A BRAND NEW URBANISM

INTRODUCTION

As sites that expose the conquests and failures of the human condition, cities can be understood as a consequence of social, political and economic manifestations of conflict between tradition and aspiration, of the utopian visions of autocrats, and the more recent dystopic realities of a progress-induced human ecology. Our cities consolidate values, people, and activity. Their form, a clear articulation of meaning and function, reflects our inclination to create and recreate our urban condition, to engage, occupy and re-occupy space and to experience and critique it with a view to either reinforcing tradition or promoting aspiration. This reinforcement or promotion underpins the project of improving the competitiveness of individual cities within a globalising economy of cultural capital through the process of place branding and place making. It is on the convergence of place branding and place making that this article focuses. To contextualise the arguments advanced, what follows is a brief survey of pertinent background material after which definitions of the major terms appear.

To examine the city is to engage with a complexity of systems, which in and of themselves reflect the diversity of services and opportunities expected of the city. Cities might therefore be understood in terms of the political mechanisms that prioritise and mediate the relationship between social, economic and environmental values, and the systems of communication, transport, faith, housing, 57health, education, recreation, and work deployed to uphold them. However, cities can also be understood within a context of technological change and population pressures.

Arguably the most significant legacy of the 20^th century has been a technology-induced globalization in which the traditional relationship between values and systems have been re-defined to reflect the liberation of geographic, economic and political ties between the city and the nation-state. Of particular impact has been the advent of the information age and the network(ed) economy which has induced the collapse of time and space so as to allow for the “capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale”1 and which in turn serves as a continuing catalyst for a level of urbanization not previously witnessed in the history of the planet.

According to the UN Report on the Urban Future 21, by 2025 approximately 65% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities.2 Of the world’s twenty-seven mega-cities (10 million people or more), eighteen are currently in Asia with fifteen of these expected to be in the top twenty of the most rapidly growing cities in the world. The continuing process of urbanization is placing unprecedented strain on government and modes of governance. While cities have benefited from an increase in social capital, they are also required to provide more services and opportunities for wealth creation. Increasingly, cities are required to compete against one another for volatile global capital, but more importantly make available a greater diversity of capital that can be exploited. A global economic condition has emerged in which the collapse of the critical distance between capital and culture3 has been fuelled by an ideology of neo-corporatism and cosmopolitanism. Governments now refer to citizens as clients or customers (as evidenced by the New South Wales Government’s recently released State Plan4) and deploy strategies geared towards the ‘production and consumption of culture’ in order to be more competitive.5

GLOBAL ECONOMY OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

Arguably, the most significant expression of a culture is human settlement.6  58Increasingly government strategies deploy the city, and therefore urban design as cultural capital with which to solicit the investment required to make and network other forms of cultural capital (knowledge, ideas / solutions, experience etc).7 An important aim in this process is to solicit interest from those people capable of generating the capital itself, a class that Richard Florida refers to as the creative class.8 However, only one component in the broader process of making cities more competitive in a global economy of cultural capital is of interest here.

Alexander Cuthbert notes that the physical organization and design of cities has taken on an inflated role in the world economy, citing: “… this is fundamentally political since a major benchmark for successful cities is their capacity to generate a promotional image that can be broadcast internationally.”9 More specifically, this political agenda, and the broadcast image is of the cultural capital itself. Jean Baudrillard’s fundamental assertion in “… a critique of the political economy of the sign” is that the mainspring of modern society must be located within the economy of consumption.10 Further, he notes that this economy of consumption must be one characterized by the re-deployment of culture as capital where it is produced as sign and exchange value and where the sign in turn becomes a commodity in its own right.

The inference that image of the city’s cultural capital has now become a significant tool in the political agenda of government, accords with a growing level of recognition and interest in the making and deployment of the city or place, and its image in the strategic project of making cities competitive.11 However, less well examined and understood, are the competing and complementary approaches of two seemingly disparate disciplines in this process.

On one hand, place or city branding (communications-marketing based) has emerged as a means by which the image of place capital is deployed to solicit investment (e.g. Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Architecture Walks, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Austrade NSW Design Services Industry Sector promotion, Sydney City – A City of Villages). On the other hand, place-making / urban regeneration / renewal / revitalization (urban design) has been deployed to 59develop and manage place-capital itself (e.g. Sydney Olympic Venues, NSW Main Street Program, Sydney Metropolitan Living Centres Program, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Millennium Bridge London).

