The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America

The City Authentic explores how cities gentrify by becoming social media influencers, using insights from urban sociology, media, and cultural studies to explain the connection between digital media and derelict buildings, industry and place, and political processes.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 25 April 2023
Publisher: University of California Press

Cities, like the people that inhabit them, are subject to the attention economy. In The City Authentic, author David A. Banks explores how cities are transforming themselves to appeal to modern desires for authentic urban living through the attention-grabbing tactics of social media influencers and reality-TV stars.

Blending insightful analysis with pop culture, this engaging study of the New York State Capital Region provides an accessible glimpse into the social phenomena that influence contemporary cities. Banks argues that the rising economic fortunes of cities in the Rust Belt are due in part to the markers of their previous decay, which translate into signs of urban authenticity on the internet.

The City Authentic unpacks the odd connection between digital media and derelict buildings, the consequences of how we think about industry and place, and the political processes that have enabled a new paradigm in urban planning. Mixing urban sociology with media and cultural studies, Banks offers a lively account of how urban life and development are changing in the twenty-first century.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520383456