City planning, urban imaginary, and the branded space: Untangling the role of city plans in shaping Dallas's urban imaginaries

Drawing on notions of the symbolic economy and urban imaginary as an inherent dimension of the neoliberal public sphere, this paper examines historicized city plans and their visions, and develops a framework for understanding the role of city plans in shaping urban imaginaries and branded spaces. The paper claims that future city visions, fundamental to plan-making, help legitimize the power elites' growth agendas and ambitions to invest in both symbolic and material flagship place-making projects heavily bolstered and publicized by the media. The study examines this claim in the American context, selecting Dallas, Texas as a unique entrepreneurial city overly concerned with its public image characterized by a long-standing legacy of place promotion and plan-making. Using archival research and semi-structured interviews with key informants, this paper finds that city plans' visions, subservient to the civic elites' cultural tastes, have been instrumental in rallying public support to materialize place-making projects in accord with the city's larger preoccupation with “world-class” status showcased and widely promoted by media outlets. This study concludes by reflecting on the subtle yet tangible link between plan-making and urban imaginaries, an overt tendency of ever more commodified urban spaces, and the paradox it poses to city planning. • Urban imaginaries are embedded in textual narratives, conceptual symbols, and visual renditions. • Plan making and city plans are fundamental to legitimizing the power elites' pro-growth urban imaginaries. • Planners and architects, as urban imagineers, play a key role in mobilizing the public to approve of place-making projects. • Media heavily brands and disseminates elites' growth-oriented urban imaginaries in the public sphere. • Elites' imposing urban imaginaries are often at odds with more pressing urban imaginaries based on social justice.