Branding New York

How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World

Miriam Greenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415954426
• eBook ISBN: 9781135919115
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Winner of the 2009 Robert Park Book Award for best Community and Urban Sociology book!

Branding New York traces the rise of New York City as a brand and the resultant transformation of urban politics and public life. Greenberg addresses the role of "image" in urban history, showing who produces brands and how, and demonstrates the enormous consequences of branding. She shows that the branding of New York was not simply a marketing tool; rather it was a political strategy meant to legitimatize market-based solutions over social objectives.

CHAPTER 1
Branding and the Neoliberal City

In order to appreciate the special significance of the branding of New York in the 1970s, it is first important to examine the broader social forces which shaped this approach, and which this approach in turn helped to transform. To do so, I will devote this introductory chapter to a theoretical and historical exploration of the interplay between media, marketing, and visual culture, on the one hand, and capitalist urbanization, on the other. First I will trace the rise of commercial media in the modern industrial city, looking in particular at the role of urban boosterism in the nineteenth century, and the growth in tourism marketing in the wake of World War II. Next, I will examine how the 1970s era of deindustrialization, fiscal crisis, and deregulation provoked the rejection of New Deal-style civic liberalism at the local and national scales, and the rise of a neoliberal, free market ideology in its place, as well as the intensification of market-based competition between cities and regions. As I will explore in the following section, this shift led most cities to turn to a new, entrepreneurial mode of economic development that combined political and economic restructuring with cultural strategies like image marketing. Because this approach was itself modeled on the private sector, I will then analyze the original development of market research and “branding” in corporate restructuring more generally in the same time period.

Finally, I will turn to the particular case of New York in the 1970s. It was then that New York’s unique status as a national and global center of media and finance, as well as its reputation as a bastion of civic liberalism, set it apart from other cities undergoing similar shifts. As a result of these distinctions, New York’s fiscal crisis and subsequent neoliberal, marketing-driven recovery were unmatched in scale, visibility, and symbolic weight. And so New York City will serve as a model for the theory of urban branding that I will outline here and develop in the coming chapters of this book.

Image Marketing and the Modern City

Since the late nineteenth century, with the dual rise of the industrial metropolis and modern technologies of media and spectacle, scholars have appreciated the powerful interrelationship between urbanization and representation. Walter Benjamin, for instance, saw the city as a dynamic interplay between visual phenomena and material social forces, whereby the former “expressed” and “reproduced”—rather than simply reflected or mystified—the latter.¹ From this perspective, the image and imagination of the city, and more broadly what Henri Lefebvre called “representational space,” should be seen as an objective and productive social force, with real material effects, playing an integral role in shaping modern forms of production, consumption, and the collective “dreamscape.”² This role has become only more apparent in the last thirty years, as cities have been so radically transformed by the simultaneous and interwoven rise of deregulated global capitalism and the “communications revolution.”³ And so what is needed now is a form of urban social research that combines analyses of political economy with those of the “symbolic economy,” seeking to understand “the interpenetration of culture and power” in an urban context.⁴

When one looks at cities in terms of the interpenetration of cultural and material forces, a more complete picture arises of the changes cities have undergone since the 1960s. For instance, in this period, “location consultants” joined the market research field, and did as much to produce market phenomena as they did to study them. Indeed, such consultants were hired alternately by corporations looking for more profitable and desirable locales, and entrepreneurial cities and regions seeking to turn themselves into such a locale, and wanting a credible blueprint to do so.⁵ This blueprint was also found in the pages of urban lifestyle magazines, which were considered required reading by powerful city leaders wanting to appeal to this new constituency on cultural terms. It was found in the plans of urban designers who began to shift their focus to questions of the imageability of urban space. And finally, it was being applied by city marketing campaigns, which sought to combine these elements and transform their city into a mirage of the perfect middle-class lifestyle.

