Alberto Vanolo
Biographic Data
| ID | 227111 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alberto Vanolo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alberto |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanolo |
| SIGNATURE | VANOLO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Turin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8550-2338 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 579 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Polyrhythmic marginalities and chronopolitics
The train station is a complex and controversial public space, characterized by a varied temporal dimension. • Multiple urban rhythms are identified in the railway station of Bergamo, Italy. • The crescendo of urban and infrastructure development, and the sinusoidal rhythms of commuters and travelers are analysed. • The rhythms of endurance of marginalised and homeless people are investigated. • A rhythmical reading of marginality is provided, sh…
What is nocturnal about night studies? Insights from Turin, Italy
The relation between the urban diurnal and the urban nocturnal has been famously conceptualized with the metaphor of the night as frontier . Originally proposed by Murray Melbin in 1978, the phrase suggests that the nocturnal has been gradually colonized by the capitalist logics of the day. This article contributes to provincializing night studies by postulating a nonlinear and non-dichotomous relation between the urban diurnal and nocturnal. Spe…
Sustainability and impossible worlds
This paper mobilises the idea of impossible worlds to conceptualise and explore inconsistent and illogical visions and ways of living sustainably. Specifically, the paper focuses on an understanding of sustainability based on classic Kantian universalistic ethics (suppose everyone did the same) and relative feelings of responsibility and guilt for the environment. By mobilising three vignettes, the paper argues that impossibility is present in cu…
Autistic cities
Autism and neurodiversity are key topics in current public debate and in the social sciences. A vast multidisciplinary literature has explored spatial dimensions of neurodiversity, particularly by analyzing autistic experiences in private and public spaces and the design of autistic-friendly environments. Building on this literature and by presenting my personal experience as the father of an autistic child, this paper explores connections betwee…
Shops, food, regeneration and a controversial signature building in Turin, Italy
The paper focuses on the case of PalaFuksas, a signature building inaugurated in 2005 and located in the central (but marginalized) area of Porta Palazzo in Turin, Italy. Originally designed to host clothing shops, the building had a history of failures and reconversions, and it is currently mainly used as a branded food hall. By mixing archive and qualitative research, the article focuses on the evolution amongst local stakeholders, of different…
Repetition, movement and the visual ontographies of urban rephotography
Engaging with a scene of the iconic movie Smoke (by Wayne Wang, 1995) in which a rephotographic project is sensitively elicited, this paper addresses the technique of repeat photography to contribute to methodological debates that have arisen within the nascent ‘Mobility and Humanities’ subfield. Through a humanistic perspective, the paper reviews and expands the nexus between mobility, photography and the urban by comparing the technique with th…
The work of foodification
Intersecting culinary and retail geographies, this paper brings to centre stage food in retail gentrification. Theoretically, it suggests that food, together with its spatialities, can produce a “displacement atmosphere” throughout retailscape by enabling privileged consumers to achieve distinction. Empirically, it draws from Porta Palazzo, Turin’s historical neighbourhood and marketplace, where the opening of a branded food hall reveals food’s r…
Cities are Not Products
This paper reflects critically on city branding by building on Kavaratzis and Ashworth’s 2005 article ‘City branding: An effective assertion of identity or a transitory marketing trick?’ It discusses the relationships between urban geography and branding studies, and challenges the idea that cities may be considered as special kinds of products in need of specific branding techniques. This exercise entails reflection on the boundaries between the…
Shame, guilt, and the production of urban space
Guilt and shame operate in connection with individual and collective forces. This paper explores how space is contingent in psychic processes, and how the generation and negotiation of feelings of guilt and shame develop in the interplay between internal processes of the mind and the worldly 'outside'. By presenting two examples, precisely commodity consumption and sex, and a set of fictional anecdotes, the article proposes a series of hypotheses…
Religious diversity and inter-faith competition
Religions play a significant role in Italian cities and, more generally, in the social, cultural and political lives of Italians. Since 1948, the Italian state has formally been secular, and it guarantees religious freedoms beyond Christianity. However, the reality is much more complex, as the hegemonic position of Catholicism is still evident, and religious minorities often deal with various forms of marginalization, stigmatization and lack of r…
Scenes from an urban outside
This contribution to the Scenes & Sounds section of CITY reflects on the experience of feeling ‘outside’ the urban by focusing on urban absences. The argument is developed first through theoretical speculations on planetary urbanism, emotions and absences/presences. The paper then mobilises autobiographical accounts concerning the emotions that I experienced during a summer spent in an alpine village. The paper suggests that, in my emotional sphe…
Anarchism and Urban Planning
