![]() Globalisation accelerated the branding process. Photograph: Art Widak/Demotix/Corbis Photograph: Art Widak/Art Widak/Demotix/Corbis Kraków in Poland was named European Capital of Culture in 2000 – but the title does not always translate into growth. From Las Vegas to Seoul, city governments reshaped their convention and visitors’ bureaus into more professional, market-savvy organisations, revved up their advertising budgets and hired brand consultants to show them the ropes. The worldwide tourism industry was rapidly growing, and the concept of top-dog, “global” cities was gaining ground, fed by academic researchers on the one hand, and widely read “best city” lists on the other. By the 1990s, every city wanted to be like New York: to be seen, in other words, as clean, safe and “open for business”. The more abstract “I (Heart) New York” slogan was created in the 1970s, in conjunction with a family-friendly tourism campaign. In 1914 the poet Carl Sandburg called Chicago “hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat,” when the city’s stockyards and factories were the economic engine – and human cesspool – of the entire midwest. The slogan “New York, Empire City” reflected a time after the completion of the Erie Canal in the 1820s, when goods were shipped into New York’s port and then taken further west to Ohio by barge. They pursued the “three Ts”: trade, talent and tourists.īut the old images, devised when cities were actively making products rather than consuming them, were no longer attractive, or even accurate. Abandoned by local companies eager to merge with much larger corporations and outsourcing production to wherever they could pay low wages and taxes and avoid government regulation, city managers turned to self-promotion. ![]() They chased the mobile capital that was let loose by deregulation of financial markets and was concentrated in the sovereign funds of oil-rich states.Ĭities didn’t have much choice. During the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan promoting an era of pro-business exuberance, cities became more entrepreneurial, too. It was led by efforts in New York, which hit the limits of a diminishing tax base and vanishing bank loans in 1975 and was pushed to the brink of municipal bankruptcy. These are powerful city images.īut city branding as a discipline proper was born in the industrial decline and fiscal stress of the 1970s. ![]() Think of postcards made around 1900 of the engineering marvel of the Eiffel Tower, or the fantasy pavilions at Coney Island, and the famous photo of the Flatiron Building by Alfred Steiglitz. So how did this counterproductive exercise in collective egotism begin? Cities have long had visual “brands”: from tourist photos to scenes in a film, our mental postcards of a city become the DNA of its essence with endless repetition, this essence becomes a meme or a logo for the city’s brand. If the brand process begins with “a desire to be extraordinary”, as one place-branding agency suggests, then predictably, according to the so-called Lake Wobegon effect popularised by the US radio host Garrison Keillor – who satirises a town where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average" – then every city turns out to be “extraordinary”. But competition between cities accelerates the need for image-making so that no city can ever win.
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