“A Place in This World”: Critical Placemaking and Identity Formation at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour

This paper explores Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour as a site of critical placemaking and identity formation within the geographies of global popular culture. We argue that the tour’s spatial and cultural practices such as citywide rebranding, ephemeral place naming, and fan-generated atmospheres, produced a transnational landscape of belonging rooted in affect, mobility, and consumption. Through discourse analysis and ethnographic participation, we trace how these practices reconfigured urban identities while revealing the uneven power relations embedded in celebrity-driven placemaking. While celebrated as inclusive and empowering, the Eras Tour circulated a feminized cultural geography grounded in White, cisgender girlhood and womanhood, raising questions about who is centered in narratives of empowerment and joy. By situating the tour within feminist and cultural geographic frameworks, we illustrate how urban celebration and fan participation can both contest and reproduce dominant hierarchies. Ultimately, the Eras Tour demonstrates how global spectacles function as complex spatial formations where pleasure, identification, and commodification converge, illuminating the gendered politics of place in an era of mediated cultural belonging.