期刊名称：Collegium : Studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences
印刷版ISSN：1796-2986
出版年度：2012
卷号：13
出版社：Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
摘要：In this article, a critical attempt is made to read the language of contemporary urban boosterism – its eulogistic adjectives and slogans, escapist evocations in nomenclature, nostalgic narratives, etc. – through the lens of The Society of the Spectacle (1995, orig. 1967), Guy Debord’s controversial theoretico-political manifesto. Through discussion of empirical examples, the authors shed light on different types of in-situ landscape texts in Finnish and English cities. In the former national context, culturally escapist and non-native names given to leisurescapes and technoscapes have mushroomed over the last quarter century. While this process represents a semi-hegemonic rather than hegemonic trend, many developers’ reliance on the “independent” representational power of language has substantially reshaped naming practices in the non-Anglophone country. The analysis of different types of promotional texts at England’s major soccerscapes evinces the co-presence of nostalgic evocations of local history amidst the hypercommodification of space. Arguably, the culturally self-sufficient, traditionaware representational strategies in current English football stem from pressure from fans, the country’s status as the cradle of modern football, and a privileged possibility to promote the game’s “native” meanings via a globally-spoken language. Finally, this article addresses the pros and cons of using the spectacle theoretical framework to analyse critically language-based urban boosterism and branding under the current conditions of neoliberal urbanism.
