Associazione Italiana di Scienze Regionali XXVIII Confenza Scientifica Annuale Lo sviluppo territoriale nellUnione Europea Obiettivi, strategie, politiche

Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, September 26th30rd 2007 Marketing the Creative Berlin and the Paradox of Place Identity. Ares Kalandides, National Technical University of Athens/INPOLIS, Berlin, kalandides@inpolis.de ABSTRACT Competitiveness among regions has become one of those words that almost unquestioned have dominated the language of urban policy makers in the recent years. In the growing competition among cities, each one is trying to define its USP and market it appropriately. Branding cities, though not a new strategy to secure a good position in a competitive environment, has reached new dimensions in the past decade, with interdisciplinary professionals joining hands to improve the citys image. Their aim is to attract investment, tourism or inhabitants that will ultimately lead to more jobs and sustainable growth. Creativity is one of these fashionable brands and many cities see in it an opportunity for future growth. Yet, by highlighting and communicating one of the possible identities of a place we potentially obscure or marginalize others. Berlin is no exception to the rule. Since German reunification in 1990 it has been undergoing a fundamental structural change, from an industrial to a service-oriented economy. The massive loss of industrial jobs and the growing deficit have forced it to look for new economical fields. At the same time the city has been building an image of a young, dynamic and creative place. Place marketers focus their efforts on assessing and promoting the creative economy on the one hand and on sustaining the conditions necessary to its well-being on the other. By focusing on Berlins marketing as a creative city, in this paper, I am examining first of all the structure of city marketing in the city, the stakeholders involved, their forms of operation and their strategies. I am then highlighting the sector of creative industries particularly design to discern the specificity of Berlin against the background of the international discourse on creativity. I finally tackle two broader sets of questions: How can we deal with the tension between the need to communicate a clear place image for marketing purposes and the respect for a places multiple identities? Is competitiveness the only way of looking at the relations between places or are there alternatives? There

are conceptualisations of space that suggest that other approaches are indeed possible. Introduction As neo-liberalism sweeps the world, cities are increasingly expected to think and act as businesses (Harvey 1989). In the growing competition between them, the entrepreneurial cities develop strategies to attract investment, tourists and inhabitants (van der Berg and Braun 1999). Rank-lists are published (Lever 1999), where cities are assessed as being creative, dynamic, tolerant, cool, hip - or according to other criteria, directly linked to image (Florida 2002). As the city - or parts of it - are turned into a commodity, the task is to package it properly and sell it. Branding cities- i.e. the creation of an image - though not a new strategy, has reached new dimensions in the past decade, with interdisciplinary professionals joining hands to improve the citys ranking. But branding also means reducing a citys complexity and ambiguity to a simplified picture that can be easily transported (Philo and Kearns 1993). Also, changes in perception can entail direct material and social side-effects that are easily overlooked by marketing. How can a city solve this dilemma, find a way to survive the international competition and at the same time respect its own internal contradictions, the complexity of its population, its differences and conflicts? This paper examines city marketing in Berlin, Germany. Berlin is as multi-faceted as any large city, but with the particularity of having to practically re-invent itself after reunification. With the city being at the brink of bankruptcy , new concepts of private-public-partnership in place marketing have been implemented since the early 1990s, thus giving the private sector a new influence in city branding. This, theoretically increases the risk of a one-dimensional marketing, oriented towards profit and excluding everything else. Yet, the multiplicity of actors involved in it, seems to hinder this oversimplifying approach. And though, of course, most things are commodified for the needs of image, there is still margin for individual action in the fissures of a not-so-compact marketing strategy. Distinctiveness, Branding and the ambiguity of identity Even if city marketing is little more than a new terminology for a set of techniques which have remained basically unchanged (Paddison, 1993: 340), it has seen, in the past fifteen years or more, an institutionalization and professionalization that clearly puts it in a different light. In spite of the different ways it is understood and implemented in different places, there seems to be a general agreement about its 2