The evolving body of knowledge on the post-modern phenomenon of place branding suggests the form and function of urban design (n.) are integral to the efficacy of branding place and therefore crucial to the competitiveness of cities in a globalising economy of cultural capital.12 The interest in this paper is on the convergence of ‘place branding’ and ‘place-making’ as part of the same political agenda of making a city more competitive in a global economy of cultural capital. The problem it seems is that while seemingly coterminous in the making of place brands neither marketing, urban design, or government, is cognisant of the other’s contribution to this project resulting in a fragmented approach that undermines the key objectives and claims of each. A significant reason for this is the lack of a theoretical framework to clarify this relationship.

To overcome this, the paper will serve two main aims towards developing a theory of place branding. The first is to provide an introduction to place / city branding from a communications-marketing perspective, and the second is to offer a preliminary position on the role of urban design in managing urban economies and its contribution to place-branding.

PLACE/CITY BRANDING

While image, as Paul Patton notes, is crucial in accounts of the post modern condition,14 the focus here is the specific relationship between the signifier (media such as an image or words), the signified (concept), the object / product (referent), and the sign (brand) in the process of making cities competitive. Place/city branding is at first understood as, and for many nothing more than, a sinister and vacuous outcome of our image-obsessed culture. However, on further examination, place brands appear to be an outcome of something far more 60complex, pervasive and crucial to the survival of cities in post-modernity.

According to Simon Anholt, “… cities have always been brands, in the truest sense of the word” and everyday decisions about buying a product with origins in a particular place to important decisions such as relocating to another city are based partly on rational factors and partly on emotional.15 The brand images of a city therefore become crucial in making a decision. To ground this discussion, it is necessary to offer some definitions derived from the communications-marketing disciplines. In the first instance an overview of the terms brand and branding will be provided. Following, the dominant term of reference, place branding, which deals with the making and deployment of brands for the economic development of cities, will be briefly examined.

BRANDS AND BRANDING

Simon Anholt notes that the difference between brand and branding is a complex issue and requires significant attention.16 The concept of the brand is central to our society. Its origins derived from the “… practice of indelibly marking or stamping property.”17

While brands and branding are now inextricably linked to our current political age, their pervasiveness has met with considerable criticism over the past decade, much of which originates from the anti-globalisation movement. This loose affiliation appears to be organized around the belief that the corporatisation of the globe exploits many in the service of a few by deploying a range of tools including brands. One of the best known exponents of this movement is Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein. In her book, No Logo, Klein takes an aggressive stand against the corrosive qualities of brands noting: “…brands are the main source of identity. …the brand fills a vacuum and forms a kind of armour, taking over the part once played by political, philosophical or religious ideas.”18

Klein’s position has resulted in leading marketing practitioners and academics such as Simon Anholt to lament the fact that brand has not only become synonymous with thing but thanks to the success of a raft of anti-globalisation books,19 brand  61has rather more quickly become synonymous with a bad thing.20 Anholt argues that the negative colouring of the term brand has served as an impediment to place branding due the cognitive dissonance that has emerged between participants involved in the process. According to Anholt, this dissonance can best be understood as three commonly held definitions of brand and branding:

• Popular definition – this is the least precise and is “… often used as a vague conflation of several marketing disciplines… (such as) advertising, marketing, PR and sales promotion… and often has a connotation of something aggressive and malevolent.”21
• Simple definition – is often used by marketing services firms and their clients as a reference to a designed visual identity. It is the dress or guise that is recognized which in and of itself is also a form of communication implying something about the nature and personality of the product.
• Advanced definition – is a total conception of branding that, in a corporate sense, provides the ‘brand DNA’ 22 for company strategy and corporate culture.

It is interesting to note that while Anholt’s popular definition conflates the communication disciplines and therefore confuses their roles and contribution to the branding process, the simple and advanced definitions epitomize the confusion between the brand itself and the branding process. To investigate this a little further, I will refer to the work of Jan Rijkenberg and his ‘concepting’ thesis.23

Rijkenberg notes that traditional marketing processes characterized by the four P’s of Product, Price, Place (distribution) and Promotion (communication), have largely fulfilled their role in enacting Kotler’s original conception of marketing. In Kotler’s seminal text entitled Marketing Management, Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control,24 his advice to companies roughly translated into “… look at what is happening in a market, observe the needs, and then offer solutions to satisfy them.” Rijkenberg, like many other observers of this consumer age, notes that the consumer habits of developed nations no longer seek product differentiation in order to satisfy needs as much as wants or aspirations.25

In keeping with this shift, Rijkenberg also notes that the traditional marketing 62sequence of the four P’s was not arbitrary but reflected the relative importance of the Product in an industrial age:

Gradually however, products reached a point where they could no longer be improved, resulting in a process that seeks to impose goods on an already contented marketplace. Branding, as defined by Anholt’s simple definition, therefore seeks to add-value “… in a bid to gain a preferential position for their essentially generic products.”27

Rijkenberg notes that a new phenomenon is emerging that reflects a shift in emphasis from industrial to post-industrial economies and therefore a shift towards information and knowledge-based capital.28 Accordingly, Rijkenberg suggests a new term is required because the existing terminology, as illustrated by Anholt’s series of definitions, did not adequately reflect the specifics of this new phenomenon.