Anarchist ideas have meaningfully influenced human geography, urban planning, and urban studies in general, particularly thanks to the classic contributions of anarchist geographers such Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin. Their ideas about decentralization, autonomy, communitarianism, and nature deeply influenced generations of geographers and planners, as epitomized by the Garden City movement, as well as recent strands of critical scholarship
Politicising city branding
Cities and the politics of gamification
Symbols, Spectres and the Emotional Geographies of City Branding
This chapter deals with the symbols more closely related to the imaginaries of urban life, and specifically with attractive symbols and icons. The rationale is that urban branding is basically the art of reading, inventing, manipulating, representing and definitely displaying urban symbols and related city imaginaries. The symbolic role of the skyscraper, however, is not that straightforward. There are very powerful imaginative geographies and re…
The Evolution of the Place Branding Debate
City branding, in fact, is just one in a long list of concepts that has been translated and adapted from business studies, including urban benchmarking, urban auditing, strategic planning, urban competitiveness and urban smartness. In tracing the history of place branding, it has to be said that the expression &s;branding&s; is rather, because most of the literature before the 2000s privileged the expression &s;place marketing&s;. But, as anticip…
Neoliberalism, Consumption and the Institutional Frameworks of City Branding
The most important consequence for cities, in relation to city branding, is that the proliferation of new and intensive consumption trends has led to the production of new urban imaginaries: it is clear, that the city is also an experience to be consumed, in many different ways. City branding is strongly affected by the trends, and it reverberates with the dynamics of urban neoliberalism. To sum up, by approaching neoliberalism as a political-eco…
The Global, the Creative and the Smart City
The chapter discusses the crisis of the imaginaries of the Fordist and the industrial city which took place beginning in the 1970s. It presents the branding of innovative, cultural and creative cities, and the general move towards the branding of the urban cultural/knowledge economy. The chapter also discusses the branding of green and sustainable cities and the recent idea of the smart city. It deals with the idea of global cities. The identific…
Concluding Remarks
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the introduction of the tentative concept of the &s;right to the brand&s;. Certain auras and stigmas may be obscured by a brand, but they never disappear, as they may eventually come back like dreams emerging from the subconscious. There are a number of perspectives on city branding that have been just partly inv…
Introducing Urban Branding
Urban studies have a strong connection with films. Many scholars have analysed the relationships between specific cities and their role in films, questioning which meanings are assumed by specific urban settings in the development of the storyline, how they contribute to the atmosphere characterising a movie and what kind of image of the city is forged by movies. The discussion on the different and always partial and subjective ways in which it i…
Assessment and Evaluation of Urban Brands, or, Disciplining Urban Spectres
There is a long tradition in the practice of ranking cities in urban studies. The idea is based on the simple observation of the fact that cities may differ dramatically in terms of size, urban functions, infrastructures and living conditions. The three global ranking analyses of city brands that are arguably the most popular and influential are the &s;City Brands Index&s;, the &s;Global Cities Index&s; and the &s;Guardian Cities brand barometer&…
City Branding as a Politics of Representation
This chapter outlines some key theoretical elements in order to frame and to interpret the politics of city branding. It describes the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. The chapter introduces Jacques Ranciere&s;s idea of the &s;partition of the sensible&s;, and focuses on visibility, invisibility and violence through the mobilisation of the metaphor of the ghost. It discusses the provocative idea of a collective &s;right to the brand&s;, wh…
City Branding
Since the 1990s, city branding has become a key factor in urban development policies. Cities all over the world take specific actions to manipulate the imagery and the perceptions of places, both in the eyes of the inhabitants and in those of potential tourists, investors, users and consumers. City Branding: The Ghostly Politics of Representation in Globalising Cities explores different sides of place branding policies. The construction and the m…
City Branding
Are we allowed to use fictional vignettes in cultural geographies
Fictional vignettes are narrative texts that academic researchers may invent in order to illustrate arguments or to present their research outcomes; they are stories or situations that do not strictly report factual realities observed by the author, but that, in any case, implement the heuristics for the arguments that the author wants to raise. Although there are several works in social sciences taking advantage of fictional narratives, geograph…
Smartmentality
The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing on the power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand, smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the city and its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introducing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the 'good' and 'bad' city. The smart city discourse ma…
Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities
The image of the creative city
The image of the creative city, eight years later
City Branding
