Place Marketing as Politics: The Limits of Neoliberalism

Place marketing of cities is commonly seen as helping localities attract the groups they need for their future, whether they are investors, house buyers, developers or tourists. The argument in this chapter is that place marketing should also 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 labor and capital. Since the 1970s, place marketing has been associated with the transformation of industrial cities during the transition from social democracy to neoliberalism, a politics that gave coherence to place branding in the form with which we are all familiar. While urban place marketing is concerned with the economic health of a particular city, it is none the less inextricably linked to the dynamics of the neoliberal settlement which strengthened capital and weakened the working class. This settlement is multifaceted, spanning measures to destabilize the working class, to create a global financial infrastructure that permitted the out-movement and privatization of industry, to weaken the welfare state, to promote hypermobility for capital and labor through globalization, and to oversee the creation of a business-friendly environment at the national, regional and local levels.