Housing narratives. Stories of distortion, promotion and originality linked to the marketing of heritage

Reading the neoliberal city is a complex operation. Volatility, fleetingness, and transience have shifted the object of production so much that some critics assert that the production of images and systems of signs, rather than of goods, has become the main vocation of capitalism. Now finance, more than governments, benefits from the promotion of urban imaginaries. The speed and spread of their use, shadows an increasing aggressiveness in the process of city making that selects and hides chosen parts of the reality through the use of spoken and visual narratives. Their accessibility imposes to go beyond their commercial significance, and to think about vision as «a social act, technically manipulable and historically variable, through which meanings, believed, identities, values are elaborated». The observation of the global real estate market and the dominant rhetoric that inform its language enables to reflect about who really produces place and for who.