THE PRODUCTION OF TIME, SPACE AND PLACE
When Marx and Harvey refer to capital as a mode of production, they mean much more than the making of shoes and shirts, as important as such commodities are for the reproduction of everyday life. What they want to suggest is that in the very act of producing shoes and shirts, capital also produces the enabling conditions of its own reproduction on an ever-expanding scale, or what Nancy Fraser in Cannibal Capitalism calls "the background conditions of possibility." A good case in point is the capitalist production of time, space and place.
Even though Marx recognizes the interwoven nature of this socially constructed tryptic, he does not accord the three parts of the whole equal treatment. Rather, he enthrones time as a central organizing principle of the capitalist mode of production, leaving a consideration of space and place for later a generation of Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, who theorize them in their analyses of imperialism. In more recent times, the French Marxist intellectual Henri Lefebvre and geographer David Harvey had been at the forefront in bringing space and place into a better balance with time.
Time is imprinted on every page Capital and on every one of its foundational concepts, Marx's telltale fingerprint. Start with value. This is the socially necessary labor time that goes into the production of a given commodity. Time likewise lies at the core of surplus value, which is the labor time appropriated by capitalists in production above and beyond the labor time necessary to cover the value of their workers' labor power. Relative surplus value continues the pattern, resulting as it does from the adoption of labor-saving technology that drive down the value, or socially necessary labor time, congealed in wage goods.
Finally, we come to the conjoined concepts of wealth and freedom, which in Marx's early writings, and even in Capital and the Grundrisse, are like the sun that occasionally peaks out from a dark and forbidding sky. We learn that wealth is not a big bank account, a vacation home in Tuscany or however many billions of dollars Elon Musk has socked away for the colonization of Mars. For Marx wealth as opposed to capital is measured in terms of use value rather exchange value, of concrete labor rather than abstract labor. The spectacular development of the productive forces under capital makes it possible to imagine a post-capitalist society of freely associated workers who produce and distribute wealth, not capital, on the basis of social needs, a society liberated from the tyranny of the clock, a society in which individuals have the freedom conferred by free time to develop their creative powers and capacities,
I have before me an article that appeared in the August 24, 2024, edition of the New York Times. Written by the bureau chief responsible for the South America beat, it is an interview with the 89-year-old José "Pepe" Mujica, who was a Marxist guerilla in his youth and a political prisoner for fourteen years before his election as president of Uruguay in 2009. "My doctors say it went well, but I'm broken," Mujica tells the reporter, referring to his recent radiation treatment for esophageal cancer. These words are spoken in a simple farm house outside of Montevideo, which he shares with his long-time comrade and wife Lucía Topolansky. This is the place where they insisted on living during the years when Mujica was president, and where they have lived ever since. No official palace for them. In the fields surrounding their house, Mujica and Topolansky raise chrysanthemums for a living.
"You’re free when you escape the law of necessity—when you spend the time of your life on what you desire. If your needs multiply, you spend your life covering those needs," says Mujica from the simple place which he and Topolansky have filled with lived experience and radical meaning.
Where did the "philosopher president," the unofficial title conferred on Mujica by the press, get his ideas about time, law, necessity, desire and freedom? He doesn't say and the reporter doesn't bother to ask. But it's no mystery: these ideas come from Marx, who writes in the third volume of Capital: "In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production."
It's a shame that the interviewer did not see fit to follow up on the Marxist roots of Mujica's philosophy. A shame but no surprise. The Times has always looked askance at Latin American leaders tainted by Marxism. I suspect that Mujica, who now finds himself at death's door, would have jumped at the chance to acknowledge his intellectual debt to the author of Capital.