Rijkenberg’s new term of concepting allows for the development of a brand that embodies concepts. According to Rijkenberg this deploys concept as a rubric under which one could find “… visions, attitudes, convictions, philosophies, mentalities, motivations, ‘wavelengths,’ areas of interest, world views and indeed, whole ‘worlds’.”30 In this way, products are not sold but are bought.31 This new term required a revision of the four P’s to reflect an emphasis on the new role of the brand. Rijkenberg’s revision was to reverse the traditional marketing sequence so as to now read; Promotion (Communication), Place (retail), Price, and Product.63

Therefore a brand may best be understood as a concept of contextualized values induced through media (words, images etc). Branding on the other hand can either be understood as the process of assigning the media required to mediate between the product and the brand,32 as in Anholt’s simple definition, or it can refer to Anholt’s advanced definition33 and what Rijkenberg refers to as concepting,34 that is, as the process of making of the brand itself.

For current purposes, I will adopt the term concepting to mean the process by which the brand is made and branding as the process by which brand-values are conferred to an object, transcending its utility-value and transforming it as a consumer object whose real value is entirely governed by the brand (sign).

PLACE BRANDING

The assertion that the branding and (re)branding of cities and places in post‑modernity is a tool of capitalism, relates to the growing trend of deploying the image of cultural capital, such as the Manhattan Skyline, as the basis of a struggle for meaning and by implication, power. This practice, commonly referred to as place branding, has its origins within the communications / destination marketing‑based professions. The practice, and by virtue of a rapidly growing body of knowledge,36 the study of place branding, is beginning to attract attention from disciplines outside of marketing including sociology, history, national identity, politics and now, urban design.

Place (and city) branding is derived from three substantial areas of marketing theory and practice:

• Destination Marketing64
• Corporate Marketing
• National Identity Marketing

Keith Dinnie notes that while the body of literature is small it is growing rapidly,37 as the need to attract “… tourists, factories, companies and talented people … requires countries to adopt conscious branding if they are to compete effectively on the global stage.”38 This view is also supported by Ham who claims that “… image and reputation are becoming essential parts of the state’s strategic equity.”39

Place branding is very much part of the domain of marketing and still positions marketing as the means by which the image of value is circulated, as opposed to denoting a process by which a brand (the strategy) is made in order to guide the making of that value. In some instances, place branding is seen as a crucial mechanism in adding-value to existing marketing conceptions such as Product- Country Image (PCI) or country-of-origin image, a fusion that for some commentators is expected to transform government and business worldwide.40 In this and its broader context, place branding is seen as typically having four core objectives:

• to enhance the place’s exports,
• to protect domestic businesses from ‘foreign’ competition,
• to attract or retain factors of development, and
• to generally position the place for advantage domestically and internationally in economic, political and social terms.

The product-country-image, which typically refers to “… the image of a country (or place) with which a product is associated by sellers or buyers,”41 draws on the promotional value secured through place branding. Papadopoulos reinforces the notion that place branding is largely concerned with deploying the image of place rather than with its development, a technique that is used extensively in the promotion of places for tourism (destination branding). Anholt, like many others, shares the view but states that “…the diverse and complex nature of place brand transcends the narrow confines of any single industry sector, including 65that of tourism.”42 For Anholt, a destination is but one component of a nation, region or city. However, unlike a nation, region or city, a destination can be sold as a product.

The growing realization within the marketing profession that the systematic marketing of place image is crucial to the future of these places has also lead to the realization that place is a complex entity which as yet is not reflected in the competency of place branding practitioners. A recent example of this is the City of Glasgow. Glasgow was chosen as the European City of Culture in 1990, an award that, according to many critics, confers significant status and cache to cities that were not recognized as cultural centres in their own right. However, for many Glaswegians this was nothing more than a cynical exercise which sought to gloss over profound social and economic problems.43 A conflict echoed by the Workers’ City Group of Glasgow, is the defacing of the Saatchi and Saatchi slogan There’s a lot of Glasgowing on to read There’s a lot of con going on.

