Selling Places

The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850-2000

Stephen Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780419206101
• eBook ISBN: 9781135818944
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Selling Places explores the fascinating development of the place marketing and promotion over the last 150 years, drawing on examples from Northern America, Britain and continental Europe. The processes involved and the promotional imagery employed are meticulously presented and richly illustrated.

1

INTRODUCTION

The last quarter of a century has seen a massive worldwide growth in the practice of place marketing and promotion. Every town, city, region and nation, it seems, is now frenetically selling itself with assertions of its competitive place advantage. All places, even those least endowed with attractions, vie to ensure that the tourist gaze falls, however fleetingly, upon them. Traditional resorts find themselves competing with older industrial towns and cities as their abandoned factories and docks are recycled into the marketable commodities of heritage and leisure experience. Today’s manufacturing towns compete for the uncertain favours of Japanese car makers, Korean electronics giants and other multi-national firms. Major cities compete for international prestige (and the investment in business services that goes with it) by selling themselves as ‘cultural capitals’ in the new Europe or as ‘world cities’, staging major spectacles like the Olympic Games. The collapse of Communism (where it has not precipitated a descent into ethnic barbarism) has signalled the comprehensive entry of the cities and nations of eastern Europe into the place marketing ‘game’.

A specifically promotional policy repertoire has also emerged. Its staples include place logos, slogans, advertising, public relations, subsidies, tax breaks of various kinds,‘flagship’ development projects, flamboyant architectural and urban design statements, trade fairs, cultural and sporting spectacles, heritage, public art and much else besides. At the core of these manifold endeavours is a concern with making and propagating place images that are sufficiently attractive to persuade place users, principally understood as visitors and investors, to part with their money. The place is packaged and sold as a commodity. Its multiple social and cultural meanings are selectively appropriated and repackaged to create a more attractive place image in which any problems are played down.

This kind of competitive ethos of selling places now permeates urban public affairs throughout the world, modifying or even supplanting other policy concerns. In Britain and other European countries the extent of place marketing’s contemporary dominance is certainly unprecedented. Yet we must not make the mistake of believing that the approach itself is in any way a novel one, even though much of the existing literature reinforces such a view. The main focus of this book will be on British experience, where comparatively little has been written about the history of place selling. But an almost equally important secondary theme will be to consider experiences in other countries, especially in the United States. As we will show, this trans-Atlantic dimension forms a highly pertinent comparison, because it throws into sharp relief many of the underlying factors that have triggered and shaped place selling activities. We can begin to get some clues about this from what others have already written.

THE EXISTING LITERATURE

There has been a quite startling growth in publications on the subject over the last few years. In the wake of Logan and Molotch’s Urban Fortunes (1987), Bailey’s Marketing Cities in the 1980s and Beyond (1989) and Ashworth and Voogd’s Selling the City (1990), we now have Kotler, Haider and Rein’s Marketing Places, Kearns and Philo’s edited collection Selling Places (both 1993), Smyth’s Marketing the City, Gold and Ward’s edited collection Place Promotion (both 1994) and Duffy’s Competitive Cities (1995). There are also many more localized studies of place marketing, for example Neill et al. ’s recent comparative study of Belfast and Detroit, Reimaging the Pariah City (1995), Gold and Gold’s Imagining Scotland (1995) or Rutheiser’s study of a classic booster city, Imagineering Atlanta (1996).

Even more striking has been the increased attention given to place marketing approaches across a very wide range of recent publications on urban regeneration. A major source of inspiration has been David Harvey. In books such as The Urban Experience, a collection of his earlier writings, (1989 a ) and The Condition of Postmodernity (1989 b ) he has highlighted the rise of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ (on which see also Harvey (1989 c ). This refers to cities throughout the world deliberately adopting policies, amongst them explicit place marketing, intended primarily to enhance and demonstrate their attractiveness to mobile investment and consumption. Where Harvey has led, many, especially in Britain, have followed, adding empirical detail to his synoptic sketches. A few significant examples here would be Healey et al. (ed.) Rebuilding the City (1992), Imrie and Thomas (ed.) British Urban Policy and the Urban Development Corporations, Bianchini and Parkinson (ed.) Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration, and Law Urban Tourism (all 1993). It would not be difficult to suggest other titles.