Since the 1990s, city branding has become a key factor in urban development policies. Cities all over the world take specific actions to manipulate the imagery and the perceptions of places, both in the eyes of the inhabitants and in those of potential tourists, investors, users and consumers. City Branding: The Ghostly Politics of Representation in Globalising Cities explores different sides of place branding policies. The construction and the m…
Are we allowed to use fictional vignettes in cultural geographies
Fictional vignettes are narrative texts that academic researchers may invent in order to illustrate arguments or to present their research outcomes; they are stories or situations that do not strictly report factual realities observed by the author, but that, in any case, implement the heuristics for the arguments that the author wants to raise. Although there are several works in social sciences taking advantage of fictional narratives, geograph…
Alternative Capitalism and Creative Economy
TheFreeTown ofChristiania is an autonomous community of about 1,000 inhabitants in the centre ofCopenhagen. Built as a squat for a hippy community in the 1970s, it is today a central node in the geography of activism, anarchism and alternative social life. This article analysesChristiania from the specific perspective of creativity and within the context of the 'creative city' debate. TheFreeTown is a lively innovative milieu, nurturing the arts,…
The work of foodification
Intersecting culinary and retail geographies, this paper brings to centre stage food in retail gentrification. Theoretically, it suggests that food, together with its spatialities, can produce a “displacement atmosphere” throughout retailscape by enabling privileged consumers to achieve distinction. Empirically, it draws from Porta Palazzo, Turin’s historical neighbourhood and marketplace, where the opening of a branded food hall reveals food’s r…
Shame, guilt, and the production of urban space
Guilt and shame operate in connection with individual and collective forces. This paper explores how space is contingent in psychic processes, and how the generation and negotiation of feelings of guilt and shame develop in the interplay between internal processes of the mind and the worldly 'outside'. By presenting two examples, precisely commodity consumption and sex, and a set of fictional anecdotes, the article proposes a series of hypotheses…
Locating the couch
Using an autobiographical methodology, the paper examines the different spatialities involved in psychoanalytic therapy. The paper proposes an understanding of space that is simultaneously physical, relational, emotional, symbolic and transformative. Focusing on the practices and microgeographies involved in psychoanalytic therapy, the aim of the paper is to contribute to the body of literature dealing with psychoanalytic geography by discussing …
Gay and lesbian emotional geographies of clubbing
Urban nighttime entertainment spaces, including bars, pubs, and clubs, are a crucial space for the performance of gendered social relations and the experience of sexual identities. This article investigates the emotional spaces of commercial gay and lesbian recreation in two different settings: lesbian nights in Paris, France, and gay clubs in Turin, Italy. This research was carried out through direct observation and auto-ethnographic fieldwork. …
Normalising autonomous spaces
Christiania is an autonomous Free Town, born as a squat in 1971, located in the centre of Copenhagen. After 40 years of struggles and negotiations with the Danish institutions in order to survive and to maintain its autonomy, Christiania reached an agreement with the state in 2011. If on the one hand the agreement apparently guarantees the survival of Christiania, on the other hand it regulates various domains that used to be self-regulated by th…
Cities and the politics of gamification
Autistic cities
Autism and neurodiversity are key topics in current public debate and in the social sciences. A vast multidisciplinary literature has explored spatial dimensions of neurodiversity, particularly by analyzing autistic experiences in private and public spaces and the design of autistic-friendly environments. Building on this literature and by presenting my personal experience as the father of an autistic child, this paper explores connections betwee…
Religious diversity and inter-faith competition
Religions play a significant role in Italian cities and, more generally, in the social, cultural and political lives of Italians. Since 1948, the Italian state has formally been secular, and it guarantees religious freedoms beyond Christianity. However, the reality is much more complex, as the hegemonic position of Catholicism is still evident, and religious minorities often deal with various forms of marginalization, stigmatization and lack of r…
Politicising city branding
Exploring the Afterlife
Cultural understandings of the Afterlife are often embedded in spatial thinking and spatial metaphors. This article, first develops an understanding of the Afterlife as a relational virtual space populated by absent presences. Second, the article explores the possibility of investigating the Afterlife with ethnographical approaches. Exploring three fictional vignettes, the article discusses alternative spatialities of the Afterlife, in order to e…
The political geographies of Liberty City
Liberty City is a virtual city, created for use with several versions of Grand Theft Auto ( GTA ), a best-selling series of video games concerning the world of crime. Millions of people all over the world have spent large amounts of time exploring this virtual space, making the city an important cultural artefact and a meaningful landmark in the urban imaginary on a global scale. The aim of this paper is to analyse Liberty City in terms of the im…
Repetition, movement and the visual ontographies of urban rephotography
Engaging with a scene of the iconic movie Smoke (by Wayne Wang, 1995) in which a rephotographic project is sensitively elicited, this paper addresses the technique of repeat photography to contribute to methodological debates that have arisen within the nascent ‘Mobility and Humanities’ subfield. Through a humanistic perspective, the paper reviews and expands the nexus between mobility, photography and the urban by comparing the technique with th…
