The research, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, was conducted by Sara Bonati of the University of Genoa, Monia Del Pinto of Loughborough University, and Giuseppe Forino of the University of Salford. The team combined place branding theory with critical disaster studies to examine how the projects of internationally celebrated architects, so-called starchitects, have been deployed in Italian disaster zones over the past fifteen years. Their central claim is provocative: starchitecture in the aftermath of catastrophe operates less as reconstruction than as communication, and that communication serves powerful political and economic interests.

The authors build on the concept of “branding disaster” introduced by consumer researchers Humphreys and Thompson, who described how private companies use market communication to restore trust after industrial accidents. Bonati and colleagues expand the idea from corporate reputation to whole territories, arguing that in Italy the practice has become a recurring, structural feature of the reconstruction system, serving both private donors and public institutions. When a local administration recruits a Pritzker Prize winner in the weeks following an earthquake, the study suggests, it is not simply commissioning a building. It is purchasing a seal of guarantee, a globally recognized brand mark stamped onto a recovery process that may be slow, contested, or underfunded.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers applied critical discourse analysis, a method rooted in linguistics that treats texts as exercises of power and influence. Rather than studying the buildings themselves, they analyzed the official project descriptions published on starchitects’ firm websites, documents that typically serve as the source text for all subsequent press releases. Using a framework derived from place branding and critical disaster theory, the team identified recurring macro-codes and sub-codes in the language, then examined how meanings were stratified and conveyed. The cases included an auditorium in L’Aquila after the 2009 earthquake, a “Taste Hub” in post-earthquake Amatrice, a civil protection center in Norcia, the replacement for the collapsed Morandi Bridge in Genoa, and even Renzo Piano’s flower-shaped vaccination pavilions designed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Across all of the cases, certain keywords surfaced with striking regularity: rebirth, identity, authenticity, effectiveness, and safety. The language of recovery was ubiquitous. Projects were framed as urgent necessities, “accelerators” of reconstruction or spaces in which a wounded place could “start the healing process.” In Amatrice, famous as the birthplace of the Amatriciana pasta dish, the new food hub was justified as a way of letting the town be “born again” through the continuity of its economy and cuisine, with food tourism positioned as the real beneficiary. In Genoa, the new bridge was presented as the “driving force” behind the transformation of a “fragile ecosystem,” reasserting the city’s identity as a commercial harbor first and a community of grieving residents second.

The researchers show how authenticity itself becomes a commodity in these narratives. Local traditions, whether musical heritage or gastronomy, are distilled into marketable symbols, a process the authors describe as the manipulation of culture. Place branding literature has long noted that such selective storytelling removes the aspects of a place that are not appealing to the market and silences the voices that do not support the dominant narrative. In the post-disaster context, this means that systemic drivers of risk, such as depopulation, unemployment, and decades of unaddressed vulnerability, are carefully edited out of the story, replaced by romanticized images of local excellence that reassure outsiders and tourists alike.

Participation, when it appears in the project descriptions, also comes under scrutiny. The auditorium in L’Aquila included an educational laboratory for engineering and architecture students, yet only twenty-two students took part, a small fraction of the local student population. In Amatrice, the planning consultation involved restaurant owners, a niche of the community with direct market interests, even as the building was presented as being “aimed at the common good.” These limited participatory gestures, the study argues, function as branding devices that manufacture consensus rather than genuinely distribute decision-making power, creating what the researchers call shadow spaces in which marginalized residents and dissenting voices are excluded from the transformed place.

Perhaps the sharpest critique concerns the themes of speed, effectiveness, and safety. Project descriptions emphasized completion times with an almost competitive tone: “only 12 weeks” for the Amatrice food hub, “just over three months” for the Norcia civil protection center, and record-speed delivery for the Genoa bridge, explicitly offered as “a model” for future projects. Safety was dramatized through materials and structure, with timber celebrated for its elasticity, lightness, and anti-seismic properties, and reinforced concrete invoked for the bridge as a promise of robustness. The authors note that such claims of effectiveness are a classic instrument governments use to demonstrate competence during crises, and that in the Italian cases they amplified and consolidated the official message of an efficient reconstruction machine, even where residents complained bitterly about delays and unmet needs.

The historical sweep of the study gives the argument additional weight. The authors trace a lineage from the Renaissance master builders through the celebrification of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright to the global starchitect boom of the 1980s and 1990s, when a handful of internationally consecrated designers began operating on a global circuit, driving capital and, in the authors’ words, serving as a product of neoliberal culture. Iconic buildings became urban totems of the “Bilbao Effect,” deployed by policymakers for consensus-building and media exposure. Post-disaster contexts, from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to the tsunami-stricken Tohoku region of Japan, have increasingly attracted such figures, sometimes for genuinely humanitarian work like Shigeru Ban’s paper architecture, but also for scenic one-off interventions that become symbols of recovery while remaining marginal to the actual rebuilding.

Italy offers a particularly revealing laboratory. The study contrasts earlier episodes, such as the deliberate invitation of artists and architects to the new town of Gibellina after the 1968 Belice earthquake, a collective civic experiment that nonetheless failed to bridge the divide between residents and their new surroundings, with the Foligno church won by Massimiliano Fuksas after the 1997 Umbria quake, a standalone “sacred box” whose international aesthetic marked a shift toward individuality and symbolic abstraction. Since the 2000s, the authors argue, Italian reconstruction has progressively opened to punctual interventions of authorial architecture, with signature designs acting as devices for strategic place resignification, the hallmark of branding.

The consequences of disaster branding, the researchers warn, extend well beyond aesthetics. Because architecture exercises a form of soft power, reassuring and aesthetically compelling narratives can make the alteration of place identity acceptable even when it does not reflect the will of local communities, potentially facilitating dispossession and gentrification. In Amatrice, the branding of rebirth coexisted with public claims against a reconstruction that dragged on for years. The symbolic restoration of the pre-disaster status quo through a single landmark, an ideal long criticized in disaster research, risks trivializing a complex, contested process by reducing it to one photogenic building.

The study does not call for the exclusion of famous architects from disaster zones, but it does insist that their dual influence, physical and communicative, be critically assessed. Unpacking who benefits from disaster branding, the authors conclude, is essential to understanding the networks of power and consensus-building that shape post-disaster recovery. As climate change intensifies hazards worldwide, and as recovery increasingly offers a clean slate for neoliberal speculation, the spectacle of the starchitect’s ribbon-cutting deserves more skeptical attention. A building may symbolize rebirth, the researchers suggest, but the question worth asking is whose rebirth it actually serves.