- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
- CONTACT
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 last tab could easily come away thinking that place is an idyllic 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, travel/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.
Let me begin by letting you in on a little secret. Capitalism in Place was not the original title I chose for this website. Branding Capitalism in Place was my first pick. Why? Because I believed that the visual evidence of place branding in the photos I had taken was strong enough to justify putting Branding on the website's marquee. I was eventually dissuaded by the good folks at GoDaddy, my website host, who advised me to keep the domain name short, the shorter the better. While most of the website's potential viewers would be able to remember a domain name of three words, they said, four would be testing the limits of short-term memory in the age of social media. Regretfully, I hit the delete key. Branding ended up on the cutting-room floor.
And here's another secret. At about the same time that Branding was axed, I decided to add the subtitle A Marxist Travel Guide. Because the subtitle was not part of the domain name, it did not face the same word-count restrictions. I took the deal, swapping Branding in the title for Travel in the subtitle. Being able to sneak Marxist into the subtitle was an added bonus.
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 guaranteed rights to participate in governance, nor as members of a broader public motivated by multiple and sometimes conflicting identities. Rather, they are viewed as "stakeholders" whose lives are impacted by decisions made about the place where they live. In business speak, stakeholders straddle the divide between engaged actors and concerned spectators, in stark contrast with shareholders who own pieces of the place/corporation which is being branded.
Yet those proficient in the language of place branding are careful to avoid using terms like shareholder, board of directors or CEO, despite subscribing to a textbook model of corporate governance which they probably encountered as first-year students in their MBA programs. This is rather like discussing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Why are these corporate keywords taboo? Because they raise dangerous questions about who owns and governs a place—in short, questions about class privilege and economic inequality. What the professional gurus of place branding offer is a sanitized model of corporate governance in which it is never clear who serves as the CEO, who sits on the board of directors and who are the voting shareholders of the place being branded. A world of places is reduced to a world of stakeholders.
The business and discourse of place branding have also burrowed into the academy, as my snarky MBA reference suggests. 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 teach, is a formidable figure on the public stage for reasons that have less to with higher education than with higher property values. (GSU is arguably the number-one driver of the commercial and residential real estate markets in downtown Atlanta.)
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. Let's call it the place-branding-industrial complex.
This complex sees travel, tourism and place branding as interlocking parts of a virtuous circle. To take just one example, Bloom Consulting, founded by a Portuguese entrepreneur in 2003 and with a worldwide client list, boasts of having 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 see the value of the services on offer Bloom has developed a visual aid called 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 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 first three benefits go to the usual suspects in the business sector, the fourth to members of the high-tech "creative class" trumpeted by urbanist Richard Florida and the fifth to "the general public," a catch-all for the vast majority of stakeholders 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.
Like Boom and the place-branding industry in general, I see travel, tourism and place branding as interlocking parts of a circle. But the circle I see is embedded in another larger circle, whether virtuous or vicious is for you to decide. 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 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 it does 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.
Place branding and travel/tourism are thereby subsumed by the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital. This is a topic that Bloom has every incentive to avoid addressing since its consultancy fees depend on convincing clients that place branding provides a quick fix to the escalating crises of urban life. As hyped by professional consultants and academic specialists, place branding offers the promise of some magical "Central Idea" which operates outside the laws of motion of capital, a kind of open sesame to sustainable growth, technological dynamism and multicultural openness.
This is a false promise and a sign of desperation not hope.
To understand why we must place travel, tourism and place branding in the larger context of capitalist restructuring 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.
Bombay Beach, Salton Sea, California (from "Desert Waterscapes")