position in the competition among places (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990, Gold and Ward 1994, Lever 1999, van den Berg and Braun 1999). The terms marketing and promotion are mostly used interchangeably, while branding and distinctiveness seem to find an increasingly central position in the whole discussion. Lets look at this terminology a bit closer. Ole B. Jensen (Jensen 2006: 86-87) sees three characteristics that distinguish city from product marketing: first, that in city marketing there is a much higher number of stakeholders and their related interests, secondly that there is the challenging task of negotiation local values as to focus on a locally legitimate value base, thirdly, that it has to write on top of existing notions of place and the historical place-based identities anchored in the location and fourthly that branding has to serve diverse groups of potential investors, residents and tourists. It not the aim of this paper to insist on the difference between these two types of marketing, but it may be helpful to ask whether the term place marketing reduces a much more complex mechanism to the action of selling. Or as Kavaratzis and Ashworth (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005) put it very few marketing specialists have given much thought to its application to places, treated as products, and, if they do, they too easily assume that places are just spatially extended products that require little special attention as a consequence of their spatiality (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005: 507). Marketing is not only about selling a product (which is what sales does), but also about forming it to suit the consumer. It would be extremely hard to prove that the product, i.e. the city in this case, is formed to suit the needs of its marketing, though I would not like to exclude the possibility that there are cases where this happens. Bernt and Holm e.g. believe that the gentrification of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin was at a certain degree the result of city marketing (Bernt and Holm 2002, but s. also Swyngedow et al. 2002). Kavaratzis and Ashworth go one step further and ask for that to happen: that city branding objectives be built into the place. At the same time [branding] demands associating the place with stories about the place [..] First, the stories need to be built into the place, not least by planning and design interventions, infrastructure development and the organisational structure and, subsequently they can and must be communicated through the more general attitude of the place and through promotional activities (2005: 512). Greg Schrock and Ann Markusen argue that one important way of thinking about urban development is in terms of distinctiveness (Schrock and Markusen 2006: 51) and distinguish between productive distinctiveness, consumptive distinctiveness and identity distinctiveness (idem 52-53). They agree that the third 3

type is extremely hard to measure, but suspect that it is an important, if underappreciated, dimension of how firms and households make choices about where to live, work and invest. (idem 53). Kavaratzis and Aswhorth add that branding is more than distinctiveness: it is the forging of associations (2005: 508). In more general terms: A place needs to be differenciated through unique brand identity if It wants to be first, recognized as existing, second, perceived in the minds of place consumers as possessing qualities superior to those of competitors, and third, consumed in a manner commensurate with the objectives of the place (Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2005:510). But the idea of a place possessing qualities or having objectives suggests that there is something intrinsically special in its nature. This is an essentialist approach that ignores the ways place is constantly produced and contested, and the ways identity is always in the making (s. for example Massey 1994, 2005). The question then, when talking about cities, is whether every attempt to articulate identity distinctiveness sounds simplistic and essentialist. This way, the goal of city marketing to isolate and tap distinctiveness, seems per definition impossible, as it would mean taking a snapshot in space and time, of a material which, just a moment later, will have mutated again. But before I get into branding again, let us see how city marketing is implemented in Berlin. Introducing Berlin: What, to whom, by whom and how? Berlin in 1990. Reunification euphoria sweeps the land; People dance on the Wall; they fall into each others arms; East and West Germans join hands to built a common future; World War II, the Cold War the past are buried and gone. Or arent they? Is there maybe a different story to be told? The tale of two cities East and West Berlin both at the brink of bankruptcy, each one for its own reasons? The story of two peoples with their resemblance, but also their mistrust for each other? And finally the ever-present past, the city as the stage of the Third Reich crimes or as the materialization of the Cold War through the Wall? In the meanwhile, neo-liberal globalization is galloping (almost) unhindered around the world. The end of soviet-type republics meant the fall of the last barrier inside Europe and the opening of new labour and consumer markets. There is no other beyond the Wall any longer, just a world to be conquered and colonized. Cheap labour flows into the West in the form of immigrants or refugees and temporarily boosts the economy. But soon businesses find that they dont have to wait for it to come to them they can go where cheap or/and unprotected labour is to be found, alongside with flexible work regulations and low environmental 4