Another important form of this interpenetration is the political and tactical use of media in the modern city. Groups with varying degrees of power have different resources with which to create, promote, and impose urban representations that serve their interests. This representational power, as I will call it, is of course not new. Dating back to the first Mesopotamian cities, dominant urban images have consistently been shaped by, and helped shape, broader political struggles. Yet with the rise of the modern “institutional matrix” of media and marketing over the last two hundred years, the potential for representational power has grown enormously.⁶ On the one hand, as new media technologies have become smaller, cheaper, and more interconnected, and as mass media products have become more accessible and versatile, they have revealed a liberatory potential, giving voice to underrepresented groups, spurring creativity, expressing new forms of class consciousness and solidarity, and opening doors to civic participation. On the other hand, as mass media ownership has grown increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and larger corporations, and with print and broadcast media reaching ever wider audiences, the media have also revealed a formidable potential to legitimize dominant groups and to limit access to the mediated “public sphere.” In this way well-connected urban groups—from the new middle class to corporate elites—have gained increasing power to promote and impose a hegemonic vision of the city that serves their interests.

Boosters and Modern City Marketing

Urban boosterism was the first instance in which modern media and marketing were used to promote and sell a particular image of the city. Boosterism was largely an American phenomenon, launched by the showmen, entrepreneurs, and chambers of commerce of frontier towns and newly industrialized cities that by the late nineteenth century were caught up in fierce competition with other cities for residents, workers, industries, and investments.⁷ Beginning in this period, a contingent of urban boosters, working with local advertising agencies, newspaper publishers, and other emerging media industries created an extensive “critical infrastructure” of urban guidebooks, reviews, and press coverage, with which to promote ever more spectacular consumer spaces, from department stores to amusement parks.⁸

Generally speaking, the concern of urban boosters was to replace negative perceptions of their “product”—whether New York, Houston, or another city—with an enticing, all-encompassing, and carefully edited image of the city-in-miniature, or the “city as a whole.” One of the primary sources of negative perceptions was the deep-rooted anti-urban bias that emerged in the Jeffersonian era, particularly among the country’s majority rural population, its landed elites and, in the late nineteenth century, a growing suburban population.⁹ City boosters’ efforts to counter such bias through the selective commodification of their locale underlay their most sophisticated visual strategies. Taking advantage of new photographic and motion-picture technologies and techniques, they perfected the panoptic strategies of panoramas, city view books, and “city symphony” films. And so, entrepreneurs sold investors, pleasure-seekers, and new immigrants on exotically named cities in the swamps of Florida and the wilds of California, as well as on the rapidly expanding metropoles of the East and Midwest.¹⁰

Particular marketing strategies varied by locale, and by the perceived anxieties or desires of potential customers. In frontier towns boosters emphasized law and order, cleanliness, and well-managed civic life, attempting to establish the respectable “city-ness” of their nascent settlement.¹¹ Meanwhile, in older, more established cities, boosters seeking to attract tourism developed images of cultural sophistication and historic grandeur, often alongside new, spectacular forms of shopping and entertainment.¹² Another popular approach was to exploit the middle-class fascination with the city’s poorer, ethnic quarters, and to promote a “slumming aesthetic” through voyeuristic tours of bohemian quarters, as well as more risqué sites of vice and debauchery.¹³ Of course, whatever superficial treatment might be given to ghettos or elite institutions, boosters strenuously avoided reference to underlying structural inequalities, such as the poor labor or housing conditions faced by most of the working population in these industrializing cities.

As urban populations expanded in the nineteenth century, city marketing increasingly targeted the city’s own residents, linking with local markets for entertainment, leisure, and consumption. Such marketing formed an essential part of the mass urban periodicals and films, which created cities-in-miniature within their montages, listings, and guides.¹⁴ Through newspapers, serial novels, movies, and police hand-bills, readers and spectators learned to be modern urban citizens and to interpret the city made of text and image that overlay that of bricks and steel.¹⁵ This mediated city offered a new narrative map, one which entertained as well as educated, enticed as well as disciplined, imposing a modicum of coherence and order on an unfamiliar world of constant flux.¹⁶

Then, in an effort to revive moribund economies in the 1930s, the practice became institutionalized and externalized to a degree through the creation of “Convention and Visitors Bureaus” (CVBs) in cities nation-wide.¹⁷ CVBs were supported jointly by local governments and private members, with the latter generally drawn from the tourism, retail, entertainment, and real estate industries. They became particularly powerful in mid-size cities and towns, for which tourism and convention business represented a significant expansion of the economic base, and a relatively easy source of new revenue.¹⁸ For large, industrialized, port cities and financial centers like New York, they were not seen as vital to economic growth, and were relatively less powerful and less well funded.

