Social scientists have long sought to understand the cultural production system. Such research elucidates the importance of the social milieu to cultural industries. We capture aggregate patterns of the social milieu and the geographical form it takes. We use a unique data set, Getty Images and geo-coded over 6000 events and 300,000 photographic images taken in Los Angeles and New York City, an...

City identity can be examined from a number of political, economic and cultural perspectives including the way it has been perceived by residents and outsiders. While residents derive the city’s identity from their experience of it, for outsiders various branding schemes used to sell the city have an important role in constructing the identity. Sometimes the images viewed from the inside and th...

Introduction Branding has become an empirical phenomenon in the governance of urban districts and communities, especially in urban regeneration programmes (e.g. Van Dijk and Holstein, 2007). Branding has been widely applied to change the image of regenerated areas, with the aim of attracting investors and new residents. In the UK for example, branding has become increasingly central to regenera...

In the urban development policy in China, city brands play an important role in setting targets for Chinese cities. These economic city brands, however, are not produced in an institutional vacuum: they are embedded in the visions national, provincial and municipal governments have for these cities, i.e., on multi-level governance. In this paper, a data-intense analysis of economic city brandin...