More than ‘creative’: analyzing place branding strategies and Chinese migration in the City of Prato, Italy

ABSTRACT

In a progressively urbanized world, the modes of governamentality adopted by city administrations increasingly focus on the adoption of strategic functions. Environmental safeguard, circular economy, and urban innovation, for instance, have been referred to, in the case of the Italian city of Prato, as the city’s orientation ‘towards the future’. Some of the ambitious projects that have characterized the recently adopted governance model of Prato relate in fact to urban forestation, connectivity, the realization of more public space and the application of ‘creativity’ as a driving force for urban development. Significantly, too, representations of Prato (as of today one of the most studied examples of migration from China to Europe) have been tied to images of a conflictual multiculturalism and to the liminal spaces of social relations within which Chineseness has often been relegated. In this article, I use secondary data and first-handedly retrieved information through qualitative methods to describe how the recent place branding project promoted by the municipality based on the concept of ‘creativity’ has particularly targeted a neighborhood named Macrolotto Zero, marked by decades of migration from China. In doing so, I discuss how the formulation and application of the place brand have generated frictions between stakeholders, as well as new transcultural alliances. These speak to the challenges of achieving a condition of living with difference in the city and provide a still-underexplored platform from which city-making processes and social identities can be analyzed.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese migration
• urban governance
• creative district
• place branding
• urban diversities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 At the time of writing, the last two infrastructures have been completed, while the construction of the first is still taking place.

2 http://www.pratoalfuturo.it.

3 https://ecol.studio/shelter.

4 Successful initiatives were organized here, including a summer outdoor free cinema and a watermelon festival.

5 The article was published under a ‘stories from the illegal city’ dedicated section.

6 https://www.la7.it/propagandalive/video/propaganda-live-propagandacina-25-02-2019-264296.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CHCI-Mellon Foundation & the International Center for Cultural Studies, the Higher Education Sprout Project of the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and Ministry of Education (MOE), Taiwan.