Mid-Century Growth in Tourism and Market Research

In the post-World War II era, a number of factors—from the expanding middle class, to the globalization of the economy, to the rising popularity of jet and automobile travel—converged to propel the tourism industry into an era of massive international expansion. At the national and state levels, government increasingly felt pressure to respond to growing competition in this market. In 1961, the Kennedy administration created the United States Travel Service as the federal government’s lead travel and tourism advocacy group, and the following year launched “Discover America,” its marketing arm.¹⁹ As their reports put it, drumming up tourism was not only a business opportunity, bringing “new money” into the national economy, but patriotic, keeping “American dollars” from leaving.²⁰ At the local level, meanwhile, tourism was part of a broad push by “urban growth machines” of the 1950s and 1960s, representing the interests of local elites in finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE), as well as in retail, hotels, advertising, and media.²¹ They joined with CVBs in an effort to grow the economic base rapidly, expand the value of local real estate, and replace blue-collar industries with those of the more profitable, less unionized service sector. And they keenly grasped the idea, as Dennis Judd has put it, “that tourism is an industry without smokestacks.”²²

This embrace of tourism was legitimated by new, quasi-statistical methods of market research. Ever since 1941, when travel agents organized their first business association, the National Association of Travel Officials (NATO), members sought to create credible data with which to demonstrate their growing importance, advance their common interests, and launch effective marketing campaigns.²³ Thus, in 1944, NATO established a research committee, and encouraged member firms that conducted tourism research to furnish results to its national center.²⁴ In the 1950s, this committee joined the nationwide Travel Research Association, which worked closely with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, and in particular George Katona’s renowned Survey Research Center, to produce classic consumer research studies that measured such things as the demographics, preferred modes of travel, and length of trips of consumers in this new market.²⁵

Over the course of the 1960s, the United States Department of Commerce conducted a series of regional studies that showed the potentially revolutionary impact of increased tourism capacity on economic development and job creation in some of the nation’s most impoverished regions, at little cost to the regions themselves.²⁶ In 1965, “Discover America” merged with NATO to create Discover America Travel Organizations, with a congressionally chartered mandate to generate more international tourism to the US via increased advertising and the coordinated application of survey data. Now, with Washington’s support, thousands of market research studies were produced throughout the 1960s by every state in the union, measuring the potential consumer market for tourism, the marketability of potential tourist “attractions” and “destinations,” and the potential impact of expanding tourism, recreation, and business conventions on the economy.²⁷ In addition to creating some of the first coordinated tourism marketing campaigns in the US, this effort made tourism marketing one of the primary ways through which American cities were represented to the world.

These tourism studies tied in with those produced by a new crop of “business location consultants.” The latter were the first to employ the “science” of ranking cities, regions, and states in terms of both “tangible” benefits to business—like tax and labor policy—as well as culturally subjective “intangibles” like “lifestyle” and “quality of life.” Such consultancies were hired both by corporations looking to use locational change to boost profits and worker morale, and by cities and regions seeking to appeal to these corporations and become thir desired location.²⁸ In line with the prescient urban design theories first advanced by Kevin Lynch in 1960, city planners transformed urban space around the criteria of “legibility,” “visibility,” and ultimately “imageability,” in order to produce “vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images” of entire cities.²⁹

Savvy CVBs, chambers of commerce, and regions dependent upon tourism and business relocation began employing the services of professional marketing, design, and research firms. CVBs were interested in their findings because they provided supposedly hard data on how to lure tourists, business travelers, and relocating middle managers. Broader growth coalitions also found them particularly useful, as they could be cited to justify the redevelopment of the city and the restructuring of its services and tax structure to appeal to the new tourism and convention market.

Crisis, Restructuring, and the Neoliberal City

Discursive practices developed in the age of urban boosterism endured through the twentieth century. Yet the forms of capital accumulation and cultural production in which these practices were embedded changed dramatic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: New York, Capital of the 1970s
• Prologue: From the Standpoint of the Out-of-Towner
• Chapter 1 Branding and the Neoliberal City
• Part I From Image Crisis to Fiscal Crisis: 1964–1974
• Part II The Battle to Brand New York: 1975–1985
• Conclusion: The Legacy of the 1970s
• Epilogue: Re-branding the Wounded City
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography