Making Milwaukee Famous: Cultural Capital, Urban Image, and the Politics of Place

Culture has come to perform a pivotal role in the selling of places, as competition among cities resulting from economic restructuring has heightened the significance of a city's image. Using the case of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this paper explores the relationship between a city's image and a complex reality by examining the manipulation of local cultural resources to promote dominant interests. This city's experience also demonstrates the extent to which a politics of resistance can be espoused on the basis of contested local representations of different class and racial experiences.