UrBANALization: In the Global Souk of Urban images

Abstract

This article presents the concept of "urBANALization" in the context of the production of urban image, characterizing the contemporary city during the last decades of the twentieth century and in the present moment. The text starts from perspectives of "festivalization" of urban policies and the progressive relevance of marketing and urban branding, to support the absolute mastery of image at the time of the construction of urban strategies and in the development of urbanistic processes, whether new urbanization, or transformation of the existing urban territory. "urBANALization" is defined as a spatial and cultural process characterized by a territorial specialization that accompanies trends in thematization and simplification of the urban landscape. A common development, to a greater or lesser extent, in distinct cities that, despite the differences that characterize each local context, end up replicating a similar kind of landscape, through a similar typology of urban programmes. "urBANALization", therefore, does not mean the homogenization of cities and territories that some authors believe to be behind the processes of globalization. It is rather about the absolute triumph of the common. It does not have so much to do with the repetition of landscapes, but with the multiplication of common landscapes. Something that, in the final analysis, poses a major problem for the future of the territory and for those who inhabit it: the reduction of the city to a smooth, flat surface, without flaws or roughness, without differences, where the absence of complexity and diversity allows you to project, without pause and in a ubiquitous way, the images and "brands" that give shape to the urban landscape.