Almost a year has passed since I wrote the preceding paragraphs about Mujica. In this morning's paper, the Times reports that he died on May 13, 2025, at the age of eighty-nine. The same bureau chief who interviewed him earlier sums up Mujica's life this way: "But as news of his death spread on Tuesday people across the world remembered him not for his policies. It was his humility that was his legacy." There is no mention of Mujica's Marxism or how it might have influenced his decision to privilege creative time over consumers needs, and to live what many regarded as a "humble" life. Drained of any philosophical content, the philosopher president's life and legacy are effectively reduced by the newspaper of record to a lifestyle choice, rather ironic in light of Mujica's indictment of lifestyle consumerism.
Out of respect for both Mujica and his legacy, let's go where the Times did not, and dig deeper into Marx's conception of time in relation to space and place.
Picking up where we left off in the last section, the competitive drive for relative surplus value leads to technological innovations that cut inputs of labor time in the sphere of production. But it would be a mistake to assume that the impulse to economize on time is confined to this sphere alone. The same impulse is at work driving the hunt for time-saving efficiencies in the spheres of realization and circulation, as Harvey seeks to demonstrate by unpacking Marx's concept of "turnover time."
This concept is the cable holding together the three-tower suspension bridge of time, space and place.
Turnover time is how long it takes industrial capitalists to (1) buy labor power and means of production; (2) combine them in a production process from which will emerge a new commodity; (3) get this new commodity to market; (4) sell it at a profit; (5) use part of the profit to settle accounts with the tax collector, banker and landlord; (6) use another part to buy goods for personal consumption; and (7) reinvest what's left of the profit in labor power and means of production so that the accumulation process can start over again on an expanded basis.
Those industrial capitalists who get from (1) to (7) in the least amount of time enjoy a significant advantage over their competition. They are able to throw money into circulation again and again while the rest of the competition waits impatiently for their profits to materialize. In a given period of time, these efficient capitalists will earn a mass of profit greater than the social average, a portion of which will be reinvested in improved technologies that increase labor productivity, reduce the value of labor power and produce more relative surplus value.
Conversely, any interruption or delay in the movement of value through the industrial circuit will put individual capitalists at a competitive disadvantage. Sluggish turnover times will translate into a loss in market share at the very least and economic ruin in the worst-case scenario. At the level of capital in general, a system-wide slowdown in turnover time will trigger a powerful response, ranging from localized, short-lived devaluations to a general crisis of overaccumulation.
In sum, value races against the clock as it travels through the circuit sketched out in Diagram 1. Individual capitalists are like sprint cyclists fighting for position on the final lap of a velodrome track, trying to be the first to cross the finish line.
Do you remember our stereoscope analogy from the "Place" essay? Let's try applying it to Diagram 1. Up to this point we have been viewing it with one eye shut, through the lens of time only. Now let's open both eyes, so that we can see Diagram 1 through not only the lens of time but also that of space. We know that the three red rectangles of production, realization and distribution represent the moments in time when value changes form. But that's not all they represent: these same rectangles also mark the places in space where value changes hands.
From this insight into the convergence of time, space and place Harvey is able to construct a Marxist theoretical framework in which time is more than an arrow that arcs through space, space is more than an empty container through which the arrow flies and place is more than a set of coordinates on a map pinpointing the arrow's path. Time, space and place do not exist as fixed, universal principles independent of their social and historical context; they are produced by capital as it reproduces itself on an ever-larger scale.
"The ability to overcome space," Harvey writes, "is predicated on the production of space." If value is to circulate smoothly, some part of it must be fixed in the double sense of being immobilized over a long period of time and being anchored to a particular place. The see-saw relationship between fixity and motion is what gives the dynamics of capitalist place formation its volatile and uneven character.
At the most basic level, the production of space entails the construction of transportation and communications infrastructures that aim at nothing less than "the annihilation of space by time," to quote Marx. What is more, it involves the accretion of larger built environments that grow up layer upon layer around these infrastructures, like the coral reefs that are perishing before our eyes as a result of global warming and ocean acidification. Capital produces space in the form of interlocking built environments that are necessary not only for the reduction of turnover time but also for commodity production in general and the social reproduction of local populations whose labor keeps value in motion.
