Architecture and territorial marketing walk.

Promenade urbaine dans Rennes lors du 18thInternational Conference on Research inthe Distributive Trades of theEuropean Association for Education and Researchin Commercial Distribution.

The architecture of cities is often related to the stakes of a territorial marketing that seeks to instil new urban dynamics after the several processes of desindustrialization in the 1980s, especially in former industrial sites.

This approach of architecture involves a competitive logic between areas where buildings are no longer monuments to the glory of their sponsors but markers (or agents of the territorial trademark), recognizing signs of a territory which seeks to affirm its uniqueness and creativity by the means of necessarily spectacular and readable works.

Does Rennes, parliamentary and university town, illustrates this posture – now dominant in France – of a spectacular architecture that fuels a territorial marketing project ?