ICS Seminar Series - Andrea Del Bono
Date: Thursday 5 November 2015
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EB.3.18, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus
Andrea Del Bono
Ethnic place brands: A nuanced insight into the complex relations between 'ethnicity and the city'
Abstract
This paper looks at the application of ethnic brands to Haymarket and Leichhardt, two Sydney precincts that are shaped by place-branding logics of urban reconfiguration. These are strategies designed to achieve economic prosperity and influence through the adoption of 'competitive identities' for place-products. In this presentation I will discuss how different Local Government Areas have marketed more or less contested versions of ethnicity as their differentiation points within a wider context of development and growth in Sydney. I argue that the process of place branding in Haymarket and Leichhardt paves the way for a conceptualisation of ethnic place brands as fluid, uncertain and open-ended platforms of contested meanings that have meaningful consequences in regards to the way in which we understand the complex relationships between ethnicity and the city.
My analysis will take place in two main parts: firstly, I will situate ethnic place brands within a paradigmatic shift for the analysis of ethnicity and urban places. Secondly, I will draw on ethnographic data to highlight the tensions between essentialism and complexity that result from the contingent application of ethnicised culture to urban contexts, which are defined by a highly diverse social composition and protracted phases of urban transformation. Here I provide evidence to suggest that a series of visible contradictions destabilise images such as the 'heart of the precinct' and the 'ethnic community', which are recurrently used to strengthen the character of the two precincts by means of a static and unchanging ethnic identity.
Biography
Andrea Del Bono is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society. His research looks at the relations between ethnicity and the city, with a particular focus on place branding. It looks comparatively at Haymarket and Leichhardt, with a focus on how Chineseness and Italianness are negotiated by a wide network of actors and how ethnic brands are 'put together' as complex, dynamic, unstable and contingent processes of composition and intensification.
