Miriam Greenberg is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Greenberg's work lies at the intersection of urban studies, media studies, and political economy. Using critical social and historical methods, she studies the rise of urban branding in the US and globally; urban representation in the media; and the role of media, marketing, and the symbolic economy in post-crisis urban restructuring. Recent publications include: Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008) and "From 9/11 to 8/29: Post-Disaster Recovery and Rebuilding in New York and New Orleans," forthcoming in Social Forces (with Kevin Fox Gotham).

Over the past three decades, cities aspiring to global status have branded themselves in competition for tourism, investment, new residents, and corporate headquarters. As I have argued elsewhere, urban branding involves the total commodification of the city-from the level of cultural representation to that of political and economic restructuring. With the market-centered shift of the neoliberal era, city brands assist local governing strategies, becoming the most publicly visible aspect of the increasingly privatized restructuring process. This has been particularly true in periods of crisis, which provoke wide-scale demands for radical change as well as class, race, and spatially-based struggles over who should benefit from such change. Urban branding then plays its most powerful role: presenting an imagined consensus, soothing the trauma of crisis, as well as aestheticizing and distracting critical attention from highly politicized processes of urban recovery and rebuilding.

This paper addresses the use of urban branding in contemporary New York City. This is a period bracketed by the crises of 9/11 and the current Wall Street-led economic collapse, in which profound efforts to transform the image and political economy of the city have been undertaken by the branding-savvy administration of Michael Bloomberg and in partnership with powerful private interests.

I first analyze the Bloomberg administration's massive new branding apparatus. The past eight years has seen the merging of marketing operations; the expansion of market research and overseas operations; the creation of new governing bodies like the Office of Chief Marketing Officer; and the integration of marketing within offices of economic development [EDC], tourism [NYC&Co], cultural affairs, policy, and budget. Branding now penetrates and links all aspects of urban governance and helps guide the Mayor's broader strategy to remake and sell the city locally and globally.

I then analyze the two modes of representation that the branding apparatus has mobilized. The first mode is highly public and populist, epitomized by the "This is NYC" tourism campaign designed for NYC&Co by preeminent branding firm Wolff Olins. The campaign celebrates New York's "urbanity" and "diversity" through a montage of faces and cultural practices. Coming out of the patriotic city marketing that immediately followed 9/11, the campaign also emphasizes the city's "toughness" and ability to triumph over the trauma of that event.

The second mode appears almost completely opposed to the first. It is private and elitist, represented by the 'luxury city' business marketing campaign led by the Mayor and the EDC, based on research from McKinsey and Co. This behind-the-scenes campaign argues corporations pay a premium to keep offices and executives in one of the most expensive cities on earth. It is also part of a broader development agenda to build a city that appeals to global elites by attracting high-end retailers, hotels, stadia, residential towers etc., and in the process, pushing out mixed-use, working class districts.

How are we to understand the contradictory discourse contained within New York's new brand? What implications does such branding have for cities more broadly? I argue it serves to reinforce the utopian city-myth that has emerged globally in the neoliberal era. Representations of grit and diversity respond to and resonate with popular fears in the midst of crisis, as well as desires for authentic and inclusive urban experience. They also obfuscate the entrenched class politics of urban restructuring, and help us imagine an exclusive "luxury city" as global utopia.