For Harvey the city is crowning proof of capital's capacity to overcome spatial barriers by producing geographical configurations favorable to accumulation and circulation. In 2007 it was announced that for the first time in human history a majority of the planet's population lives in urban areas. The city as a spatial form and urbanization as a spatial process have never been so central to capital accumulation as they are today. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that urbanization and accumulation form a unity, albeit one riddled with contradictions.
In short, the production of space and place under contemporary capitalism boils down to the production of urban built environments. The countless physical structures that make up these environments are commodities possessing a use value, exchange value and value. Taken together, they form what Harvey calls "a geographically ordered, complex, composite commodity." This commodity of commodities is created by capital, not out of thin air but from materials at hand. And it is created not to last forever but only until the time comes to destroy it, in whole or in part, and replace it with a new built environment more in line with capital's needs.
The production of time, space and place cannot escape the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital. Let's now turn to Diagram 2 above, another of Harvey's schematic represents of value in motion. Here, he disaggregates the circulation process into primary, secondary and tertiary circuits of capital. The primary circuit is where value and surplus value are produced, and where commodities are consumed as either means of production or wage goods. The secondary circuit encompasses the built environment of production and consumption. The tertiary circuit, about which Harvey has relatively little to say, consists of social infrastructures and investment related to state expenditures on research, development and social programs more generally.
As we noted in the last section, pressures of overaccumulation have a tendency to build up in the primary circuit, driving down the rate of profit and threatening the mass of profit. If corrective measures are not undertaken to deal with this situation, nothing short of a system-wide devaluation in the form of a crisis will be able to eliminate the surplus capital and restore conditions of accumulation.
Investment in the secondary circuit of capital of the built environment provides a temporary solution or "fix" to the surplus capital absorption problem. In Diagram 2, Harvey subdivides this circuit into two broad categories, fixed capital and the consumption fund. Those elements of the built environment which enable the production of value are assigned to fixed capital, while those others contributing to the consumption of value belong to the consumption fund. Factories are an example the first, housing of the second. But every element of the built environment is defined by its use, so that boarded-up factories that have been repurposed as hipster condominiums move from fixed capital to the consumption fund, while tenement apartments that have been converted into sweatshops move in the opposite direction. Streets are dual products, defined as fixed capital when they are being used by trucks to move goods in and out of production and storage facilities, and as part of the consumption fund when they are being used by motorists or pedestrians on their way to and from the shopping mall.
The spatial-temporal fix aims to manage overaccumulation pressures by "switching" surplus capital from the primary circuit to the secondary circuit. Capital that has languished for lack of profitable investment outlets in the primary circuit is now channeled into major urban development and infrastructural projects in the secondary circuit, ranging from high-speed rail to suburban housing tracts and downtown festival markets. These large-scale, taxpayer-subsidized undertakings are made possible by long-term loans with amortization periods of 20 or 30 years. The complicated logistical and technical challenges of such development projects are managed by a nexus of state and financial intermediaries which are substantially shielded from public scrutiny and form a hybrid public-private state within a state.
In addition to the anti-democratic governance structures through which they operate, spatial-temporal fixes are fertile soil for all manner of speculative behavior. This is due to the long-term nature of investments that are inherently risky and whose success or failure will not be known until long after the original investors are gone. Moral hazard is hardwired into the day-to-day operations of spatial-temporal fixes overseen by the state-finance nexus.
Unsurprisingly, spatial-temporal fixes have been a breeding ground for the some of the most insane excesses of casino capitalism in recent memory. What is more, they have put urban development priorities on the auction block, so that that mammoth projects productive of neither surplus value nor human well-being receive the green light from state-finance nexuses eager to please the major "community stakeholders" (read finance capital and real estate interests). Harvey characterizes the big-city trophy projects of the neoliberal era as "mindless urbanization," since their sole function is to serve as a sink for surplus capital.