standards. Western European cities compete among each other to attract the decision-makers of globalization Eastern ones to attract the businesses that flee the West. In the midst of all this, Berlin is trying to built up its economy on clay feet. With New York, London or Tokyo being the leaders in globalization, it has few chances of becoming a seat of decision-makers. With a West German welfare state, it has no chances of offering cheap labour. Who can it compete with? And in what? Or why compete at all? It is more than just an economic question, it is an identity crisis. The world does not look at Berlin, the way it looks at London or New York as a world class city or at Paris or Rome cities of European history. Berlin is trapped between a dark past and an unstable future. Its own identity crisis is perceived by others as a blurred image. Who is this city, now emerging out of isolation? What is the image, the distinctiveness which city marketing wants to communicate? Also who does it want to communicate it to? Groups that targeted by city marketing are firms, workers and residents as Schrock and Markusen put it (Schrock and Markusen 2006: 51). In order to reach their goals and attract these groups cities use more or less professional mechanisms and put together more or less professional structures to implement them. Exactly why are these groups targeted and through what institutions? With the fall of the Wall, Berlin was a city of 3.4 million inhabitants. Statistics expected it to grow up to 5 by the year 2010. Accordingly planners concocted a Masterplan (Flchenutzungsplan ) that came into action in 1994 (Senatsverwaltung 1994). There was space for densification in the city centre, some controlled growth in the periphery; new buildings would be erected to house the new inhabitants, old ones would be refurbished and office complexes would offer new possibilities to businesses. But population growth appears to be an illusion. By 1997 there were clear signs that there was a decline (Huermann and Kapphan 2002:95), a trend that slowed down a bit after 2000, but is expected to continue in the next few years. Developers are the first to feel the lack of demand that this entails. In 1990 there is hope that businesses will move to Berlin. Though there are no real good reasons for it, the Berlin Masterplan reserves 21 surfaces in the heart of the city for industry (Senatsverwaltung 1994). Berlin was once one of the largest industrial cities in Europe, why shouldnt it become that again? Isnt the government soon relocating from Bonn to Berlin? Dont businesses want to be close to the centres of power? Apparently not. Some companies do open up a small office in the capital and a couple of lobbyists actually move there. But new jobs are not created. On the contrary, in the first years after Reunification east German industry 5

closes down (or is closed down) and unemployment grows steadily to reach almost 20% (Statistisches Landesamt Berlin 2005a) in 2005. There is a lot of hope in tourism. Where Berlins past seems to be an obstacle in creating a positive identity, it attracts tourists. As it often happens, history is reduced to consumable images and symbols: the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, Hitlers bunker. Tourists are expected to boost the hospitality and retail business and thus create turnover and jobs. The plan seems to work. There is a significant growth in tourism, (Statistisches Landesamt Berlin 2005b) peaking in 2006 with the Football World Cup and still growing in 2007. Tourism services in the form of information offices is something very common even in the smallest German town. Active marketing policy, including campaigns of all types, are usually to be found in regions or larger cities. In Berlin it is the privatepublic-partnership organization called BTM (Berlin Tourismus Marketing) responsible for promoting Berlin as a tourist destination (http://www.btm.de). A quick view at their profile and their target groups is astonishing: travel groups, families, youths, gays & lesbians, seniors, adults only (sic!), seniors, handicapped, business travellers, congress participants. What is striking of course is the very conscious attempt at diversity (on this s. also Hoffman 2003). The main city marketing organization is Berlin Partners, a public-private-partership, where the city of Berlin, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the Berlin state bank, almost 150 mostly medium size companies, but also universities and other educational organizations participate in a broad network of partners. Their scope of action is very wide: it includes promoting Berlin as a business location and a political decision-making centre, as a city of creativity, technology and education, but also assist potential investors and enhance export (http://www.berlinpartner.de). Besides these two larger organizations, the administration itself, both at federal, state and municipality level pursue their own city marketing policy, have their own contacts and political agendas. Cultural foundations as for example the GoetheInstitute or organizations such as the Berlin Trade Fair Centre, that both do their on place marketing, add to the complexity of the picture. A large portion of the literature on city marketing focuses on events (Kearns 1993; Waitt 1999; Gotham 2002; Gotham 2005; Stevenson, Rowe and Markwell 2005) and advertising (Gold and Ward 1994 ) as the main instruments of city marketing. 6

