Place branding and the neoliberal class settlement

Place branding is much more than helping cities become more competitive. It is an aspect of the class settlement in which neoliberalism displaced social democracy. By developing an interdisciplinary political approach it may gain the reflexivity needed to fully understand its role in society. Place branding does not sell places by changing their image, but actively engages in the political transformation of cities as well as displaying many of the assumptions of that settlement which it helps to legitimate. It also creates a consensus in people’s minds that obscures neoliberalism’s political impacts in shifting power away from ordinary people. By looking at some vignettes of place branding, including London’s South Bank, Glasgow, New York, the Great Exhibition and Canary Wharf, it is clear that we should evaluate the impacts of its policies by looking at people not at places; rather than trying to encourage tourism, for instance, we should be asking what different forms of tourism can do for the inhabitants

Back to basics in the marketing of place: the impact of litter upon place attitudes

YesAttempts to apply marketing theory and principles to place have become a legitimate area of academic and 'real world' practice. However, place marketing does not typically incorporate all elements of the traditional 7 Ps, focusing far too often on just one of these - promotion. Besides this rather myopic approach, place marketing suffers from an overly strategic view of the world that ignores the meaning and lived experience of places to individuals, especially residents. The purpose of this article is twofold - first, we investigate the impact of litter on place attitudes. Litter is a common, but negative, element of place, which is intimately connected to the lived experience of a place but typically far removed from the positive promotional activity favoured by place marketing efforts and the study thereof. In this sense, the article reframes place marketing from a strategic to a micro-marketing endeavour. We found that exposing respondents to litter significantly lowers their place attitudes. Our second contribution is to demonstrate the relevance of classic marketing research approaches, such as attitudinal measures, to investigate litter and its impact on place evaluations, through quasi-experimental design (with 662 respondents). Through this, we extend the range of theory and method applied in place marketing - away from controllable promotional endeavours investigated through case-studies to a more holistic and robust interpretation of place marketing, which has a measurable impact upon the places where people live and visit

Tourism, class and crisis

The academic literature on tourism is focused on its problems – its lack of sustainability, its lack of responsibility, its poor treatment of its workers, its contribution to climate change, terrorism, its environmental impacts, its responsibility for evicting people from their land. It is assumed that these are discrete problems that are soluble – that mass tourism with a responsible face is a possibility. This approach tackles each problem separately and argues that with cooperation, goodwill, a stronger state and an educated public, solutions are possible. In this paper we start with the profits crisis of the early to mid seventies and argue that a range of counter tendencies developed that was able to resist the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Tourism expanded rapidly with the rise of that neo-liberal class settlement in the eighties because it embodied many of those counter tendencies. It was not, however, just a reflection of neo-liberalism which emerged as the way to restore the rate of profit, but helped to lay the groundwork for it. Tourism’s natural features, its use of space, the relatively small workplace, the use of unskilled labour, are all counter tendencies. In the article it is argued that they are essentially about intensifying class relations and at that stage in the economic cycle they were successful. However the problems that now plague tourism are a result of those trends. The second part of the article looks at how these counter tendencies also have negative effects – that is they are internally contradictory. Class relations in particular are now causing problems. These problems are so severe that it is arguable that the sector is coming up against the limits of accumulation because of the way that it expanded. If one looks at it from capital’s perspective the sector may indeed not be viable, because the externalities that it ignores involves the state in remedial work. Ultimately capital pays those costs but indirectly. Possibly this is an early sign that neo-liberalism itself is reaching the limits to its accumulation

Town planning, planning theory and social reform

Town planning is often seen as an instrument of social reform. It is argued here that this was not the case under social democracy; and by implication neo-liberalism and globalisation do not necessarily act as brakes upon reform. Planning should be interpreted in class terms, as a means of stabilisation and legitimation thereby helping to ensure growth. It fragments social reality in order to contain the political movements that could urban problems could generate. This view of planning may explain why social reform is not high on planning’s agenda. But social reform is possible but only at times of intense conflict. For planning to take advantage of such transient opportunities, planning theory needs development. The paper concludes by developing a model of social reform and looking at some of the flashpoints that could trigger it

The politicisation and contradictions of neo-liberal tourism

Neo-liberalism is often portrayed as a stable state, a set of social relationships designed to oppress labour and redistribute income and power to capital. In this paper it is, however, argued that it is a contradictory class settlement that has implications for tourism. Tourism is a product of and a means of constructing the neo-liberal class settlement. Yet despite the synergy between tourism and neo-liberal politics, tourism brings up issues that weaken that politics. The paper focuses on four aspects of tourism – consumerism, democracy, the work ethos and urban class politics – arguing that the relationship between this politics and tourism is contradictory in each of these areas. The result is the increasing politicisation of tourism and that is likely to weaken both neo-liberalism and tourism itself

Place marketing as politics: the limits of neo-liberalism

Place marketing should be regarded as a political activity that resonates with the dynamics of a particular class settlement. Each political era constitutes a class settlement in the sense that it is constructed around a particular relationship between labour and capital. For the last three decades place marketing has been associated with the transformation of the industrial city during the transition from social democracy to neo-liberalism, a politics that gave coherence to place branding in the form which we are all familiar with. While urban place marketing is concerned with the economic health of a particular city, it is nonetheless inextricably linked to the dynamics of the neo-liberal settlement which strengthened capital and weakened the working class. This settlement is multi-faceted, spanning measures to destabilise the working class, to create a global financial infrastructure that permitted the out-movement and privatisation of industry, to weaken the welfare state, to promote hyper-mobility for capital and labour through globalisation, and to oversee the creation of a business-friendly environment at the national, regional and local scale

Neo-liberalism and the future of place marketing

Place marketing of cities tends to be seen as a pragmatic rather than a political activity aimed at bringing prosperity to localities. It is argued here that the reverse is the case: place marketing is an essentially political activity that demonstrates different political, or more accurately, class settlements by its impact upon cities. The political shift to neo-liberalism ended the post-war social democratic settlement and ushered in a new era for place marketing. Place marketing was an integral part of that settlement. It was particularly associated with gentrification which, it is argued, is a political strategy by which neo-liberalism takes control of the city. Place marketing, however, reached its limits by the end of the long boom – economic crisis is nothing more than the impact of the cumulative limits of that period. But now that crisis has discredited neo-liberalism it is unlikely that the place marketing that characterized the last twenty five years will remain. If place marketing symbolises different political settlements then the politics that emerges out of this crisis will generate another type of place marketing

Poverty in the High-Income Countries: a Marxist Alternative to Mainstream Ideologies

Poverty has been present in all the advanced capitalist countries since the dawn of industrial capitalism in the late 18C, and remains so to this day. Mainstream explanations of this phenomenon are superficial and mistake symptoms for causes. In this article we present a Marxist explanation of poverty in the high-income countries since the late 19C. We show how poverty is systematically produced by the dynamics of capital accumulation and the capital-labour relation, including their spatial dynamics, operating in the realms of production, social reproduction, and their mediations by the state. Since poverty is produced by the totality of society, measures which target particular sites or aspects of poverty are doomed to failure: it cannot be solved outside of an end to capitalism. Since poverty is a condensation of oppressions which are experienced by the whole population, it can only be addressed by struggles against all forms of economic exploitation and social oppression, including those mediated by the state. These struggles benefit the whole population, not just the poor. The collective organisations of the whole working class in both the production and reproduction spheres are thus crucial for addressing both the immediate needs and long term interests of the poor