Neighborhood Branding and Residents’ Engagement: Evidences from NoLo - in Milan - to TomTom - in Istanbul.

City branding and place marketing strategies have become key factors in generating cultural and economic development worldwide as practical tools to create attractive urban images in cities. Cities have been increasing their effort to attract creative people, creative industries, investors, inhabitants, tourists, daily users, and consumers. Creating and establishing a city brand on the global creativity map requires combining arts, culture, technology, and entertainment. Therefore, cultural events, festivals, landmark buildings, and social life have critical roles in this branding process. Many authors have underlined the significant risk of city branding, stressing the phenomenon of gentrification related to the housing market, the expulsion of the most vulnerable residents from the city, and the negative effect of over-tourism. However, a recent tendency is a shift from city to neighborhood branding that, operating at the local level, tends to reproduce and redefine the macrodynamics on a smaller scale. This paper will explore the creation of a neighborhood brand in two areas; the NoLo district in Milan and the Tomtom district in Istanbul. Both are more than a neighborhood with their cultural events, art galleries, designers, and social networks, and they are in the process of rapid growth and transformation. They are located in the city center and close to the urban megaproject areas. Within five years, the whole NoLo district has been affected by a massive change, led by a cohesive and young group of residents who decided to invest energies in reinventing this area. On the other hand, the creative cluster at Tomtom started as a real estate investment firm's effort to revitalize the neighborhood to create a new cultural center in Istanbul. These events created momentum in bringing together different neighborhood actors and constructing a neighborhood branding process. The paper aims to investigate how the leap in scale from city branding to neighborhood branding translates into the inhabitants' real life and the place's regeneration process. Furthermore, the research aims to understand whether the presence of an efficient and consolidated structure of bottom-up activism is sufficient, in itself, to avoid the risk of gentrification that often occurs in some city branding processes, not sufficiently integrated into the local neighborhood dimension.