The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America

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

Perhaps, then, we should return to our initial supposition: authenticity isn’t about a person’s or a thing’s origin; it is about how we feel. What if authenticity emerges out of a relationship between tourist and destination, audience and celebrity, or, generically, subject and object?

Instead of making things, Klein argued, corporations shifted resources to managing their brands. Your Nike shoes might have slightly better build quality than some discount brand, but the difference in price is dictated by the status of the brand itself, not the actual product.

Striking the right balance between bespoke authenticity and market compatibility is what I call “predictably unique.” Something is different enough that it can transport us, offering an existential experience or fulfilling a previously constructed expectation, but it is not so alien that it gets rejected outright as too intimidating or simply a bad