Bottom-up Neighborhood Rebranding: Community Building or Loss Of Place Identity?

In the last decade, the economic crisis has seen the main European cities as the perfect stage for social segregation. Peripheral areas have often been reshaped through uneven urban development processes and that has typically involved the rebranding of the area concerned as a symbolic boundary. European urban policy-makers increasingly utilize urban rebranding as planning tools to foster social change and attract economic capital, imposing a top-down changing of the very identity of a district. In literature, these phenomena have been broadly investigated, though, we have observed that there is a gap about bottomup place rebranding processes related to outcomes such as gentrification and loss of place identity. Indeed, the shared sentiment within the academia sheds light mainly on the inclusive nature of bottom-up interventions, focusing on the successful results rather than seeing the big picture. The present work aims to re-think on this debate extending the analysis on the harmful social impacts that bottom-up urban rebranding might have on local hyper-diverse communities. In fact, in such a complex scenario, neighborhood rebranding, even when constituted for the sake of a culture-led social and urban regeneration, may mirror the very logic of misappropriation if interventions are uncritically enacted through false forms of participation. We read this phenomenon thanks to the exploratory analysis of an Italian case study that took place in Milan, in an emerging peripheral multi-ethnic area, recently renamed NoLo by a specific group of residents. As we will argument from our results, we assess both the potential benefits of a bottom-up symbolic and economic renewal and its limits in terms of marginalization and loss of place identity.