Postcard-perfect: the Big Business of City Branding

Image is everything when it comes to global city brands – but who is this frenzied exercise in image-control actually for?

The Sydney Opera House has wings. The BurjKhalifa in Dubai is the tallest building in the world. Shanghai’s Pudong boasts a 21^st century skyline of bubbles, crowns and globes. These buildings are designed to be instantlyrecognisable, a signature brandfor both their city and their architect. But if every city has them – and they all hire the same elite group of architects to design them – how unique can cities’ images be?

Yet uniqueness is the goal of city branding, which during the past few years has grown into a global industry connected to tourism and the media-sports-and-entertainment complex. Originally a promotional scheme meant to lure new residents, city branding is now a slogan tied to a public relations campaign to make the places where we live into “destinations”. As always with branding, image is everything.

But competition between cities acceleratesthe need for image-making so that no city can ever win. If the brand process begins with “a desire to be extraordinary”, as one place-branding agency suggests, then predictably … every city turns out to be “extraordinary”.

So how did this counterproductive exercise in collective egotism begin? Cities have long had visual “brands”: from tourist photos to scenes in a film, our mental postcards of a city become the DNA of its essence; with endless repetition, this essence becomes a meme or a logo for the city’s brand. Think of postcards made around 1900 of the engineering marvel of the Eiffel Tower, or the fantasy pavilions at Coney Island, and the famous photo of the Flatiron Building by Alfred Steiglitz. These are powerful city images.

But city branding as a discipline proper was born in the industrial decline and fiscal stress of the 1970s. It was led by efforts in New York, which hit the limits of a diminishing tax base and vanishing bank loans in 1975 and was pushed to the brinkof municipal bankruptcy. During the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan promoting an era of pro-business exuberance, cities became more entrepreneurial, too. They chased the mobile capital that was let loose by deregulation of financial markets and was concentrated in the sovereign funds of oil-rich states.

Cities didn’t have much choice. Abandoned by local companies eager to merge with much larger corporations and outsourcing production to wherever they could pay low wages and taxes and avoid government regulation, city managers turned to self-promotion. They pursued the “three Ts”: trade, talent and tourists.

But the old images, devised when cities were actively making products rather than consuming them, were no longer attractive, or even accurate. The slogan “New York, Empire City” reflected a time after the completion of the Erie Canal in the 1820s, when goods were shipped into New York’s port and then taken further west to Ohio by barge. In 1914 the poet Carl Sandburg called Chicago “hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat,” when the city’s stockyards and factories were the economic engine – and human cesspool – of the entire Midwest.

The more abstract “I (Heart) New York” slogan was created in the 1970s, in conjunction with a family-friendly tourism campaign. By the 1990s, every city wanted to be like New York: to be seen, in other words, as clean, safe and “open for business”. The worldwide tourism industry was rapidly growing, and the concept of top-dog, “global” cities was gaining ground, fed by academic researchers on the one hand, and widely read “best city” lists on the other. From Las Vegas to Seoul, city governments reshaped their convention and visitors’ bureaus into more professional, market- savvy organisations, revved up their advertising budgets and hired brand consultants to show them the ropes.

Globalisation accelerated the branding process. Organisations such as the modern Olympics, UNESCO World Heritage Centre and European Capitals of Culture, all of them founded to promote ideals like friendship among nations and preservation of nature and culture, were soon seen as catalysts of economic growth for cities. International cooperation led to intense competition, as cities elbowed each other aside in the bid for coveteddesignations that would put them in the spotlightof global media.

The benefits have been mixed. If the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona sparked a big jump in public-sector investment and created a brand-new city image, other Olympic sites – Athens, Sydney – have not been so lucky. Kraków, the European Cultural Capital in 2000, was ranked just 30^th out of 46 European cities on Saffron brand consultants' 2008 European city brand “barometer”, tied with Cardiff and Chişinău, the capital of Moldova.

Branding can also be a political liability, if local people and politicians see it as diverting scarce resources from public goods like housing, sewage systems and transportation. Huge demonstrations swept Brazil in 2014 to protest the money being spent to ready Rio for its moment in the sun (the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics). In Cape Town, 2014 World Design Capital, a decision on the city’s new logo and branding slogan was delayed until after the next general election because of discord between political parties over the costs.

Consultants advise cities to begin branding by cataloguing their strategic assets. This is a complex process: it involves asking a wide range of stakeholders what they feel about their city, and comparing their reactions to those of potential consumers, who hold no stake in the city at all. There is, of course, some overlap. Everyone likes clean streets, low crime rates and the sense of well-being that is exuded by pleasant public places. Yet the everyday authenticity that city residents enjoy may not match the heightened, “staged authenticity” that Dean MacCannell described in his classic 1976 critique The Tourist.

Modern-day cities, with New York again in the lead, are gentrifying their old quarters, replacing dive bars with Starbucks and turning whatever old buildings remain into malls and museums. There’s a big difference between this programmed “authenticity” and the “soul” of a neighbourhood, founded on everyday routines and local character that is so low-key, most residents are not conscious of it at all.

By contrast, Saffron’s model defines a city’s uniqueness in terms of a “pervading sense of exoticism”. The highly desirable “Ooh, I could live here” reaction is identified as “the Barcelona effect”. Yet what could be less desirable if you already live there?

Branding, to be crass, is a means of selling a place – a building, a district or a city. Capitalising on image demands metrics, and metrics imply control – of the image, the message and, ultimately, the men and women who flesh out the image: us. In the end, the most important metrics in city branding are increases in property values and tourist spending. Yet these are not necessarily good for city dwellers, especially rental tenants and people who depend on public services that may beunderfunded while municipal budgets are diverted to creating and maintaining tourist attractions.

So I’m happy for the cities whose global brands are strong. But ooh, I’m not sure I want to live there.

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