Cities are Not Products
This paper reflects critically on city branding by building on Kavaratzis and Ashworth’s 2005 article ‘City branding: An effective assertion of identity or a transitory marketing trick?’ It discusses the relationships between urban geography and branding studies, and challenges the idea that cities may be considered as special kinds of products in need of specific branding techniques. This exercise entails reflection on the boundaries between the…
Scenes from an urban outside
This contribution to the Scenes & Sounds section of CITY reflects on the experience of feeling ‘outside’ the urban by focusing on urban absences. The argument is developed first through theoretical speculations on planetary urbanism, emotions and absences/presences. The paper then mobilises autobiographical accounts concerning the emotions that I experienced during a summer spent in an alpine village. The paper suggests that, in my emotional sphe…
Anarchism and Urban Planning
Anarchist ideas have meaningfully influenced human geography, urban planning, and urban studies in general, particularly thanks to the classic contributions of anarchist geographers such Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin. Their ideas about decentralization, autonomy, communitarianism, and nature deeply influenced generations of geographers and planners, as epitomized by the Garden City movement, as well as recent strands of critical scholarship
Selling cruises
Leisure cruising combines movement and stativity in a particular tourist experience: users are supposed to enjoy very different activities, with the movement of the ship guiding them to their destinations. This article analyses visual representations of gender and mobility in over 600 images collected from leisure cruise promotional brochures by taking advantage of a qualitative methodology and by focusing on narratives related to themes of pleas…
The Border Between Core and Periphery
Geographical metaphors such as centre‐periphery or First‐Second‐Third World are widely used to describe the world economic system. This paper discusses the role of metaphors in geographical representations and proposes some guidelines for the analysis and classification. This methodology is then applied to a sample of well known textual metaphors used to describe the world economic scenario, including ideas of a First‐Second‐Third World, North‐So…
The image of the creative city
The Border Between Core and Periphery
Geographical metaphors such as centre‐periphery or First‐Second‐Third World are widely used to describe the world economic system. This paper discusses the role of metaphors in geographical representations and proposes some guidelines for the analysis and classification. This methodology is then applied to a sample of well known textual metaphors used to describe the world economic scenario, including ideas of a First‐Second‐Third World, North‐So…
Urban Political Geographies
Table of contents\n\nForeword: The Athenian Symptom by Ola Söderström \t\nForeword: The Nine Lives of Neoliberalism by Jamie Peck \t\nForeword: Politics Between the Lines by AbdouMaliq Simone \t\n\nIntroduction \t\nGlobalization and the Urban Experience \t\nThe Triad of Urban Politics \t\nOverview of the Book's Structure \t\n\nPART ONE: POLITICS AS REPRESENTATION \t\nUrban Development and the Politics of Representation \t\nIntroduction: towards a…
The political geographies of Liberty City
Liberty City is a virtual city, created for use with several versions of Grand Theft Auto ( GTA ), a best-selling series of video games concerning the world of crime. Millions of people all over the world have spent large amounts of time exploring this virtual space, making the city an important cultural artefact and a meaningful landmark in the urban imaginary on a global scale. The aim of this paper is to analyse Liberty City in terms of the im…
Gay and lesbian emotional geographies of clubbing
Urban nighttime entertainment spaces, including bars, pubs, and clubs, are a crucial space for the performance of gendered social relations and the experience of sexual identities. This article investigates the emotional spaces of commercial gay and lesbian recreation in two different settings: lesbian nights in Paris, France, and gay clubs in Turin, Italy. This research was carried out through direct observation and auto-ethnographic fieldwork. …
Smartmentality
The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing on the power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand, smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the city and its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introducing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the 'good' and 'bad' city. The smart city discourse ma…
Alternative Capitalism and Creative Economy
TheFreeTown ofChristiania is an autonomous community of about 1,000 inhabitants in the centre ofCopenhagen. Built as a squat for a hippy community in the 1970s, it is today a central node in the geography of activism, anarchism and alternative social life. This article analysesChristiania from the specific perspective of creativity and within the context of the 'creative city' debate. TheFreeTown is a lively innovative milieu, nurturing the arts,…
Locating the couch
Using an autobiographical methodology, the paper examines the different spatialities involved in psychoanalytic therapy. The paper proposes an understanding of space that is simultaneously physical, relational, emotional, symbolic and transformative. Focusing on the practices and microgeographies involved in psychoanalytic therapy, the aim of the paper is to contribute to the body of literature dealing with psychoanalytic geography by discussing …
Urban Neoliberalism
The Fordist city and the creative city
The image of the creative city, eight years later
Normalising autonomous spaces
