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Sports, Music, Entertainment and the Destination Branding of Post-Fordist Detroit

Post-Fordist cities have increasingly converted former industrial areas into tourist entertainment districts. Events that can generate tourism income, spur the transformation of event cities into cities of culture, and help reinforce a city's brand have also been used to reinvent so-called post-industrial difficult areas. This downtown tourism and entertainment strategy has been utilized in Detroit, the best-known difficult area in the US. This paper examines the sports and music components of Detroit's plan to address economic and social challenges stemming from deindustrialization, disinvestment, and decentralization. To foster economic growth and improve the city's persistently poor image, Detroit has redeveloped its downtown into an entertainment district anchored by two sports stadia and focused on landing sports mega events. This development, which mirrors that undertaken by other cities, is part of its long-term strategy for dealing with blight and its image problems. Detroit also has belatedly focused on events celebrating its musical heritage. Specifically the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (DEMF), which centers on techno, an alternative musical form born in the city and intertwined with its post-industrial cultural identity, has been used in differentiating and branding Detroit. The DEMF attracts an international audience and can thus help promote an image of post-Fordist Detroit as creative and cosmopolitan, rather than economically and socially paralyzed. Finally, this paper examines how Detroit's newest destination branding strategy incorporates, both the traditional and alternative, in its focus on cars, culture, gaming, music and sports and sells post-Fordist Detroit as cool, cutting edge, and real.