The image of the creative city, eight years later: Turin, urban branding and the economic crisis taboo

•Urban branding overlaps with complex and controversial politics of representation.•Turin is mobilised as a key study for exploring branding in times of economic crisis.•Turin experienced massive urban branding up to the 2006 Winter Olympic Games.•The city of Turin is now experiencing social and economic depression.•In Turin, with the crisis, internal and external branding images tend to diverge.

The article looks at the evolution of urban branding in the city of Turin, Italy, over a period of about ten years. As reported in a previous article published in Cities, at the end of the nineties the city of Turin started investing heavily in creative and cultural branding strategies, in order to modify its former image of an industrial one-company town. This article looks at the same city eight years later: both Turin and the general socio-economic situation have changed, primarily because of the ongoing economic crisis. As a result, other discourses are emerging in the field of urban branding, with a meaningful divide between the ‘internal’ dimension of branding (messages directed to inhabitants and city users) and its ‘external’ dimension. Specifically, the article considers the role and heritage of ‘old’ discourses on culture and creativity and the diffusion of new branding messages related to food and to the imagery of the ‘smart city’.