What is the big take-away from this discussion that began with the background conditions of capital's possibility? Just this: capital produces time, space and place in its own image. But there is no magical configuration of these three elements that can solve capital's internal contradictions and crisis tendencies once and for all, only temporary fixes that power uneven spatial development and subject place formation to periodic gales of creative destruction.
To the degree that the production of time, space and place has been hijacked by such displacement mechanisms as the spatial-temporal fix, cities will continue to serve as sponges for overaccumulated capital, playgrounds for gentrifiers and incubators of speculative finance, while the vicious circle of displacement, housing insecurity, homelessness. and social and spatial inequality goes round and round with no end in sight. Welcome to urbanization in the time of neoliberalism.
TOURISM AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF PLACE, SPACE AND CULTURE
I am going to conclude by returning to place, where our journey began in the last essay. And I will do so by way of tourism, which seems fitting for someone who calls himself a "Marxist tourist."
Tourism is a major driver of capital accumulation and place formation today. Not only does it account for roughly 10 percent of global GDP and employment, its rate of growth is projected to continue outpacing that of the world economy for the foreseeable future. Tourism, travel and related sectors now constitute what Marxist political economist and tourist authority Raoul Bianchi labels the "tourist-real estate regime of accumulation." This regime of accumulation operates not only in tourist hot spots like Barcelona, Venice and Amsterdam, where grass-roots, anti-tourism movements are gaining traction, but also throughout the Global South, where cultural tourism, ecotourism and related niche products are plugging into the spiderwebs of platform capitalism. While the word tourism does not appear in either of Harvey's diagrams which map out the complicated pathways of capital accumulation and circulation, don't be fooled: the spatial dynamics of value in motion represented there are the indispensable framework for understanding the touristification of capital.
The spectacular rise of mass tourism has not escaped the notice of academics. Tourism scholarship has emerged as a booming disciplinary field in its own right, decked out with all the professional accoutrement of peer-refereed journals, annual conferences and research institutes. The institutional origins of this field go back to business schools, where tourism was branded as "hospitality" and bolted onto existing undergraduate and MBA programs. Steeped in their chamber-of-commerce view of the world, the academic doyens of the free market see in tourism an all-purpose vehicle for delivering economic development, shoring up shaky tax bases and creating career opportunities for newly credentialed graduates of their programs. In recent years, less celebratory perspectives coming out of geography, sociology and anthropology have mobilized under the banner of "critical tourism studies." Focused primarily on matters of cultural representation and identity formation, and sprinkled with liberal calls for a reconfiguration of the hospitality-industrial complex along more ethical lines, critical tourism studies marks a big improvement over the business-school approach. Even so, it fails to pay sufficient attention to the political-economic constraints within which mass tourism operates today.
Marxists challenge both the conservative managerial framework and the multidisciplinary cultural framework, contending that mass tourism should be viewed as a critical site of capital accumulation, in which the commodification of place and culture is proceeding at a record pace. Let's begin by stepping back and asking the most general question implicit in Marx's value theory: what what must happen to an external object or intangible service before it can become a full-fledged capitalist commodity? Fortunately, geographers Noel Castree, Martin Young and Francis Markham have provided us with a list of six prerequisites:
How do these criteria apply to the commodification of tourist places?
I define a tourist as anyone who uses the tourism industry to travel, irrespective of the reasons for travel, the distances traveled or the time spent traveling. A person becomes a tourist the moment she makes her first travel-related purchase and remains so until she returns home from her trip. Tourist dollars and euros flow into global circuits of capital by way of what Raoul Bianchi, a Marxist political economist, calls the "tourism-real estate regime of accumulation." Overseeing this regime of accumulation are interlocking networks of "real estate states," to borrow a useful term from urban planner Samuel Stein. The number-one priority of real estate states is pumping up property values by any means necessary. Through their spending tourists provide real estate states with the resources and incentives to pursue the highly regressive growth strategies which have become the hallmark of global capitalism in an era of fierce interplace competition.
