Who’s afraid of Niketown?

Nike-Urbanism, Branding and the City of Tomorrow

Friedrich von Borries



A book about Nike’s urban marketing strategies and how they alter the city.

Who’s afraid of Niketown? illustrates the way Nike is transforming urban space into a new brand city. In his persuasive analyses, Friedrich von Borries is able to demonstrate this process with astonishing concreteness. He proceeds not just analytically, but also undertakes speculative excursions into the future. Precisely this approach endows his detailed investigations of contemporary marketing strategies with their forcefulness.

By looking at Nike’s strategies of urban interventions, this publication investigates the role that branding and marketing strategies will have on the city of the future as well as the responsibilities architects will have in the future. Nike, who has always embodied the avant-garde of marketing, has developed new marketing strategies during the last years, which focus on the temporary transformation of urban space into brand-specific sites of experience and seek to exploit local sub-cultures.

Niketown is not only the name of 19 Flagship Stores located in different cities around the world but it is also a synonym for a new kind of urbanism. This 'Nike-urbanism' encompasses the temporary occupation of urban space and signals Nike’s protest against the functionalized city of modernity and, in addition, it constitutes an alternative plan for today’ cities. According to the brand-strategic objective Niketown is a new kind of city: free, daring and eventful.

ISBN 978-90-5973-014-4
language: English
paperback | 104 pp | 18.5 x 15

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