Little sense of an activity with rich historical precedents appears in this burgeoning literature, however. There are occasional allusions, in passing, to earlier episodes of place marketing, sometimes of slightly doubtful provenance. Harvey, for example, dates the selling of places back to the civic boosterism of the Hanseatic League and the Italian City States in Medieval Europe (1989 c ). Ashworth and Voogd claim even earlier examples of place marketing in Viking Leif Ericsson’s search for settlers to populate his newly discovered ‘green’ land (1994, p. 39). Whatever the validity of such assertions, and little evidence is presented, these places were not promoted in ways that bear much resemblance to the practices of today. The most immediate and important precedents for contemporary practice lie in the more recent past. A few vignettes into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are offered in Logan and Molotch (1987), Kearns and Philo (1993), Gold and Ward (1994), Gold and Gold (1995) and Rutheiser (1996). Otherwise very little comes through in the mainstream place marketing literature.

Outside this mainstream, there is a small, relatively obscure and very fragmented literature on aspects of the history of selling particular kinds of places in specific parts of the world. The North American literature is much the richest with several fine accounts of the role of place marketing in the westward colonization of both the United States and Canada (e.g. Gates, 1934; Quiett, 1934; Dumke, 1944; Elias, 1983). Drawing mainly on this experience, Boorstin (1965) has given a typically vivid and suggestive account of the central role of the local promotional, boosterist ethos in the emergence of the American nation. The promotion of the southern United States for industrial development has also been well treated, most comprehensively by Cobb (1993). Industrial place promotion in Canada has similarly attracted significant historical attention, especially by Bloomfield (e.g. 1983 a, 1983 b, 1983 c ). Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Warner, Stilgoe, Jackson and many other urban historians have cast much valuable light on American suburban promotion.

Still more dispersed and fragmentary is the work on British and other European experiences. Such as it is, most of the existing historical writing focuses on tourist resorts and residential suburbs (e.g. Walton, 1983 a ; Jackson, 1991). Much useful work on the selling of both these place types has been done by railway and local historians, especially Jackson (1986) and Yates (1988). Another very important group of historical studies are those of railway advertising art in both Europe and North America, much of which had a place promotional intent. Fine examples are Shackleton (1976), Camard and Zagrodski (1989), Cole and Durack (1990; 1992), Runte (1994) and Weill (1994). Yet, in all these studies, even this last group, place selling remains only a secondary or incidental theme. There have been only a few, partial, attempts Holcomb (1990) and Ward (1994 b, 1995) to synthesize the various episodes of place selling into a coherent overview. One of the most straightforward aims of this book is therefore to mould a coherent and comprehensive story from the current, rather fragmentary view.

UNDERSTANDING PLACE SELLING

What is Place Selling?

As a first stage in this process, it is important to think about how to conceptualize the place selling phenomenon. As already noted, place selling is not simply a specific area of urban policy or action. It is rather a broad entrepreneurial ethos or ideology which, at specific times, has permeated the common affairs of particular places. We have already identified some of the most familiar and obvious ways in which this ethos has found expression, but manifestations of it may be found across the whole urban policy agenda. Every aspect of public policy from street cleansing to the provision of housing, from equal opportunities to public transport, from the award of public contracts to sewage outfalls can be made to bear the imprint of the place selling ethos. But the reverse is not true: the existence of these common urban concerns does not necessarily imply that they are motivated by any significant impulse of asserting competitive advantage over other places.

A more specific example will give more depth to this point. In the late twentieth century it is well known that many post-industrial cities are busily investing in ‘high’ culture as a deliberate promotional strategy, to draw in tourists and encourage business investment (e.g. Bianchini and Parkinson, 1993). Over a century ago, British cities were also spending large sums on much the same material things: libraries, concert halls, art galleries and museums. Yet the motives then were very different, concerned more with demonstrating the success of industrial civilization (e.g. Briggs, 1963). Britain’s cities did not need, at that time, to give priority to boosting their economies. Culture was the ‘icing on the cake’; today it has become part of the ‘cake’ itself.

Yet this was not universal, even then. There were some cities, especially in the American mid- and far-West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which did, quite deliberately, use high culture as an economic promotional device. As of one of Sinclair Lewis’ characters told the Boosters Club of the imaginary mid-West city of Zenith:

Culture has become as necessary adornment and an advertisement for a city to-day as pavements or bank-clearances…it gives such class- advertising as a town can get in no other way; and the guy who is so short-sighted as to crab the orchestra proposition is passing up the chance to impress the glorious name of Zenith on some big New York millionaire that might—that might establish a branch factory here! (Lewis, 1922, pp. 252–253)

The broad point behind all this is that cities were (and are) capable of doing very similar things for quite different motives. In the past some cities were obliged to become more entrepreneurial in the running of their collective affairs. Others, as we have seen, did not need to be. There is actually only one area of public policy and action which may be equated directly with the wider ideology of place selling. The existence of place advertising remains perhaps the surest single test for the existence of the place selling impulse. We certainly do not overlook the many other dimensions of place selling but, as we have argued, their intent is rarely as clearcut and unambiguous as place advertising.

