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This paper traces the recent transformations that have taken place in the city of Bologna to critically redefine the meaning and scope of the changes related to commerce and consumption, and including the city’s more general practices and promotional rhetoric. It will show how, starting from the increase in tourism and the strategic planning and policies to render the city more attractive, the city has undergone a reconfiguration through important regeneration processes linked to food. It will highlight the limited range of political and economic values which, through new ways of regulating public space and access to consumption, have redefined the socio-spatial fabric of certain areas of the city. The processes described will trace a path for deconstructing the reductively optimistic way in which Bologna is being portrayed, which ends up producing forms of displacement and exclusion.