The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America

These protections increase or sustain both direct and indirect monopoly rents by throwing up barriers to dilution.

Authenticity somehow implies both fragility and eternity—something that has lasted a long time but may be endangered by modern forces. The authenticity of a place and its people are deeply intertwined not only because people make up the culture of a place but because the very notion of authenticity is predicated on the choices we make as free indiv

Under modernity, each person must be a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: completely unique but predictably so—a piece that is different from all those around it but still able to fit into a larger picture. We have more artifacts, both material and digital, than ever with which to enact our identities, yet we can never seem capable of staying unique for lon

Both the intellectual history of authenticity and the recent scholarship on how authenticity behaves in media and tourism settings are indicative of an irredeemable system of striving and false hope.

Dilution of authenticity through the commodification of a place’s culture is just one of the many problems with making money through authenticity peddling.

This shift from origins to style means that authenticity itself “becomes a tool of power.”

Sure, profits can be made in healthy economies, but the biggest returns can be found where investors buy low and sell high: whether it’s decades of disinvestment or an acute disaster, the biggest profits are to be found amid rubble and ruin, not milk and honey.

Turning culture and history into money is the jurisdiction of cultural planning. Outside the profession, few people have heard of it. Perhaps that is because people find it off-putting to think that something as creative and intimate as “culture” could, in any way, be planned. It feels like a rude oxymoron. And yet the City Authentic, ironically, o

Unlike direct monopoly rent, the buying, selling, and leasing may not change who owns the land itself; you’re trading on proximity or some other relationship. Every time you buy a souvenir on vacation, you’re trading on indirect monopoly rent.

To truly read as “authentic” according to internet studies scholar Crystal Abidin, influencers have to “actively juxtapose this stripped-down version of themselves against the median and normative self-presentations of glamour, to continually create and assign value to new markers—faults and flaws, failures and fiascos—to affirm the veracity of the