Place, Brand, Tourism

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE, BRAND, TOURISM

In this final part of the essay, I will try to close the circle by bringing us back to where our journey began—place. Someone reading the "Place" essay could easily come away thinking that place is an peaceful island surrounded by the stormy seas of capital. Here, I want to set the record straight by arguing that while place can muster significant resources in defense of its own rules of reproduction, it is no more immune to the logic of capital than are space and time. The two industries that I will discuss here, tourism and place branding, are worth considering on account of the role they play in disciplining place to the reproduction requirements of the capitalist mode of production.

I define a tourist as anyone who uses the tourism industry to travel, irrespective of the reasons for travel, the distances traveled or the time spent traveling. A person becomes a tourist the moment she makes her first travel-related purchase and remains so until she returns home from her trip. Tourist dollars and euros flow into global circuits of capital by way of what Raoul Bianchi, a Marxist political economist, calls the "tourism-real estate regime of accumulation." Overseeing this regime of accumulation are interlocking networks of "real estate states," to borrow a useful term from urban planner Samuel Stein> The number-one priority of real estate states is pumping up property values by any means necessary. Through their spending tourists provide real estate states with the resources and incentives to pursue the highly regressive growth strategies which have become the hallmark of global capitalism in an era of fierce inter-place competition.

My wife Allyson and I have our own small roles to play in this tourism-real estate regime of accumulation. When our travels take us to far-off places, we will book our flights through Travelocity and our lodging through Airbnb, two multinational corporations that connect tourists with local service providers and integrate both into global capital flows. Once or twice, we have even availed ourselves of Airbnb's "Experiences" to book cooking classes and food tours with local residents. For places closer to home we prefer to drive rather than fly, but in most other respects we remain dependent on services provided by the tourism industry to get where we are going and to see the sights while we are there.

Tourists venture out into the world in search of many things, excitement, cross-cultural encounters, paid sex, unfamiliar food, enlightenment, exotic locales, cheap drinks, authenticity, souvenirs, selfies, medical services, meaning, business contacts, ganja, natural beauty and so on. Some of these things appeal to me a great deal; others not at all. But none of them captures what I'm looking for as a Marxist tourist.

I venture out into the world in order to observe and document the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism. While I feel a political and emotional attachment to most of the places on my itinerary, the Marxist in me is less interested in the destinations per se than in what they reveal about the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation. The ethical questions at play when I travel as a tourist do not escape me. I am wagering that the negative costs of my travel in terms of environmental and cultural degradation will be offset by the benefits to be derived from a better understanding of how the capitalist accumulation process operates on the ground.

Central to the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation and the real estate states which oversee it is place branding. This is a strategy that seeks to attract tourists and investment to a given place, be it a neighborhood, town, city region or nation, by associating it with an appealing identity or image. Place branding works by turning cultural products into commodities that can be attached to a given place. The techniques of place branding combine elements of professional stagecraft, performance art, group psychology, mass marketing, real estate hype and magical thinking.

Place branding is also an arena of political contestation. While growth machines dominated by real estate interests exercise disproportionate power in determining the outcome of these contests, they cannot unilaterally impose a brand on a place without making concessions, symbolic or otherwise, to NGOs claiming to speak on behalf of local residents. Every place brand is the end result of intense negotiations among "stakeholders," as the privileged constituencies of the real estate state are called.

Tourist destinations afford an ideal vantage point from which to observe how place branding works on the ground, since every stop on the tourists' itinerary is a staged performance of "authentic" local culture, a spectacle commodity produced for the benefit of the tourism and real estate markets.

Place branding, travel and tourism form an interlocking economic whole in relation to the capitalist production of place and space. In recent years, the first of these has become a lucrative business for professional consultants who offer their services to place-based clients all over the world. Actors in the place-branding line of work speak a language imported from the world of business management, a language that reflects the contradictions intrinsic to place branding as a political-economic project.

In pitches made to potential clients, place is imagined as an efficiently run corporation adhering to best business practices. The people living in a place are viewed not as antagonistic classes engaged in a war of position, nor as citizens with the right to participate in governance, nor as members of a broader public motivated by multiple and sometimes conflicting identities. They are viewed as stakeholders whose lives are impacted by decisions made about the place where they live, and whose interests are best represented by nonprofits and NGOs with close ties to real estate states.

The business and discourse of place branding have also burrowed into the academy. Universities, business schools, marketing programs and economics departments promote place branding not only through their research and teaching functions but also through their economic partnerships with local real estate interests and governing regimes at the local and state level. Nowadays, the president of an urban university like Georgia State University, where I used to work, is a formidable figure on the public stage for reasons that have less to do with higher education than with higher property values.

