Capitalist visuality: branding, architecture, and its visual reproduction. A case study in the city of Porto.
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Ana Miriam Rebelo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This chapter examines the promotional image of the city of Porto, cre-ated and disseminated in the last decades, as a means through which core capi-talist values, objectives and operative logic are disseminated and naturalized in public space. Mirzoeff’s conceptualization of visuality, as the aesthetic means through which dominant systems seek to present their legitimacy as self-evident, informs our examination of branding, architecture, and its visual reproduction, as discursive practices employed in the deployment of what we will designate as a capitalist visuality.
Local tradition and cosmopolitan modernity are identified as the two main con-cepts in the promotional strategy designed to enhance the city’s appeal, which representation relies to a large extent on architectural aesthetics, namely vernac-ular heritage, and international architectural icons. The chapter analyzes the re-currence of these concepts in branding, promotional imagery, and architectural management.
Manual de identidade. Representação hegemónica e dinâmicas de apropriação da marca 'Porto.'
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Ana Miriam Rebelo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Territorial brands seek to project idealized versions of the identities of the places they represent, presented as unifying and consensual. However, cities are made up of diverse and often antagonistic realities and visions. Taking the “Porto.” brand as a case study, we propose a counterpoint to a narrative that has become dominant, through the non-exhaustive mapping of typologies of appropriation of the brand's graphic identity. This exercise enables the recognition of local dynamics around the brand, revealing the coexistence of different perspectives on the city model it represents. Through this identification, we propose a reflection on the functions that are performed by the design of territorial brands, deliberately or contingently, when appropriated by different agents.
This article is part of the research project “Visual and semantic identities of the city of Porto: an ascertainment of the contributions of informal dwelling”, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the European Social Fund (ESF), under the grant PD/BD/150641/2020