“MILANO, A PLACE TO BE” Expo 2015 and the chronotopic rebranding of Italy’s moral capital

This chapter focuses on the slogan “Milano, the place to be” to explore the semiotic processes and the political dynamics mobilized by the recent rebranding of the city of Milan. A component of place branding that is often glossed over, slogan-formation draws on and transforms fragments of (on and offline) conversation by enacting shifts in footing, uptake, and reported speech frames. Based on the iterability of discourse, city slogans rely in part on the spontaneous semiotic labor of language users, whose utterances are extracted, rephrased, and re-contextualized for promotional purposes by marketing strategists. Pivoting on transformations in the voicing structures of the original utterances, these processes undergo complex uptakes and re-contextualizations, often resulting in controversial outcomes. My analysis is aimed at making three major points. First, to understand the political and social frictions engendered by place branding processes, we need to look both at the voicing structures implied in the slogans and at the forms of uptake these slogans invite. Second, place branding is an exquisitely scalar process. The rebranding of the city of Milan, thus, cannot be seen as isolated from wider-scale efforts to define a distinctive nation brand for Italy. More specifically, the rebranding of Milan should be analyzed as part of the political competition between conservative and progressive nation branding projects currently unfolding in Italy. Third, place branding puts in question and brings into friction a number of conceptual oppositions that underlie both common sense and scholarly literature. Namely, the opposition between things and words, commodities and non-commodities, producers and consumers, politics and marketing, the external audience of potential customers (i.e., tourists and city users) and the inner public of citizens. My analysis is aimed at engaging these frictions both at the conceptual and at the ethnographic level, showing how the controversies triggered by the rebranding of Milan are partially due to the tensions between these binary oppositions.