In the realm of place branding, professional consultants and academic institutions are closely intermeshed, thanks to the ebb and flow of ideas and personnel between the two sectors, one nominally for-profit and the other not-for-profit. This cozy relationship between the consulting and academic worlds is not unlike the revolving door between the Pentagon and the weapons industry or between the FDA and Big Pharma or between Stanford University and Silicon Valley.

Travel, tourism and place branding are seen by professional consultants as interlocking parts of a virtuous circle. Consider the case of Bloom Consulting, which was founded by a Portuguese entrepreneur in 2003. It boasts a worldwide client list and a network of offices in Lisbon, Madrid, London, Paris, São Paulo and Riyadh. "We provide countries, regions and cities with a range of consulting services and proprietary technology," Bloom declares on its website, "to create innovative Place Branding Strategies and measure Nation and Place Brand effectiveness and reputation."

To help potential clients visualize the value of the services its offers Bloom has developed the "Country Brand Wheel," which looks like an apple pie divided into five equal slices. At the center of the pie is a big black hole in which float two words in bold white font, "Central Idea." The Central Idea represents the brand while the five slices of the pie represent the benefits to be derived from the successful implementation of Bloom's strategic place branding.

To use Bloom's terminology these benefits break down into exports, investment, tourism, talent and prominence. Each benefit is aimed at a particular group of stakeholders, though Bloom is quick to point out that place branding is not a zero-sum game but an everyone-wins game in which the benefits will be broadly shared among all the place stakeholders. The benefits of exports, investment and tourism go to the business sector; the benefits of talent go to members of the high-tech "creative class"; the benefits of prominence go to "the general public," a catch-all for the vast majority of people who don't make their living in business or high tech. In other words, the public receives one of the five slices of Bloom's apple pie, which is probably an accurate measure of its standing among professional place branders.

Today, travel and tourism make up 10 percent of the world's GDP and 10 percent of its workforce. According to a recent study by Bloom Consulting of 63 cities worldwide, the perception of a city accounts for 23 percent of its tourist income, 37 percent of its foreign investment and 22 percent of its net migration income. Taken together, these three economic indicators of place branding represent 1 percent of global GDP. “This will be a game-changer for the nation branding and place branding sector,” trumpeted Bloom's CEO upon release of the study, arguing that the evidence left little doubt that even small investments in place branding will pay large dividends in terms of a place's perception, growth and competitive standing.

The income generated by the travel/tourism and place-branding industries enters the larger circuit of value flows which we have already encountered in Harvey's diagram and in his concept of the spatial-temporal fix. Bloom envisions that investments in place branding will catalyze private and public investment in the secondary circuit of the urban built environment, specifically in fixed capital and the consumption fund. As we have seen, such investment outlets serve as sinks for surplus capital which displace and defer the pressures of overaccumulation in the primary circuit. But they do so at the risk of fostering what Harvey calls "mindless urbanization" and inflating the speculative bubbles that have made urban real estate markets the epicenter of global financial crises in recent decades.

The rise of place banding, the tourism-real estate regime of accumulation and real estate states are part of the process of capitalist restructuring which has been unfolding over the last forty years. In the US and large parts of Europe, the regime of mass production and mass consumption which had reached its culmination during the two decades following World War II, the so-called "Golden Age" of capitalism, began to unravel. At the same time, the rise of finance capital and merchant capital vis-à-vis industrial capital, at least in the Global North, laid the foundation of a capitalist class alliance that aimed to open up global markets and reign in the protectionist and redistributionist priorities of national policy makers. International financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank played a crucial role in advancing the class project of globalization, backstopping the privileges of lenders and bondholders worldwide while imposing harsh austerity programs throughout the Global South in the name of competitiveness.

The forces of globalization and financialization were aided and abetted by revolutionary developments in communications and transportation technologies, from computers and satellites to fiber optics and containerization. What Marx characterized as "the annihilation of space by time" in capital's quest for ever-shorter turnover times became a tidal wave of "time-space compression," to use Harvey's terminology. From these seismic shifts in the production, circulation and realization of value issued a whole host of changes in the realms of governance, biopolitics, subjectivity, culture and identity, which are usually lumped under the general heading of neoliberalism and which Harvey identified as "the conditions of postmodernity."

The stated goal of the neoliberal ideologues who began to achieve prominence after the 1970s was to consolidate the hegemony of market logics in all realms of life, be they economic, political, social or cultural. Their ideas were appropriated and weaponized by no-nonsense capitalists who cared less about ideas per se than about reviving the rate of profit which had been in decline since the 1960s and breaking the back of organized labor whose collective power peaked in that same decade.

