State Licence, Local Settlements, and the Politics of ‘Branding’ the City

The author explores the changing institutional landscape of English cities. Manchester is used to illustrate how a particular local settlement’ was forged between institutions and actors in the city: a combination of national policy diktat and guidelines and local political negotiation. Marketing Manchester is analysed to assess how the arrival of new (national) institutions and the growth of the (local) partnership model of development affected local policy, and to examine how a consensus emerged around the need for a marketing organisation to promote and sell the city. On one hand, the formation and practices of Marketing Manchester are located within the local politics of Manchester. On the other hand, the author explains the failure of Marketing Manchester as a result of tensions and change in the local and the national political terrain. The election of New Labour in the General Election of 1 May 1997 in part shaped local responses to the slogans and campaigns of Marketing Manchester. The cultural élite that formed in opposition to Marketing Manchester took part both in the ‘high politics' of ‘rebranding’ Manchester and in the low politics' of political hedging, as leading actors in Marketing Manchester became cast, within local political circles, as politically obsolete because of the change in national politics. The author argues that there is a complex relationship between how national political change structures local political actors and how local regeneration experiments shape national policy.