Out now!
The first book to explore how our cities gentrify by becoming social media influencers—and why it works.
Cities, like the people that live in them, are subject to the attention economy. In The City Authentic, author David A. Banks shows how cities are transforming themselves to appeal to modern desires for authentic urban living through the attention-grabbing tactics of social media influencers and reality-TV stars.
Blending insightful analysis with pop culture, this engaging study of New York State’s Capital Region is an accessible glimpse into the social phenomena that influence contemporary cities.
Read more about the book from the University of California Press including praise from Sharon Zukin, Paris Marx, and Nathan Jurgenson.
Interviews, Reviews, Mentions, & Write-ups
- David A. Banks, author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Modern America calls this type of space “predictably unique,” a reduction of local character and history into aesthetic. This can refer to everything from the same OBX-style bumper sticker for every small town to the uniformity of microbreweries. “The Burbs Have Eyes” by Jake Maynard
- A politics that overcomes the anarchic tyranny of capital, Banks contends, can only be forged out of solidarity, overcoming geographic divisions and uniting the office worker and factory worker, black and white, man and woman. Disrupting capital’s game of pitting one city against another requires replacing the rule of the grasstops with that of the grassroots—mass democracy. “Insta Towns” Review in Commonweal by Julian Assele
- It is a book written by a real and quite likable human, one who is so versed in and concerned about these hard-to-pin-down cultural and economic problems that they are willing to throw every possible writerly approach at them. At several points, Banks even fully pivots out of essay mode, writing fictional vignettes that help the reader truly feel and envision the potential futures––good and bad––of cities. His love of fiction is quite apparent in his relevant, humorous analysis of any number of cultural touchstones, from David Byrne’s cult film True Stories and the more widely known Beetlejuice, the latter of which prompts the funniest line in the book, one I refuse to spoil via context: “We are in the Deetzes’ home.” “Exposed Bricks” Review in The New Inquiry by Patrick McGinty (The finalist for the 2024 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing)
- “Welcome to Generic Town, USA” Essay in Insider
- “Cities are branding themselves into predictably unique products” Opinion piece in DeZeen
- Excerpt in Dwell Magazine
- Trillbillies (Premium episode)
- TrueAnon (Ep. 248) (Ep. 287)
- TRASHFUTURE (Preview ep, subscribe for the whole thing.)
- This Machine Kills
- The Antifada
- Nostalgia Trap
- Tech Won’t Save Us
- Chasing Leviathan Podcast
- Julie Mason Mornings – Sirius XM Radio
- “How smaller cities are changing to attract new residents” Wisconsin Public Radio
- The Conversation
- New Books Network
- The Creative Process
- UC Press Blog
- UAlbany Q & A
- “Predictably unique” is how David A. Banks defines authenticity in his book, The City Authentic. Authenticity, or what’s “predictably unique,” describes how culture, place, and style are packaged to become recognizable—and, therefore, consumable—to a general audience. And while Banks’s interest is in the politics of urban planning, his analysis spoke to a question I’ve pondered for almost as long as I’ve been a Very Online Person: why does authenticity often feel so fake? Tara McMullin on her Substack, What Works
- Huffington Post article on Fetterman’s mayoral legacy: “These small towns’ only competitive advantage that can’t be outsourced is fundamentally their own history and identity,” said Banks, author of the forthcoming book “The City Authentic,” which examines how cities commodify their history to woo young professionals.
David A. Banks 