The place selling impulse would normally, then, involve fairly public assertions of competitive place advantage by means of, but not confined to, place advertising. In practice, this means that it has often to be identified, especially historically, on the rather pragmatic basis of ‘knowing it when you see it’. Such an approach militates against easy reliance on quantitative measurement or comparison of activity. In practice, place selling action within particular national jurisdictions have often followed certain common patterns during specific periods. But the possibilities of precise international or historical comparisons are very limited.

Moreover, a reliance on place advertising as a key indicator also brings its own unique research problems. There will obviously be a tendency to exclude place selling episodes which predate the emergence of modern print advertising. More seriously, however, advertising and other publicity are essentially ephemeral items. Unlike minutes, correspondence, briefing papers etc (some of which are clearly valuable in understanding the promotional process), it is almost unknown for bodies to hold archive copies of their advertising.

Beyond these operational problems lie some altogether more fundamental questions. Much the most basic of these is what we actually think about place selling. Do we begin from a critical standpoint, bemoaning the appropriation of the multi-layered meaning of places into a one-dimensional marketable commodity? Or can we be more positive, appreciating that the making and propagation of marketable place images can be worthwhile—an extension rather than a narrowing of the cultural meanings of place, even a source of enjoyment?

Not too long ago, most academic commentators on the contemporary urban scene would have found it easy to answer these questions. To the first, yes; to the second, no. Now the new mood of ‘realism’ that pervades the post-Thatcherite, post-Reaganite and post-Communist world adds a tantalizing uncertainty. All, left and right, have begun to show a real awareness of the importance of projecting positive place images and the need to work within a market framework. This is mirrored in recent trends in research work on place marketing and promotion.

Cultural Interpretation of Place Selling

Within this shift in prevailing attitudes we can occasionally detect faint echoes of sympathy for earlier episodes of place selling. Anyone familiar with John Betjeman’s poetic and televisual evocations of Metro-land will immediately have some sense of the power of promotional imagery to stir deeply sympathetic feelings. Around the Metropolitan Railway’s inspired attempts to market the suburban areas along its tracks in north west London from 1915 to 1932 has been woven the best known British celebration of the cultural aspects of place selling. As we will show in more detail in chapters 5 and 6, the characteristic Metro-land combination of fine illustrations and a highly contrived prose style created a romantic fairytale vision of suburban living. Across the decades it nurtures a deep nostalgia for a supposedly simpler age whose innocence is signalled by the charms of the hand coloured photographs and the quaintness of the language. There is, and was in the past, a humorous dimension to the appreciation, but the humour is gentle and sympathetic.

Though none achieve the emotional power of Betjeman’s interpretation of Metro-land, at least as far as an English audience are concerned, there is much other writing in similar vein about place selling, especially of the suburbs and seaside resorts (Jackson, 1991; Yates, 1988). Heroic tales of railroad building and town promotion are more typical North American themes, particularly evident in the works of Quiett (1934), Dumke (1944) and Elias (1983), for example. In the promotional puff and the often outrageous actions of the railroads and town boosters, such writers find a powerful metaphor for the deeper story they want to tell: the making of a nation out of relentless optimism, boundless hyperbole and sheer guts. In this way the idea of place selling and boosterism has become, as novelists great, such as Sinclair Lewis (1922), and obscure, such as Mark Lee Luther (1924), have shown, an integral part of the American dream. It reflects the competitive freedom of individuals and communities to better themselves by their own efforts, untrammelled by big government or powerfully entrenched aristocrats.

Not all cultural comment has been so positive, however. During the 1980s, insights drawn from the critical cultural studies began to be applied to place selling efforts. The real pioneering work had been done in the 1970s by a few behavioural geographers, particularly Gold (1974) and Burgess (1982). But the main shift came within cultural geography, influenced by both the new directions coming from cultural studies and Harvey’s more general encouragement to critical exploration (e.g. Kearns and Philo, 1993). Some related work of great importance has come from sociologists and social anthropologists, notably O’Barr (1994) and Lash and Urry (1994).

One of the principal concerns of this body of work has been with decoding the promotional message itself, particularly the place image that is being sold. Much of the style of this decoding derives fairly closely from several studies on advertising such as Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements (1978). As we might expect, given the Marxian intellectual origins of the whole cultural studies approach (Williams, 1980), the critical fire is mainly directed at th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Studies in History, Planning and the Environment
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Credits
• Dedication
• Part 1 Foundations and Beginnings
• Part 2 Selling the Resort
• Part 3 Selling the Suburb
• Part 4 Selling the Industrial Town
• Part 5 Selling the Post-Industrial City
• Bibliography
• Index