Central to the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation and the real estate states which oversee it is place branding. This is a strategy that seeks to attract tourists and investment to a given place, be it a neighborhood, town, city region or nation, by associating it with an appealing identity or image. Place branding works by turning cultural products into commodities that can be attached to a given place. The techniques of place branding combine elements of professional stagecraft, performance art, group psychology, mass marketing, real estate hype and magical thinking.
Place branding is also an arena of political contestation. While growth machines dominated by real estate interests exercise disproportionate power in determining the outcome of these contests, they cannot unilaterally impose a brand on a place without making concessions, symbolic or otherwise, to NGOs claiming to speak on behalf of local residents. Every place brand is the end result of intense negotiations among "stakeholders," as the privileged constituencies of the real estate state are called.
Tourist destinations afford an ideal vantage point from which to observe how place branding works on the ground, since every stop on the tourists' itinerary is a staged performance of "authentic" local culture, a spectacle commodity produced for the benefit of the tourism and real estate markets.
Place branding, travel and tourism form an interlocking economic whole in relation to the capitalist production of place and space. In recent years, the first of these has become a lucrative business for professional consultants who offer their services to place-based clients all over the world. Actors in the place-branding line of work speak a language imported from the world of business management, a language that reflects the contradictions intrinsic to place branding as a political-economic project.
In pitches made to potential clients, place is imagined as an efficiently run corporation adhering to best business practices. The people living in a place are viewed not as antagonistic classes engaged in a war of position, nor as citizens with the right to participate in governance, nor as members of a broader public motivated by multiple and sometimes conflicting identities. They are viewed as stakeholders whose lives are impacted by decisions made about the place where they live, and whose interests are best represented by nonprofits and NGOs with close ties to real estate states.
The business and discourse of place branding have also burrowed into the academy. Universities, business schools, marketing programs and economics departments promote place branding not only through their research and teaching functions but also through their economic partnerships with local real estate interests and governing regimes at the local and state level. Nowadays, the president of an urban university like Georgia State University, where I used to work, is a formidable figure on the public stage for reasons that have less to do with higher education than with higher property values.
In the realm of place branding, professional consultants and academic institutions are closely intermeshed, thanks to the ebb and flow of ideas and personnel between the two sectors, one nominally for-profit and the other not-for-profit. This cozy relationship between the consulting and academic worlds is not unlike the revolving door between the Pentagon and the weapons industry or between the FDA and Big Pharma or between Stanford University and Silicon Valley.
Travel, tourism and place branding are seen by professional consultants as interlocking parts of a virtuous circle. Consider the case of Bloom Consulting, which was founded by a Portuguese entrepreneur in 2003. It boasts a worldwide client list and a network of offices in Lisbon, Madrid, London, Paris, São Paulo and Riyadh. "We provide countries, regions and cities with a range of consulting services and proprietary technology," Bloom declares on its website, "to create innovative Place Branding Strategies and measure Nation and Place Brand effectiveness and reputation."
To help potential clients visualize the value of the services its offers Bloom has developed the "Country Brand Wheel," which looks like an apple pie divided into five equal slices. At the center of the pie is a big black hole in which float two words in bold white font, "Central Idea." The Central Idea represents the brand while the five slices of the pie represent the benefits to be derived from the successful implementation of Bloom's strategic place branding.
To use Bloom's terminology these benefits break down into exports, investment, tourism, talent and prominence. Each benefit is aimed at a particular group of stakeholders, though Bloom is quick to point out that place branding is not a zero-sum game but an everyone-wins game in which the benefits will be broadly shared among all the place stakeholders. The benefits of exports, investment and tourism go to the business sector; the benefits of talent go to members of the high-tech "creative class"; the benefits of prominence go to "the general public," a catch-all for the vast majority of people who don't make their living in business or high tech. In other words, the public receives one of the five slices of Bloom's apple pie, which is probably an accurate measure of its standing among professional place branders.