On the first count, the neoliberal record was mixed as profit rates continued their secular slide, with occasional revivals, from the highs posted immediately after World War II. But the assault on the institutional basis of union power and labor aspirations was spectacularly successful, as is attested by the freefall of union participation rates in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in the private sector. The retreat of the working class in the face of an emboldened capitalist class created perfect conditions for the rise of wealth and income inequality, which reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. “There’s class warfare, all right,” financial manager nonpareil Warren Buffet told the New York Times in 2006, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

In terms of the spatial dynamics of capitalism, the triumph of what people on the left call "the neoliberal counter-revolution" has brought about the weakening or dismantling of post-World War II regulatory structures that protected domestic industry and impeded the free flow of capital across regional and national borders. As part of this counter-revolution, new regulatory structures have been put in place to prevent any backsliding that might threaten the flow of foreign direct investment and the offshoring of industrial production to East Asia and other low-wage parts of the Global South. Historic centers of industry in the US and Europe have watched helplessly as their jobs, benefits and local businesses disappeared, but found compensation of a sort in the availability of cheap consumer goods imported from abroad and sold by chains of big-box retailers like Walmart. Compensatory consumerism and the Walmart Effect became the new order of the day under the protective umbrella of the neoliberal counter-revolution.

This one-two punch of deregulation and reregulation has unleashed shock waves of inter-place competition as nations, regions, cities and towns worldwide jockey for position. You must keep this ferocious competitive environment in mind if you want to understand why travel, tourism and place branding have moved to centerstage of accumulation dynamics today. It explains how an outfit like Bloom Consulting has carved out a profitable niche in today's world of fierce spatial competition at all scales.

Of course, places have always squabbled over bragging rights when it comes to the supposedly unique qualities of their heritage, traditions, art, architecture and natural beauty—their cultural terroir, so to speak. But the restructuring of global capitalism and the attendant intensification of spatial competition have put places under enormous pressure to double-down on their brand.

No longer shielded from market forces by the regulatory presence of state actors who after the Second World War strove to manage urban and regional development in the interest of national priorities, cities have shifted from what Harvey calls managerialism to entrepreneurialism. Place branding has become the signature strategy of entrepreneurial growth regimes in the neoliberal era, in part because cities are scrambling desperately to plug themselves into the burgeoning networks of global tourism. Tradition, music, history, language, religion and the arts, to name the most obvious cultural assets, have all become grist for the mill of spectacle commodification.

The contradiction lying at the core of the dog-eat-dog, inter-place competition for a unique brand is that the end result is not uniqueness at all but uniformity and sameness. Guided by professional consultants who learned their trade and aesthetics in the echo chamber of business schools, entrepreneurial growth regimes roll out identical spatial templates of festival marketplaces selling the same products, trophy architecture reflecting whatever international style happens to be in vogue, trendy street art by renowned graffiti artists whose all-star client lists include cities from every part of the globe, world-class museums hosting the same traveling exhibitions of the celebrity artist du jour, boutiques, galleries, bistros which are virtually identical in appearance and feel wherever you go.

The touristification and branding of place operate in the realm of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital." They subordinate the basic stuff of culture to the totalizing logic of capital, while at the same time enabling aspiring groups to challenge existing hierarchies and stake a claim to power and legitimacy.

The evidence of touristification and branding are hiding in plain view, though seeing it requires immersing yourself in the crowd. While I like to think of myself as a leftist traveler and documentary photographer rather than a selfie-snapping tourist, many of the destinations on my itinerary have been either popular tourist spots or are working very hard to become such. Often, I feel like an undercover agent as I try to blend into the tourist crowd for some candid shots, outfitted in my backwards baseball cap, t-shirt and sneakers, to say nothing of compact, street camera which I bought because it looks like a smartphone, the universal tourist appendage.

Some of the places I have documented are as far off the beaten tourist path, both geographically and culturally, as one can imagine. Yet even here I come across place branding. Take the above photo as a case in point. Bombay Beach is a curious place about which you will learn more in "Desert Waterscapes." It is one part dying beach resort, one part toxic waste dump, one part squatters' colony, one part transgressive arts haven and one part "Don't Tread on Me" stronghold with its middle finger pointed straight up in defiance of the straight world. The billboard whose four skiing goddesses welcome visitors to the community may be a DIY foray into place branding by the elders of Bombay Beach or a cheeky parody of it. This is Bombay Beach, so you never know what's for real and what's a joke.

I'll sign off by cutting and pasting something I wrote in "About this Website."

If place is defined as meaningful space and if meaning lies at the heart of culture, what we are now witnessing as a result of global travel, tourism and place branding is the commodification of culture, meaning and place on an unprecedented scale. To put it differently, the places where we make our lives, and the meanings we attach to these places, are being rapidly reconfigured around the needs of capital not people.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE, BRAND, TOURISM

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist