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- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
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ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
Leonardo da Vinci, "Last Supper," Milan Malpensa Airport; Ryan "ARCY" Christenson, Elvis Mural, Tupelo, Mississippi (Many thanks to my good friend and fellow photographer Craig Deman for merging the two photos.)
We all live in place and under capitalism. So it is no surprise that the spatial and economic processes of daily life seem as natural as the air we breathe. Appearances can deceive, however. Far from being timeless and universal, the fusion of place and capitalism is a recent development and a sharp departure from the mainlines of human history. While anthropogenic place is as old as our species—300,000 years, according to the experts—and while it might be argued that all life forms have evolved some sense of place, capitalism did not come fully into its own until the industrial revolution kicked off 300 or so years ago. Today, place and capitalism are inseparable conditions of human life.
Framing Capitalism in Place aims to show how capitalism shapes the places in which we make our lives, and how these places, in turn, shape us. It tells this story through pictures, words and the theory of capital formulated by Karl Marx. The photo galleries and the reflections that accompany them are small windows looking out on a vast, ever-changing landscape produced by the contradictory unity of place and capitalism.
Allow me to anticipate three questions you might be asking yourself right now.
(1) "Am I the sort of person who will be interested in this website?"
Well, if you recognize yourself anywhere on the list below, chances are that you will feel right at home. If you don't, give it a try anyway. You never know what might catch your eye.
- Geographers, historians and students across the human sciences.
- Documentary and street photographers.
- Urbanists in general, urban planners in particular.
- Creative artists with a passion for visual story telling.
- Travelers of all sorts.
- What the French call flâneurs.
- Anyone curious about Marx and Marxism.
- Activists, especially those engaged in anti-capitalist struggle.
(2) "How should I navigate this website, given its off-beat mix of galleries, essays and reflections?"
My advice is that you begin with the two essays filed under the "Place" and "Capitalism" tabs. These present a Marxist framework for understanding the deeper processes at work in the locations I have visited, photographed and written about. Once you have familiarized yourself with the theory and concepts I am working with, dive into the photo galleries. Each photo has a caption indicating where it was taken and how it illuminates this or that aspect of the process of capitalist place formation. Some of the galleries are also accompanied by reflections that discuss these matters in greater depth.
I recognize that many will prefer a less structured, more smorgasbord approach—a gallery here, an essay there, perhaps a reflection if you have the appetite for it. Others will be happy to eat their fill of photos and leave the essays and reflections for someone else.
It's up to you. Framing Capitalism in Place is not a fixed menu.
(3) "What does this fellow Steffen mean by A Marxist Travel Guide?"
The answer is pretty straight-forward. Tourism today is a critical site of both capital accumulation and place formation, accounting for 10 percent of both global GDP and global employment. To understand the larger ramifications of this phenomenon I have grafted Marx's radical critique of capital onto the tourist's best friend, the travel guide. This website will take us to some of the world's most famous tourist destinations, such as Milan with its iconic mural of the Last Supper. But it will also make stops at less celebrated places that are off the beaten track of global tourism and closer to where I live, such as Tupelo, Mississippi, with its splashy mural of hometown legend Elvis Presley.
You might think that Milan and Tupelo have nothing in common. Think again. While it might seem sacrilegious to put Leonardo da Vinci in the same boat with graffiti artist ARCY, as I have done in the image above, their respective murals illustrate how powerful actors who dominate the place-making process use art and other cultural products to create a recognizable mystique, image or brand that, it is hoped, will rev up the tourist trade. If you believe the hype surrounding it, place branding is the open sesame to tourist spending, foreign direct investment, good jobs, high tech, quality of life and on and on. In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of consulting firms that offer their professional services to place-based "stakeholders" looking for a sure-fire brand, one calculated to catalyze local economic development and entice the "creative class" to hop on board. The agents, practices and strategies of place branding have become central not only to the operations of the global tourism industry but also to the dynamics of global capitalism more generally.
Of course, places have always squabbled over bragging rights when it comes to the unique qualities of their history, traditions, art, architecture and natural beauty—their cultural terroir, so to speak. But the restructuring of global capitalism since the 1980s and the attendant intensification of spatial competition at all scales have put nations, regions, cities and towns under enormous pressure to double-down on their brand. What this means is that cultural products are increasingly treated as spectacle commodities to be manufactured and marketed, bought and sold, in the hope of gaining an edge in the zero-sum game of inter-place competition.
The touristification and branding of place operate in the realm of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital." They subordinate history, tradition, memory, identity and meaning—the raw materials of culture—to the totalizing logic of capital accumulation, while at the same time enabling aspiring groups to challenge existing hierarchies and stake a claim to power and legitimacy. If place is defined as meaningful space and if meaning lies at the heart of culture, then what we are now witnessing as a result of global tourism is the commodification of place, meaning and culture on an unprecedented scale. Needless to say, the politics arising from all this makes place formation a highly contested arena.
Marx may not have known much about tourism, but he certainly knew capitalism inside and out. He will be our guide as we travel from place to place, observing how and why capitalism transforms the world around us.
I plan to continue my travels, so stay posted for a steady stream of new galleries and reflections. And don't be surprised if you discover that I like to tinker with the existing galleries, add new photos, delete old ones and rework the arguments set out in the reflections. Nothing here is set in stone.
Framing Capitalism in Place is a work in progress.