Today, travel and tourism make up 10 percent of the world's GDP and 10 percent of its workforce. According to a recent study by Bloom Consulting of 63 cities worldwide, the perception of a city accounts for 23 percent of its tourist income, 37 percent of its foreign investment and 22 percent of its net migration income. Taken together, these three economic indicators of place branding represent 1 percent of global GDP. “This will be a game-changer for the nation branding and place branding sector,” trumpeted Bloom's CEO upon release of the study, arguing that the evidence left little doubt that even small investments in place branding will pay large dividends in terms of a place's perception, growth and competitive standing.
The income generated by the travel/tourism and place-branding industries enters the larger circuit of value flows which we have already encountered in Harvey's diagram and in his concept of the spatial-temporal fix. Bloom envisions that investments in place branding will catalyze private and public investment in the secondary circuit of the urban built environment, specifically in fixed capital and the consumption fund. As we have seen, such investment outlets serve as sinks for surplus capital which displace and defer the pressures of overaccumulation in the primary circuit. But they do so at the risk of fostering what Harvey calls "mindless urbanization" and inflating the speculative bubbles that have made urban real estate markets the epicenter of global financial crises in recent decades.
The rise of place banding, the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation and real estate states are part of the process of capitalist restructuring which has been unfolding over the last forty years. In the US and large parts of Europe, the regime of mass production and mass consumption which had reached its culmination during the two decades following World War II, the so-called "Golden Age" of capitalism, began to unravel. At the same time, the rise of finance capital and merchant capital vis-à-vis industrial capital, at least in the Global North, laid the foundation of a capitalist class alliance that aimed to open up global markets and reign in the protectionist and redistributionist priorities of national policy makers. International financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank played a crucial role in advancing the class project of globalization, backstopping the privileges of lenders and bondholders worldwide while imposing harsh austerity programs throughout the Global South in the name of competitiveness.
The forces of globalization and financialization were aided and abetted by revolutionary developments in communications and transportation technologies, from computers and satellites to fiber optics and containerization. What Marx characterized as "the annihilation of space by time" in capital's quest for ever-shorter turnover times became a tidal wave of "time-space compression," to use Harvey's terminology. From these seismic shifts in the production, circulation and realization of value issued a whole host of changes in the realms of governance, biopolitics, subjectivity, culture and identity, which are usually lumped under the general heading of neoliberalism and which Harvey identified as "the conditions of postmodernity."
The stated goal of the neoliberal ideologues who began to achieve prominence after the 1970s was to consolidate the hegemony of market logics in all realms of life, be they economic, political, social or cultural. Their ideas were appropriated and weaponized by no-nonsense capitalists who cared less about ideas per se than about reviving the rate of profit which had been in decline since the 1960s and breaking the back of organized labor whose collective power peaked in that same decade.
On the first count, the neoliberal record was mixed as profit rates continued their secular slide, with occasional revivals, from the highs posted immediately after World War II. But the assault on the institutional basis of union power and labor aspirations was spectacularly successful, as is attested by the freefall of union participation rates in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in the private sector. The retreat of the working class in the face of an emboldened capitalist class created perfect conditions for the rise of wealth and income inequality, which reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. “There’s class warfare, all right,” financial manager nonpareil Warren Buffet told the New York Times in 2006, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
In terms of the spatial dynamics of capitalism, the triumph of what people on the left call "the neoliberal counter-revolution" has brought about the weakening or dismantling of post-World War II regulatory structures that protected domestic industry and impeded the free flow of capital across regional and national borders. As part of this counter-revolution, new regulatory structures have been put in place to prevent any backsliding that might threaten the flow of foreign direct investment and the offshoring of industrial production to East Asia and other low-wage parts of the Global South. Historic centers of industry in the US and Europe have watched helplessly as their jobs, benefits and local businesses disappeared, but found compensation of a sort in the availability of cheap consumer goods imported from abroad and sold by chains of big-box retailers like Walmart. Compensatory consumerism and the Walmart Effect became the new order of the day under the protective umbrella of the neoliberal counter-revolution.