The Saatchi and Saatchi campaign was an effort to (re)brand (in the old marketing parlance, i.e. brand as logo) Glasgow as a place. It illustrates the disjuncture between traditional marketing competencies and the requirements of place-branding.

Papadopoulos draws from the seminal work of Aaker and his conception of brand equity to propose that place branding must be grounded within an understanding of place equity.44 Place equity according to Papadopoulos, would refer to “the real and/or perceived assets and liabilities that are associated with a place and distinguish it from others.”45 This raises two interesting issues. The first is that Papadopoulos equates the conception of brand with that of place. Secondly, while place branding suggests a process that results in the inducement of the brand in the mind of the consumer, the question remains as to who constructs the brand itself? This point is not lost by Papadopoulos who suggests that unlike the obvious competencies exhibited by marketing professionals in relation to specific industry sector brands; place marketers have much to learn before such competencies emerge in the practice of making place brands.4666

URBAN DESIGN , PLACE EQUITY AND SPATIAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Place branding is confronted by a profound challenge; if place, in a marketing sense, equals brand and place branding is to be pivotal in making a place more competitive, then it must develop a competency in constructing the brand of place. In order to do this, it must understand what place is and therefore its equity.

The post modern political condition has always understood place to be the antithesis of the cosmopolitan, that is place as an incubator which nurtures human relations inspiring the in-situ development of culture - the very repository of cultural expression. Culture as a phenomenon is therefore more often than not imbued with the characteristics of a place and is formative in the practice of place‑making.48 However, the place referred to here is not one typically defined by history, as the ‘god-given’ and ‘of the land’ rather, place in this context is the manifest representation of sign value, developed within a context of emotion and desire. In this context, cultural forms and meanings of place, and in turn image, have become critical if not dominant elements of the city’s productive strategy and thereby the competitive (re)positioning of cities in a global economy.49

Examples of this repositioning abound over the last three decades, and in particular the last two. Governsment have deployed mass urban programs across the globe aimed at (re)igniting depressed or stagnant local economies as a means of improving the production of the material basis of a city’s life. The primary intention is to improve its image, solicit investment, and in turn, and by association, improve prospects of political tenure (e.g. Bankside Regeneration, London; Green Square Development, Sydney; East Darling Harbour Renewal, Sydney; Eastern Harbour District, Amsterdam; Abandoibarra, Bilbao). These programs often 67arose under the guise of urban regeneration / renewal / revitalization and often deploy cultural capital, via urban design, as part of place-making. For example, the regeneration of Temple Bar in Dublin sought to exploit both place as cultural capital and the mechanisms which were seen to be integral to producing this capital. As one of the earliest instances of urban regeneration, Temple Bar sought to build an economy based on soliciting interest from the creative classes.50 In a process almost reminiscent of industry clustering, once disparate socio-economic classes were (re)organized and clustered according to the production and consumption of sign value. Struggling artists had their rents subsidized while the wealthy middle classes, attracted by the event of cultural production and the condition of experience created, became live‑in patrons. In many respects, the process of place-making or urban regeneration at Temple Bar demonstrates how urban design was integral to a strategy that sought to develop place-equity. The result is that the branding (marketing) process now induces a conception of what actually exists at Temple Bar.

In order to clarify the contribution of urban design to the marketing practice of urban branding a departure from what might be considered normative theoretical constructs of urban design located in physical determinism, representation and aesthetics is necessary. Urban design reframed as an executive agent in the management of urban economies of cultural production and consumption can be understood as pivotal in the development of a strategy that guides the development, management and eventual promotion of the material basis of urban life, that is, the economy as a whole.51 In this line of thinking, Gospodini argues:

68Gospodini’s observation of this current or emerging state of urban design practice alludes to a changed condition within which urban design is now understood, and accordingly raises the concern that “…design may have all the answers but are we asking the right questions?” Current theoretical constructs which constitute urban design orthodoxy, cast doubt over its preparedness to execute this new position in a manner that fully appreciates the critical role that place brand plays in the survival of cities in a modern capitalist economy, a role which urban design has been co-opted to perform rather than one which it has actively cultivated.

Cuthbert argues that it is imperative that we accept the idea that the built environment, and therefore the quality of urban space, is the epiphenomena of deeper, more enduring social forces and that urban design theory must “… re-align itself with the substantial theoretical base being constructed within urban social theory, human geography and cultural studies, a grouping that roughly equates to what is termed Spatial Political Economy.”53

In the new cultural economy of capitalism54 both the place and the product of a place have seemingly been co-opted by an economic development agenda. Marketing has become crucial to this project, constructing and projecting an image that is of that place. This is an image or brand image which induces the concept of the culture of place (brand) in the mind of a potential investor / consumer. It deploys, its cultural values in order to solicit global financial and social capital and thereby contribute to the broader project of making a city competitive.

