In the introduction to his book Places on the Margin Rob Shields (1991) characterizes marginal places as left behind, and that those places on the margin form a ‘mythic heartland … a zone of Otherness’ (Shields 1991, 4). Shields’ ‘margin’ is located on the rim of the British Isles and in North America. This book is about the Otherness of places on the ‘margin’ of Europe, nearly as far as you can get from the European metropolis and still be in Europe. According to Berg and Kearns (1998, 129) there is a tendency that ‘… geographies of other people and places become marked as Other – exotic, transgressive, extraordinary, and by no means representative …’. One of the consequences of this, Kitchen (2005, 6) remarks, is that the theoretical production ‘casts much of the world’s geography into silence’. This book tries to break this silence. It challenges the centre–periphery conceptions, relating empirical studies to trends that have removed the material basis for such stances; basically the globalization and mobilities turn in the comprehension and constitution of the world. Through 12 case studies of places in northern Norway, Sweden and on Iceland, marginality becomes questioned, their uniqueness exotic and at the same time marked by urban winds. However, as will be argued here, these areas are not left behind in these enacted peripheries. According to Bærenholdt, ‘People connect and live together over distances to such an extent that we can envision a globalization from below, which has been going on for centuries in the region’ (Bærenholdt 2007, 256). Borders that physically were lines of separation becomes points of connection, producing new places and borderlands. New industries like tourism and traditional industries like fishery merge and form new niches like fish tourism, building networks to markets far away, and re-image the localities in their making. Routes become more important than roots (Friedman 2002). ‘Marginal’ in a global world has become an anachronism – impossible. Every place is a global space.

In this book the approach to these processes of changed marginality is performed through the concept of place reinvention – a concept that relates to ideas like place branding and place promotion and at the same time questions the rationale behind them.

A standard approach to place transformation in postmodern society is through place marketing perspectives. Re-imaging of place is often understood within the discourse of entrepreneurial managerialism (Harvey 1989). Terms such as place marketing, place branding, and competitive place identities (Anholt 2007) are among those that have emerged in this field. As Brenner and Theodore (2002) point out, it is a part of the true neo-liberal vision that a place should be branded and marketed. The practices of selling and promotion of place are therefore tightly linked to entrepreneurial strategies. As a part of the cultural shift, places have to represent themselves as interesting and entertaining, not only places where you can live a good life. In the global competition between places local actors are fighting to attract industrial investors and offer them the best possible terms to convince them to invest in their specific place. Place marketing is a broad entrepreneurial ethos which has permeated the common affairs of particular places.

Place reinvention goes beyond the concept of place branding and represents a critical perspective on certain aspects of branding as a practice. While branding is an active strategic and deliberate policy for changing the image of a place, place reinvention is underpinned by more contingent and discrete processes of change. Branding means narrowing down a place’s identity into fancy logos and slogans – it is selective story-telling (Sandercock 2003), a form of collective impression management (Jensen 2007, 12). Place images tend to be characterized by simplification, stereotyping and labelling (Shields 1991, 47). Branding places is a way of inscribing a certain logic in space – both symbolically through logos, slogans and so on, and materially through construction of buildings, infrastructure and landmarks. Place branding activities must be based on an understanding of demand patterns and images of place consumers, and on identifying the position of the place in the view of competitors. As with place myths, the branding process is a process of creating an evocative narrative with a spatial referent through selective narration – the act of representing the place in a favourable light. Places are packaged and sold as a commodity (Ward 1998, 1). Place promotion has therefore been labelled the carnival mask of late capitalist urbanization (Harvey 1989, 35). Place promotion reduces the complexity involved in local histories and identities inherent in their formation. In order to create a more attractive place image social and cultural meanings are selectively appropriated and problems are played down. Place branding does not do justice to the richness and diversity of places and their peoples. Place reinvention is more than fine words and this quotation from Stephen Ward leads us to a broader understanding of the concept:

An important part of our argument is therefore that changes in the symbolic representation of place involved in branding and re-imaging strategies often are contested.

The focus in this collection is what can be called the practices of place reinvention; practices that involve both economic and symbolic transformations constituting a changed sense of place. Processes of reinvention are related to changes in industrial bases and the representational changes accompanying these changes. This means that the focus is not so much on landscapes, townscapes and architecture but rather on how economic restructuring is followed by a changed symbolic and redefined meaning of place. The term ‘reinvention’ indicates that something has been left behind and has to be recreated, renewed or redefined. Several known processes have over the years changed the character of most places, processes that are going on all the time. Some processes change the raison d’être of the place – the genus locus of a place, for instance the industrial basis or status, whereas other processes are more related to changed landscapes and townscapes, and often these two processes are merged; townscapes change due to shifts in industrial bases. Changes in the modes of production followed by an ongoing restructuring of the local economy may lead to changes in place identities and place images.

Places are put under an innovation imperative according to Thrift (2008). This may lead them to boost their attractions in the form of place marketing – or as we emphasize in this volume to a series of other forms of innovation. Place reinvention is a concept that focuses both on inventions and interventions as vehicles for change of both urban and rural places (Robinson 2006, 251). Inventions are the more continuous changes going on all the time, while interventions are linked to those more direct, planned and intentional processes attempting to achieve change. Inventions are not only a label that fits the larger cities. We find many rural places in this collection to be experimental, innovative, open, fluid and dynamic places concerned with re-imaging the place to adapt to a new global context.

Places never reach a position of completion; they are always an ongoing affair, always in the making. Place reinvention addresses the numerous ways places are being produced and reproduced. The concept goes beyond place branding and directs attention towards the relationship between symbolic and imaginative change and planned regeneration. By place reinvention we mean transformations resulting from interplay between actors such as industries, authorities and the public, between projects of construction, promotion and consumption, and processes related to information, identity and imagery. Reinvention of places is a matter of intention, intervention and hazard; it is both planned and something that just happens as more or less unintended consequences of other ongoing processes. Thus, new place images are not only results of strategic development processes aiming at profiling and promoting place, but also products of people’s everyday life, and local and national politics.

It is this complex dialectics between material space and discursive representation that we try to catch in the notion of place reinvention. Through the concept of place reinvention the aim is to give attention to the complexity involved in place transformation which the branding literature seems to ignore or simplify. We relate place reinvention to particularly two dimensions, a material and a symbolic, which will be elaborated in the following section. The political implication of such reinventional processes will be discussed thereafter.