This one-two punch of deregulation and reregulation has unleashed shock waves of inter-place competition as nations, regions, cities and towns worldwide jockey for position. You must keep this ferocious competitive environment in mind if you want to understand why travel, tourism and place branding have moved to centerstage of accumulation dynamics today. It explains how an outfit like Bloom Consulting has carved out a profitable niche in today's world of fierce spatial competition at all scales.
Of course, places have always squabbled over bragging rights when it comes to the supposedly unique qualities of their heritage, traditions, art, architecture and natural beauty—their cultural terroir, so to speak. But the restructuring of global capitalism and the attendant intensification of spatial competition have put places under enormous pressure to double-down on their brand.
No longer shielded from market forces by the regulatory presence of state actors who after the Second World War strove to manage urban and regional development in the interest of national priorities, cities have shifted from what Harvey calls managerialism to entrepreneurialism. Place branding has become the signature strategy of entrepreneurial growth regimes in the neoliberal era, in part because cities are scrambling desperately to plug themselves into the burgeoning networks of global tourism. Tradition, music, history, language, religion and the arts, to name the most obvious cultural assets, have all become grist for the mill of spectacle commodification.
The contradiction lying at the core of the dog-eat-dog, inter-place competition for a unique brand is that the end result is not uniqueness at all but uniformity and sameness. Guided by professional consultants who learned their trade and aesthetics in the echo chamber of business schools, entrepreneurial growth regimes roll out identical spatial templates of festival marketplaces selling the same products, trophy architecture reflecting whatever international style happens to be in vogue, trendy street art by renowned graffiti artists whose all-star client lists include cities from every part of the globe, world-class museums hosting the same traveling exhibitions of the celebrity artist du jour, boutiques, galleries, bistros which are virtually identical in appearance and feel wherever you go.
The touristification and branding of place operate in the realm of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital." They subordinate the basic stuff of culture to the totalizing logic of capital, while at the same time enabling aspiring groups to challenge existing hierarchies and stake a claim to power and legitimacy.
The evidence of touristification and branding are hiding in plain view, though seeing it requires immersing yourself in the crowd. While I like to think of myself as a leftist traveler and documentary photographer rather than a selfie-snapping tourist, many of the destinations on my itinerary have been either popular tourist spots or are working very hard to become such. Often, I feel like an undercover agent as I try to blend into the tourist crowd for some candid shots, outfitted in my backwards baseball cap, t-shirt and sneakers, to say nothing of compact, street camera which I bought because it looks like a smartphone, the universal tourist appendage.
Some of the places I have documented are as far off the beaten tourist path, both geographically and culturally, as one can imagine. Yet even here I come across place branding. Take the above photo as a case in point. Bombay Beach is a curious place about which you will learn more in "Desert Waterscapes." It is one part dying beach resort, one part toxic waste dump, one part squatters' colony, one part transgressive arts haven and one part "Don't Tread on Me" stronghold with its middle finger pointed straight up in defiance of the straight world. The billboard whose four skiing goddesses welcome visitors to the community may be a DIY foray into place branding by the elders of Bombay Beach or a cheeky parody of it. This is Bombay Beach, so you never know what's for real and what's a joke.
If place is defined as meaningful space and if meaning lies at the heart of culture, what we are now witnessing as a result of global travel, tourism and place branding is the commodification of culture, meaning and place on an unprecedented scale. To put it differently, the places where we make our lives, and the meanings we attach to these places, are being rapidly reconfigured around the needs of capital not people.
Diagram 2: David Harvey, The Three Circuits of Capital Flow