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M. Klein, A. Rumpfhuber:
"The Possibility of a Social Imaginary: Public Housing as a Tool for City Branding";
in: "Branded Spaces", herausgegeben von: Stephan Sonnenburg, Laura Baker; Springer, Wiesbaden, 2013, ISBN: 978-3-658-01561-9, S. 75 - 85.

This paper examines social housing as a tool for city branding.1 We ask whether
or not social housing (that is public and subsidized housing) has capabilities for
branding the city. The underlying hypothesis is that housing contributes
essentially to what is considered the brand of a city, even if it is not part of the
established forms of brand-production. We will be investigating the relationship
of housing and of branding the city by focusing on the case of Vienna, its history
and its recent developments. In doing so, we do not engage in a debate on how to
design a city as a competitive consumer brand. We rather aim to go beyond
contemporary concepts of branded spaces that seem to be fixed to the iconic, the
exceptional and to artificial theme-park-like assemblages of sceneries. The
objective of this text is to think beyond upgrading and branding city quarters and
its spaces through cultural venues, railway stations and other means of
gentrification. In other words this contribution challenges what has become the
predominant idea of city branding. It questions a mode of governance that
confuses running a city with that of running a business. In the lines to follow we
propose an alternative approach of branding (space) that fosters structural change
and local qualities and not the repetition of a global typology or best practice. In
this sense, our contribution questions an approach to city branding eventually
oriented towards predatory competition and concurrency; we rather propose a
sustainable mode of branding in social housing that pursues an economy of
resilience.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-01561-9_5