Following Anholt, the culture of a place harbours the brand DNA.55 Establishing brand DNA means that a whole family of branded products can all come from the same place and share similar characteristics of the brand while still possessing a distinctive image necessary to appeal to different markets.56 However, this is commonly constructed as part of the process of place-branding, a task largely understood to be the domain of traditional communications-based professions, which apply traditional brand positioning techniques. In this sense the brand‑image, rather than the brand, seeks to (re)contextualize the product, or as the case is with city marketing, imbue the place with context in a very superficial 69way. This means that when the city as product seeks differentiation within an already saturated market of cities vying for volatile global capital; the brand-image relies on a surface or exterior with which to (re)position or, (re)contextualize the city (product).57

According to branding experts however, the brand-image must be supported by the product. That is, if the brand is to succeed in its role of guiding the development, management and eventual promotion of place-equity then it must establish a relationship based on trust between the user and the object.58 Given the current praxis of place-branding is not in a position to explain and therefore construct a brand that is complex enough to do this, it can only ever deal in superficiality. A desireable process would cast the place-brand as antecedent to the making of the urban condition and transfer the executive role of making urban brands from communications oriented disciplines to urban design (v.).

To suggest, for example, that architecture is capable of re-branding a city is to ignore the complexity of brands and the systemic nature of place-equity. Architecture can at best contribute or contest the brand-image of a city or as part of an urban design-lead brand development process, contribute to place-equity. The city’s brand is a complex and entirely abstracted set of values that have developed over the entire duration of that city’s existence.59

The key shift taking place now is that brand is being consciously deployed as the strategy for validating and enacting a broad range of culture-lead productive strategies. The city of late-capitalism is therefore, in the Baudrillardian sense, an effect of the logic of the brand (sign).60 That is, the city as experienced in reality, is a referent of the brand (sign), projected or mediated by it. Architecture, or urban design (n.), is a representation, an image, deployed to induce the concept of the city’s existing brand (reinforce tradition) or, as is often the case, contest the existing brand by referencing a foreign, aspiring condition of place.

Governments will increasingly rely on the cultural content of place and therefore place-brands, whether imagined or experienced, and the deployment 70of their image to attract investment and thereby compete with other cities. The commodification of the expression of culture has therefore firmly positioned the role of branding and brands at the forefront of economic development, and the role of urban design at the heart of the continuing aestheticisation of the city and its political condition.

CONCLUSION

The current theoretical framework of urban design is failing to expose, understand and explain its executive role in the making of the contemporary urban condition or place, and therefore urban brands. Due to the co-opting of the urban condition by capitalism and its re-deployment as a cultural product, the praxis of urban design is, as Gospodini notes, entirely complicit in its making and therefore, one might argue, formative in managing the spatial political economy of urban brands. However, urban design theory does not encompass this.

Understanding urban brands as either a consequence of, or an antecedent to the urban condition is fundamental to the way in which brands, and in particular urban brands are made, and how they relate to urban design in the future. In the first instance, understanding the role of urban design in the management of urban economies requires a theoretical reframing of how it develops, manages and promotes place-equity before we can highlight how it contributes to a body of knowledge that guides place-branding.

Given that both marketing and urban design have a body of knowledge within which to examine this phenomenon of place / city branding, a decision must be made as to which body of knowledge is to be advanced, that is, the emerging body of knowledge on ‘place / city branding’ (marketing) or the extensive body of work on ‘place-making’ (urban design). The implications are that an attempt needs to be made to either:

• re-theorise urban design to reflect its complicity in making brands and therefore underpin place-making / urban regeneration / renewal / revitalization’ with marketing-based principles of brand and branding, or71
• to underpin the developing theory of place / city branding (marketing) with urban design principles derived from spatial political economy to assist one of its core tenets, that is that the brand should act as strategy which guides the development, management and eventual promotion of place-capital / equity.

The emerging body of knowledge within marketing demonstrates a far greater awareness of the potential efficacy of place-brands and its own disciplinary limitations vis-à-vis place-equity. It has also made greater in-roads into political agenda setting than that of normative urban design practice relative to this issue. To this end, it could be concluded that it may be more beneficial to the development of urban design as an executive agent in the material production of a contemporary economy if it contributed to the development of a body of knowledge on place-brands located within marketing. In this way, urban design may become pivotal to the development of a theory that inherently reflects the multi-disciplinary nature of the praxis of place branding.