Economic Rationality Meets Celebrity Urbanology: Exploring Edward Glaeser's City

This article presents a critique of the popular and public‐policy work of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, which has been constructed at the nexus of neoclassical economic rationality and celebrity urbanology. Widely recognized as one of the world's leading urbanists, Glaeser has combined a high‐flying academic career with public‐policy engagement and extensive work as a newspaper columnist and media commentator, enabled by a longstanding affiliation with the Manhattan Institute, a leading conservative think tank. The critique is pointed, but seeks to exceed argumentum ad hominem by calling attention to sociopolitical and institutional factors that have facilitated the accelerated diffusion and enlarged dominion of this model (and mode) of microeconomically rationalized urbanism, including the production of new forms of intellectual marketing, the construction of colonizing variants of urban‐economic expertise, and the ongoing rearticulation and creeping consolidation of market‐centric policy norms. The article argues that a distinctive form of urban‐economic orthodoxy is under construction, based on a potent fusion of scientific reasoning and pop presentation, combining ideologically disciplined applications of neoclassical economics with dissemination in the register of the ‘freakonomics' franchise. Edward Glaeser's intellectual accomplishments have been significant, but the ‘Glaeser effect' is more than a story of individual scholarly endeavor, calling for more than a merely ‘internal' critique. Its conformity to Manhattan Institute principles testifies to a telling consistency of ideological purpose, contributing as it does to a sustained effort to rationalize and normalize lean and limited modes of neoliberal urban governance, fortified by microeconomic reason.     

Translational Global Praxis: Rethinking Methods and Modes of African Urban Research

Advancing global urbanism depends upon making Africa's cities a more dominant part of the global urban narrative. Constructing a more legitimate research agenda for African cities, however, necessitates a repositioning of conventional modes of research. To achieve intellectual and political traction in what are typical African research conditions—where human needs are great, information is poor, conditions of governance are complex and the reality is changeable—we reflect on the experiences of the African Centre for Cities where (alongside conventional use of theory, methods and data) a translational mode of working has been adopted. The notion of translational urban research praxis captures more than the idea of applied research or even co‐production, and encompasses integrating the research conception, design, execution, application and reflection—and conceiving of this set of activities as a singular research/practice process that is by its nature deeply political and locationally embedded. In this way we suggest that African urbanism can be both usefully illuminated by global theories and methods, and can simultaneously be constitutive of the reform of the ideas through which cities generally are understood.     

我国奥运体育名人广告的演进及发展对策

体育名人广告是经济发展到一定程度的产物,在市场经济迅速发展的今天,体育名人广告以成为商家创造品牌效应,树立企业良好形象,并获得巨大商业利润的手段。本文采用文献资料法,从体育传媒的角度出发,阐述了从"乒乓外交"到"姚明时代"我国体育名人广告发展的历程及特征。     

The impact of death on consumer responses to celebrity endorser misbehavior

A well‐established stream of research on celebrity misbehavior suggests that negative information may have an adverse effect on an endorsed brand because of its association with a celebrity considered as blameworthy. However, the present research calls into question the generalizability of these results to fatal misbehaviors (i.e., misbehaviors that lead to the celebrity's death). Indeed, after death, a celebrity may gain spiritual meanings, and consumers may find it more difficult to blame a sacred individual. As such, the current article investigates the impact of a celebrity's death on blame attribution and consumer attitudes in the context of celebrity endorser misbehavior. The results of three experiments uncover that death favors a partial blame attribution transfer from the celebrity endorser to the brand, but only when the misbehavior implies a product related to the brand. In addition, the findings reveal a positive effect of death through celebrity sacredness on brand attitude.     

Where is Urban Politics?

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.     

