Dear Critters,

 

I put a call out a couple of weeks ago for any information about alternative approaches to city marketing.  Many thanks to those who responded.  At the request of a couple here is a digest of the responses.

 

I am working with some second year Geography and Sociology students whose task is to think of original ways in which place promotion could be used to highlight or address the problems of a selected urban area.  Based on the responses of the list and some of my own I will be talking to them about the following:

 

·          The use of place promotion to highlight an area’s problems.  Hackney in 1983 produced a poster with the slogan “Hackney: Britain’s poorest borough”.  In eschewing the prevailing boosterism of cities like Glasgow they sought to attract public investment and development money through this campaign.  This is discussed by Stephen Ward in the book I edited with Phil Hubbard, The Entrepreneurial City (1998).

·          Anti-branding / alternative representations of place by pressure groups etc.  There are many examples of this such as the London Community Poster Campaign (discussed by Dunn and Leeson in Mapping the Futures (1993)) and the Art and Place poster campaign against Cardiff Bay in the 1990s.  Thanks also to Max Rousseau for pointing out Ole Jensen’s work in this area and the following from his Plenary paper for Regional Studies Association Conference ’Regional Growth Agendas’ (Aalborg, 28th to 31st May 2005):

 

"A Danish case of anti-branding is found in the example of Randers, a city in Jutland of 30.000 inhabitants that has been actively working with urban branding under the guise of an INTERREG project in the European Union.

Randers is not only dwarfed by its next-door neighbouring city Aarhus, which is the second largest city in Denmark. Randers has also struggled with a negative image for many years – known to many as ‘the city of violence’ (Smidt-Jensen 2004:5). Furthermore, the city has faced the same economic transition logics as other medium sized cities that are depending on industrial production.

Hence, the Municipality hired a company to brand the city, and the outcome is a very comprehensive strategy of logos, fairytales, design manuals, letter heads, and the usual lot of merchandise. In this context, the most interesting feature of the Randers case is that an alternative and very ironic logo was produced to counter the official branding logo. The latter was given the shape of a capital R (a ‘unical’ in technical terms) as the name of the city begins with R. The logo furthermore contained a number of symbols among other things the salmon of the Randers fjord. On the alternative logo, the fish is stripped of any flesh leaving the macabre silhouette of the raw fishbone. The alternative logo also contains a junkie’s needle, beer bottles, motorbikes and stinking dog dirt. According to the local news paper the anti-branding logo is meant as a protest against what is perceived as a socially exclusive branding process that paints a picture that cannot be recognized by the protesting citizens."

 

The interesting thing is that searching for more info about that anti-branding logo on the internet, I have discovered that it had apparently becomen the official logo of Randers Business & Development Council, which precisely aims at attracting new investments in the city!

Here is the official website link: http://www.reu.dk/english_summary/

 

·          Community generated images / ‘What *** means to me’.  Many thanks to David Atkinson for pointing out the project from Hull that attempted to explore notions of ‘Hullness’ and contribute to debates about local identity.  The link is: http://www.hullness.blogspot.com/

·          Look behind the image / confounding stereotypes.  Although not directly about cities I am going to talk to the students about the recent campaign from the National Portrait Gallery entitled ‘Take another look’.  This included an advert that ran in a number of national newspapers recently featuring a portrait of the footballer (and yet to be disgraced England captain) Rio Ferdinand above the caption ‘Ballet student’.  It went on to discuss the fact that he trained for many years as a ballet student at a leading London ballet school.  I think there might be potential for this type of approach to be applied to cities.  

 

In addition to these themes there are a number of references that I have come across or which have been pointed out to me which are either very critical of prevailing models of place promotion or which explore some potentially alternative approaches.  These include:

 

·          Doel, M. and Hubbard, P. (2002) ‘Taking world cities literally: marketing the city in a global space of flows', City, 6, (3): 351-368

·         Murray, C. (2001) Making Sense of Place: New Approaches to Place Marketing, Stroud: Comedia

·          Andy Pike’s work on Geographies of Branding in recent issues of Progress in Human Geography and Geography Compass

·          Work by Guy Julier (Leeds Met) as well as Miriam Greenberg's (2008) Branding New York.

·          Eleanor Pasotti’s book Political Branding in Cities:

 

Thanks once again to all who responded to this call.  If you are working in this area or are interested in it please feel free to get in touch.

 

Tim

 

 

Tim Hall

Department of Natural and Social Sciences

FCH

University of Gloucestershire

 

Sub Editor: Journal of Geography in Higher Education

www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cjgh