This research stream, developed during my PhD research and a postdoc, led me to analyze how imaginaries and media narratives, through their symbolic power, influence processes of urban transformation. In particular, I focused on:
A theoretical and historical analysis of the creative economy as an urban imaginary, advancing the hypothesis that the creative economy should be interpreted as an attempt to establish urban centres as a new core source of economic development after the decline of Fordism (Gerosa, 2022).
Instances of grassroots urban place branding processes that re-signify a neighbourhood identity, analysing the potential benefits and limits of such efforts (Gerosa & Tartari, 2021; Tartari & Gerosa, 2020).
The role of media narratives in place branding processes through the concept of visual regimes(Gerosa, 2024).
Analyse the imaginaries of coworking spaces managers during the pandemic, to develop an understanding of how coworking spaces could become an active component of neo-municipalist government models, based on principles of cooperation and mutualism (Gerosa & Manzo, 2025).
This article investigates how Community Workspace managers in Milan conceptualize their role within urban governance and space. Based on qualitative interviews, it identifies three ideal-typical relationships with local institutions: beneficiaries, partners, and policy providers. These situated perspectives reveal how CWS navigate tensions between market logic, civic engagement, and territorial embeddedness, often positioning themselves as intermediaries between grassroots actors and public authorities. The article contributes to debates on platform urbanism by introducing the notion of CWS as Local Collective Cooperation Goods, highlighting both their potential and the challenges of integrating private actors into post-neoliberal governance frameworks grounded in proximity and cooperation.
2024
Regimes of visibility: Unravelling media, conflict, and hegemony in place branding processes
Alessandro Gerosa
In Responsible Marketing for Well-being and Society, 2024
This article delineates a critical history of the economic imaginary of the creative economy. Applying the Cultural Political Economy analytical framework, the article looks at the turning points during the twentieth and twenty-first century in which different but connected discourses over creativity in the economic sphere emerged. Multiple contributions derive from the results. First, the research adds analytical depth to the existing literature, recovering the thought of Patten and the economic and political debate about creativity during the fifties and the sixties. This operation allows the integration of these discourses and more recent ones about the creative city, creative industries, and creative class under a common framework. Overall, a clear pattern emerges, consisting of two phases: a first phase of germination, in which academic and intellectual circles conceptualise the discourses, and a second phase of dissemination, in which political figures appropriate and spread those discourses. Lastly, we argue that the discourses composing the creative economy imaginary, taken together, can be interpreted as the attempt of Western economies to trigger a new successful cycle of economic accumulation, able to replace the Fordist one.
2021
The Bottom-up Place Branding of a Neighborhood: Analyzing a Case of Selective Empowerment
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.
2020
Il quartiere NoLo, un caso di rebranding dal basso: tra creatività, innovazione sociale e criticità
