- HOME
- GALLERIES
- 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
- CONTACT
Bloom Consulting: Countries, Regions and Cities
PLACE, BRAND, TOURISM
This seventh and final part of our overview of capitalism brings us back to place, which is where we started out in the first tab. You might remember that I expressed some unease about my home-sweet-home story, fearing that it might create the impression that place is a stable spatial formation in which the built, natural, social and cultural moments co-exist in some kind of dynamic equilibrium. I was also worried about representing place as a largely self-contained spatial formation, one that was impervious to the economic disruptions and uncertainties afflicting the larger world outside. Now, I want to set the record straight by arguing that place is no more immune to the logic of capital than are space and time.
I have cut and pasted the above graphic from the website of one of the many, many consulting firms that offer their professional services to places and their "major stakeholders" who want to define a winning brand and so secure a competitive edge over other places. What does "brand" mean in the context of inter-place competition? Just look at the bull's eye of the circle and you'll find out. Brand is the magical Central Idea, an Open Sesame which will unlock the synergies of tourism, talent, prominence and exports.
While the capitalist mode of production is the proverbial leopard that couldn't change its spots even if it wanted to, there is no question that a tidal wave of restructuring has occurred over the last forty or so years, one that has profoundly affected the dynamics of urban development and capital accumulation. This change is sometimes characterized as a shift from a Fordist-Keynesian regime of mass production and mass consumption to a post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation. It has also been marked by a shifting balance of forces within the capitalist class as finance capital and merchant capital have dramatically increased their power relative to industrial capital, at least in the Global North. And it has been accompanied by a whole host of changes at the level of governance, biopolitics, subjectivity and identity which are generally lumped under the heading of neoliberalism.
In this brave new world, regions, cities and towns have become sites of intense inter-place competition. 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 redistributional priorities, cities have shifted from what Harvey calls managerialism to entrepreneurialism. Place branding has become the hallmark of entrepreneurial growth regimes in the neoliberal era as cities scramble 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 been transformed into spectacle commodities and marketed by state actors and real estate interests to promote a pattern of uneven urban and regional development characterized by the most savage economic, social and spatial inequalities.
I conclude on this sober note because the places I have visited and photographed are very much in the grip of these seismic transformations. While I like to think of myself as a traveler not a tourist, many of my destinations are either popular tourist spots or are working very hard to become such. Even the ones off the main tourist trails are not immune to the blandishments of place branding, even if they lack the resources to hire a professional consulting firm. This makes me something of a Ninja photographer, blending into the tourist crowd with my compact, street camera in order to get an up-close view of how place branding and the tourist industry have become a leading edge of capital accumulation in the early twenty-first century.