Analysing Place and Place‐making: Urbanization in Suburban Oslo

Despite developments within planning theory challenging the ideal of the rational master plan it may be argued that there is still use for the production of knowledge through analysis in planning. However, the cultural complexity of today's planning contexts, and a move towards governance and entrepreneurial policies, makes it difficult to make places, to achieve social welfare and sustainability. Traditionally, the analysis of places has been done by architects and planners focusing on physical form, having an essentialist perspective of place resembling the theory of genius loci. In Norway, the planning authorities refined this methodology in the 1990s. This approach is, however, not in tune with a progressive view of places as multiple and dynamic social constructions, and may be accused of ‘symbolic violence’. If one is to take this view seriously and still be able to make plans, planning must also be based on other types of knowledge. In this article I argue for a socio‐cultural approach to reveal social representations and practices that make a place. I use the case of place‐making in Sandvika, a suburban ‘minicity’ outside Oslo, as an example of how a constructivist understanding differs from and may supplement an essentialist approach.     

Hip‐hop Urbanism Old and New

The sustained connection between hip‐hop and urban identity stems in part from the origins of hip‐hop culture in post‐industrial American cities during the late twentieth century. But hip‐hop urbanism cannot be reduced to nostalgia or respect for previous traditions, as changing spatial demographics and the evolution of hip‐hop production and consumption force a disaggregation and reconsideration of ‘urban music’. Contemporary hip‐hop research in the United States must focus not only on the black and Latino communities responsible for hip‐hop's genesis, but on modern‐day race‐ and class‐based power dynamics, as well as on communities and social networks that are not typically considered urban. Ethnographers are especially well‐positioned to lead this field, thanks to methodological and theoretical tools that allow them to focus on smaller and emergent musical communities in flux.     

Why do Graffiti Writers Write on Murals? The Birth,Life, and Slow Death of Freeway Murals in Los Angeles

For three decades graffiti writers have marked the Olympic Festival freeway murals painted in celebration of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles (LA). These high‐profile murals, which once symbolized LA's status as the ‘Mural Capital of the World', became palimpsests on which graffiti writers painted their monikers, perhaps unwittingly contributing to their eventual destruction. Local government, muralists and residents have bemoaned the murals' slow death, though have not been able to identify or understand the motives for such vandalism, interpreting it as ‘mindless', ‘animalistic' vandalism perpetrated by ‘kids' who simply lack respect. I argue that the burial of these murals under layers of paint must be understood in the context of competing claims made to public space. Relying on rare personal interviews with the graffiti writers who participated in their destruction, I answer the question ‘Why do graffiti writers write on murals?', while situating the birth and life of the Olympic murals within a larger historical discussion about Chicano/a mural making, urbanization, freeway construction, and the growth of the graffiti subculture in the United States' paradigmatic global city.     

Neoliberal Urbanism Redux?

Neoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend of failure and crisis, regulatory experimentation, and policy transfer across places, territories and scales. The proliferation of familiar neoliberal discourses and policy formulations in the aftermath of the 2007‐09 world financial crisis masks evidence of more deeply rooted transformations of policies, institutions and spaces that continue to combatively remake terrains of urban development. Accordingly, the critical intellectual project of deciphering the problematic of neoliberal urbanism must continue to evolve. This essay outlines some of the methodological and political challenges associated with (re)constructing a ′moving map′ of post‐crisis neoliberalization processes. We affirm a form of critical urban theory that adopts a restlessly antagonistic stance towards orthodox urban formations and their dominant ideologies, institutional arrangements and societal effects, tracking their endemic policy failures and crisis tendencies while at the same time demarcating potential terrains for heterodox, radical and/or insurgent theories and practices of emancipatory social change.     

Celebrity Endorsements in U.S. and Thai Magazines: A Content Analysis Comparative Assessment

SUMMARY

Celebrity endorsements have become a prevalent form of advertising. Hence, the purpose of the study was to determine the relationship between the use of celebrities and the types of products endorsed. Advertisements from one popular magazine in the U.S. and 2 popular magazines in Thailand were used. Results indicated that U.S. advertisements of beauty, dietary and health services, hospitals, and weight loss clinics categories utilized celebrity endorsements more often than other categories. In Thai advertisements, supplementary foods and medicines used celebrity endorsers more often than other categories. Results further support that a significant relationship exits between celebrity endorsers and product types.