed-based, local entrepreneurship, many booster cities pursue marketing their jurisdictions as “best places” by building partnerships with the private sector and resorting to popular media narratives (McCann, 2004). Selecting a case study of the city of Dallas, this paper contributes to the expanding literature on urban imaginaries within urban studies, drawing attention to the symbolic economy (Zukin, 1996) and the role that “urban imagineers,” (i.e., practicing planners and architects) play in reimagining the city's future often expressed in visionary ideals, but subservient to the power elites' economic and political priorities. Dallas has often been described as a representative American booster city preoccupied with its public image (Hanson, 2003; Hazel, 1997). In spite of the international stigma associated with the JFK assassination, Dallas has endeavored to emend that legacy by steadily recasting its city imaginaries and proclaiming its corporate elites' national and international entrepreneurial acumen, which has propelled the city's position up in the world ranks.

In the remainder, the paper first contextualizes the concepts of urban imaginary and the branded space within the symbolic economy (Zukin, 1996). It introduces a framework linking city plans' imaginaries to place-making within the mediatic public sphere, the vehicle for construction and circulation of intersubjective meanings in modern society (Taylor, 1992)1. Second, the paper turns to Dallas's city plans focusing on elements of their visions and goals since 1900, with a particular emphasis on the post-Kennedy era. Interviews with key informants (e.g., municipal planners, architects, architecture critics), representing a segment of Dallas's urban imagineers, were triangulated with findings drawn from the content analysis of city plans and the review of D-Magazine's featured issues, a major post-Kennedy era lifestyle magazine. Findings suggest that, by building shared spatial meanings and mobilizing the public, city plans' visions, since the early 1900s, have legitimized Dallas's elites' growth agendas for civic grandeur reflected in City Beautiful imposing place-making projects able to “stir men's blood.” While Dallas's urban imaginaries once rested on oil fortunes and cowboy mystique limited to the city proper, subsequent city imaginaries have co-emerged with each plan era's vision gradually extending to “world-class” city narratives anchoring the Metroplex, transcending the region, and harboring global ambitions. This study concludes by reflecting on the link between plan-making and space branding with its social justice implications for the production of urban spaces.

Section snippets

The rise of the symbolic economy and urban imaginaries

Global competition for branded products and branded spaces to sustain economic growth is not limited to first-tier cities such as New York or London. Mid-size, second-tier cities such as Brisbane, Australia (Insch & Bowden, 2016), Auckland, New Zealand (Insch, 2018), or Malmo, Sweden (Listerborn, 2017) have also leveraged the symbiosis of image and product for selling nationally and globally images of the city (Zenker, 2018). Such cultural materials as art (Vivant, 2011), food (Blichfeldt &

Visioning and the city's future imaginaries: city planning and the elites' cultural tastes

Within the symbolic economy, businesses and philanthropic elites compelled by their patrician class and privileged access to capital and the media, can impose their cultural “tastes” (Bourdieu, 1984) to shape a city's imaginaries. Power elites recruit “urban imagineers,” whose professional practice inherently involve the construction of textual narratives, visual representations, or design interventions, dealing with both social and physical aspects of the city (Short, 1999; Zukin et al., 1998

Mediatic public sphere: place-making and the branded space

With place-making projects becoming key commodities of the cultural production of space, civic boosters participate in the construction of signature cultural projects or the recycling of districts into visual “sites of delectation” (Zukin, 1996, 9). The politics behind large-scale place-making projects often rely on image-led planning promoting urban modernity and world-class city status (Higgins & Kanaroglou, 2016). Place-making projects, by nature, require large investments often provided by

The city of Dallas

With a traditional, politically conservative agenda and a seemingly consistent trajectory of growth, Dallas stands as one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the US. Dallas is the largest city in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) region (population of 1,343,573, US Census, 2019), the fourth largest metropolitan area in the US. However, Dallas's unrestrained economic growth has been accompanied by increasing poverty and a widening income gap; according to the US Census five-year estimates (2019),

Planning ethos: visioning and the urban imaginary

Dallas's historical lineage of city planning can be classified into three key periods: the first period spanned almost 60 years, from the early 1900s to 1963. This period was characterized by the city's physical expansion with the rise of the oil industry followed by the aviation industry. The second period started amidst the aftermath of the JFK assassination that stigmatized the city. Symbolic attempts to rebuild the city's image included developing the Dallas TV Show, while physical

The branded space: towards a world-class city

In the preceding section, this paper examined the way city plans, led by the most salient segment of urban imagineers, i.e., city planners, planning consultants, and architects, have largely reflected Dallas's elite urban imaginaries often glamorized by the dominant modes of narratives, images, and representations to depict Dallas as a highly cultured, civic, green, and progressive city. In seeking to make a profound impact on external audiences, such competing imaginaries were gradually

Discussion and conclusion

An examination of specific instances of the symbolic language used in city plans developed over three key periods in Dallas reveals that city planning performed a public relations function reflecting the political necessities of branding Dallas as a progressive city. City planning as such served as a conduit for a symbolic representation of a space of construction and/or destruction (Maiello & Pasquinelli, 2015), capable of discursively positioning the city within the narrative of growth (Logan

CRediT authorship contribution statement

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows:

Ahmad Bonakdar: Conceptualization, Methodology Design, Draft Manuscript Writing, Discussion and Analysis, Revising, Editing. Ivonne Audirac: Conceptualization, Methodology Design, Editing.

Conflicts of Interest Statement

The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this manuscript.

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