Narrating urban entrepreneurship : a matter of imagineering?
Steyaert, Chris (University of St Gallen)
Beyes, Timon (University of St Gallen)
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Economia de l'Empresa

Publicación:	Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Economia de l'Empresa 2009
Descripción:	29 p.
Resumen:	The battle between cities with regard to their creative possibilities has evolved into a process of multiplying ever-new images and variegated stories of urban attractiveness and success. Engineering "cool" images and "hot" stories about one's city is now a central endeavor in the narratives of urban policy-making that center more and more on the idea of the entrepreneurial city. The making of an entrepreneurial image is enacted through various narrative genres that lie somewhere between place making and place marketing, between branding and boosting, between restoration and revanchism, between iconic architecture and mega-spectacle. This "imagineering" is not only part of the way cities try to (re)present themselves as entrepreneurial to various audiences through a real "image inflation" (Zukin, 2008, p. xii) but is 1 Forthcoming in: B. Lange,. A. Kalandides, B. Stoeber, I. Wellmann (Hrsg. ) (2009): Governance der Kreativwirtschaft. Diagnosen und Handlungsoptionen. Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld. 2 also inscribed in the various ways urban creativity and entrepreneurship can be studied, researched and imagined. In this chapter we aim to differentiate the political narratives of the entrepreneurial city as we emphasize the need to understand the politics of narration and make a plea for critical reflexivity in our forms of researching and theorizing. We will thus try to investigate how the politics of narration is intertwined with the narration of political concepts and will argue that the narrating of urban entrepreneurship can raise very different images and discourses of city life beyond those that are currently engineered. We will distinguish between a grand narrative, a counter-narrative, and an assemblage of more ambivalent little narratives, which we call prosaic narration. While the distinction between these three types might be seen as a bit too simple and "straight", we believe that by juxtaposing these different forms of narration and alternating between them, we can help problematize the engineering of the city as entrepreneurial and imagine alternative views both of city life and of what is understood as its creativity.
Derechos:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús de Creative Commons, amb la qual es permet copiar, distribuir i comunicar públicament l'obra sempre que se'n citin l'autor original, la universitat i el departament i no se'n faci cap ús comercial ni obra derivada, tal com queda estipulat en la llicència d'ús
Lengua:	Anglès
Colección:	Departament d'Economia de l'Empresa. Documents de treball
Colección:	Document de treball (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Economia de l'Empresa) ; 09/1
Documento:	Working paper
Materia:	Urbanisme ; Emprenedoria

29 p, 315.1 KB

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Documentos de investigación > Working papers > Departamento de Empresa. Documentos de trabajo