Christiania is an autonomous Free Town, born as a squat in 1971, located in the centre of Copenhagen. After 40 years of struggles and negotiations with the Danish institutions in order to survive and to maintain its autonomy, Christiania reached an agreement with the state in 2011. If on the one hand the agreement apparently guarantees the survival of Christiania, on the other hand it regulates various domains that used to be self-regulated by th…
Selling cruises
Leisure cruising combines movement and stativity in a particular tourist experience: users are supposed to enjoy very different activities, with the movement of the ship guiding them to their destinations. This article analyses visual representations of gender and mobility in over 600 images collected from leisure cruise promotional brochures by taking advantage of a qualitative methodology and by focusing on narratives related to themes of pleas…
Exploring the Afterlife
Cultural understandings of the Afterlife are often embedded in spatial thinking and spatial metaphors. This article, first develops an understanding of the Afterlife as a relational virtual space populated by absent presences. Second, the article explores the possibility of investigating the Afterlife with ethnographical approaches. Exploring three fictional vignettes, the article discusses alternative spatialities of the Afterlife, in order to e…
Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities
Symbols, Spectres and the Emotional Geographies of City Branding
This chapter deals with the symbols more closely related to the imaginaries of urban life, and specifically with attractive symbols and icons. The rationale is that urban branding is basically the art of reading, inventing, manipulating, representing and definitely displaying urban symbols and related city imaginaries. The symbolic role of the skyscraper, however, is not that straightforward. There are very powerful imaginative geographies and re…
The Evolution of the Place Branding Debate
City branding, in fact, is just one in a long list of concepts that has been translated and adapted from business studies, including urban benchmarking, urban auditing, strategic planning, urban competitiveness and urban smartness. In tracing the history of place branding, it has to be said that the expression &s;branding&s; is rather, because most of the literature before the 2000s privileged the expression &s;place marketing&s;. But, as anticip…
Neoliberalism, Consumption and the Institutional Frameworks of City Branding
The most important consequence for cities, in relation to city branding, is that the proliferation of new and intensive consumption trends has led to the production of new urban imaginaries: it is clear, that the city is also an experience to be consumed, in many different ways. City branding is strongly affected by the trends, and it reverberates with the dynamics of urban neoliberalism. To sum up, by approaching neoliberalism as a political-eco…
The Global, the Creative and the Smart City
The chapter discusses the crisis of the imaginaries of the Fordist and the industrial city which took place beginning in the 1970s. It presents the branding of innovative, cultural and creative cities, and the general move towards the branding of the urban cultural/knowledge economy. The chapter also discusses the branding of green and sustainable cities and the recent idea of the smart city. It deals with the idea of global cities. The identific…
Concluding Remarks
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the introduction of the tentative concept of the &s;right to the brand&s;. Certain auras and stigmas may be obscured by a brand, but they never disappear, as they may eventually come back like dreams emerging from the subconscious. There are a number of perspectives on city branding that have been just partly inv…
Introducing Urban Branding
Urban studies have a strong connection with films. Many scholars have analysed the relationships between specific cities and their role in films, questioning which meanings are assumed by specific urban settings in the development of the storyline, how they contribute to the atmosphere characterising a movie and what kind of image of the city is forged by movies. The discussion on the different and always partial and subjective ways in which it i…
Assessment and Evaluation of Urban Brands, or, Disciplining Urban Spectres
There is a long tradition in the practice of ranking cities in urban studies. The idea is based on the simple observation of the fact that cities may differ dramatically in terms of size, urban functions, infrastructures and living conditions. The three global ranking analyses of city brands that are arguably the most popular and influential are the &s;City Brands Index&s;, the &s;Global Cities Index&s; and the &s;Guardian Cities brand barometer&…
City Branding as a Politics of Representation
This chapter outlines some key theoretical elements in order to frame and to interpret the politics of city branding. It describes the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. The chapter introduces Jacques Ranciere&s;s idea of the &s;partition of the sensible&s;, and focuses on visibility, invisibility and violence through the mobilisation of the metaphor of the ghost. It discusses the provocative idea of a collective &s;right to the brand&s;, wh…
City Branding
Since the 1990s, city branding has become a key factor in urban development policies. Cities all over the world take specific actions to manipulate the imagery and the perceptions of places, both in the eyes of the inhabitants and in those of potential tourists, investors, users and consumers. City Branding: The Ghostly Politics of Representation in Globalising Cities explores different sides of place branding policies. The construction and the m…
City Branding
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (19 works) · Geography (15 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Art (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (10 works)