But these are just the obvious ones. There is a lot more to it, not always visible from the outside. Business development works through networking, relations, lobbying, promises. Tourism through contracts, business policies and events far outside the physical borders of the city . Inhabitants are attracted by complex things like quality of life or lifestyle . While Berlins marketers were searching for a leitmotiv that could target several different groups and tackle a wide range of themes at the same time, a new buzz word started dominating large portions of the international discourse on cities. It is a word that seems to catch the essence of a lot of the above and which, through its vagueness, leaves enough space for many possible strategies or political-ideological interpretations: this of creativity. Through two separate campaigns (Berlin, City of Change or Berlin by Berlin Partners and, Berlin, Berlin wir fahren nach Berlin by the BTM, both introduced in 2007) the city is now focussing on creativity as content and on the creative class as the target group. An analysis of these strategies would be the subject of another paper. What I am trying to show here is that on the one hand Berlin simply follows an international fashion, but on the other there are good reasons to believe that marketing Berlin as a creative city is not a bad idea at all. The creative Berlin One of the few economic segments that have evolved positively in the past few years in Berlin are the creative industries. Creative industries are defined as a profit-oriented segment and thus cover all enterprises, entrepreneurs, and selfemployed persons producing, marketing, distributing, and trading profit-oriented cultural and symbolic goods. In 2005, 21,000 small and medium-sized enterprises produced a GDP of 8 billion in Berlin, a share of 11 % of Berlins total GDP. In creative industries, 100,000 employees represent a significant labour market. In 2004, most of the enterprises were in the art market (24 %), book- and publications market (22 %) and the segment of architecture (13 %). The strong position of the art market is based on the high number of design offices selfemployed artists. The number of enterprises increased between 1998 and 2004 by approximately 4,000 start-ups, (approx. 18%). Especially the segments software (+1, 280 enterprises), book and publishing market (+1,120 enterprises) film and television production (+312 enterprises) and music industry (+300 enterprises) performed positively. On the contrary, the number of architectural offices decreased (Senatsverwaltung 2005; 2006).

Of course not all segments in the creative industries field perform equally well: From an economic point of view, Berlin recently demonstrates that only few sectors (mainly design production, fashion, and music industry) have developed positively and than not only on an image level: increased number of employees, start-ups in the field of design, fashion, and music production have led to rapid change of the urban fabric. In November 2005 UNESCO appointed Berlin as the first city in Europe to the Creative Cities Network under the framework of UNESCOs Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity awarded Berlin the title of City of Design. The Creative Cities Network is designed to forge new models of public/private partnerships at city level that can help to unlock the creative, social, and economic potential of cultural industries. As the first German city to be appointed to the Network, Berlin has demonstrated remarkable social, economic, and cultural achievements in the field of design. With a good grasp of the economic impact of its design industry, the city of Berlin stands out as an example in coordinating policy, training and networking support for its stakeholders. Berlin is up-andcoming in many different design sectors. Almost 11,700 Berliners work in fashion, product and furniture design, architecture, photography, and the visual arts, while the roughly 6,700 design companies generate annual sales of 1.5 billion (Senatsverwaltung 2006). The surroundings, space, and excellent basic conditions here lay the foundation for creative work and the development of innovative products. Designers, fashion designers, photographers, and architects, according to the UNESCO evaluation of Berlins design industry, find artistic freedom, affordable office space and living costs, networks, as well as a public interested in design. In the segment of design production the number of entrepreneurs has tripled between 1993 and 2003. In 2003, 80% of them act as micro-entrepreneurs with less than three employees, 50 % of them have less than 15.000 yearly turnover (IDZ 2003). The crash of the so-called New Economy in the years 2001/2 had tremendous impact on the development of this professional group. In 2000 and 2001, 186 new companies had been founded in the design sector of Berlin; in 2003 only 48 enterprises were founded and many employees lost their jobs and had to move in new directions. Krtke (Krtke 2002: 139) underpins this observation in the framework of his study of Berlins media economy: the number of media and communication designers play a key role in this sector, which in Germany grew between 1994-1998 by 6%, and in Berlin by almost 10%. (idem). These key figures demonstrate structural data about a relatively new and in the last years growing professional group. In the last year, the design sector grew substantially without being directly pushed or supported by the city administration. This unexpected and by the Berlin Senate 8

(the city government) in the beginning neglected dynamic field of action has forced the public administration to rethink their political agenda: While focusing on the potential of self-organised and completely independently operating creativebased service segment, the public administrative sector had to find appropriate ways to govern these growing knowledge and creativity based economies.1 A lot of the above suggests that there is indeed creative potential in Berlins economy. Yet, the figures alone do not necessarily support those who see in the creative economy the citys only future. The precariousness of small and medium size enterprises (and especially micro-companies) are a sign of high instability and existential risks. But if creativity itself is not yet such an important economic motor for the city, why deal with it altogether? A fast, definitely oversimplifying look at the whole discourse on creativity may help discern what is at stake here and why Creative Cities are so popular among marketers. There is a lot to be said for and against it, but it is not in the scope of this paper. In the following section I will try to place the debate in context and identify some of its elements that make it particularly interesting for city marketing. Creative Industries, Creative Cities, the Creative Class and Culturpreneurs. There are two lines of thought that have gained ground since the 1990s and that can be seen as fundamental preconditions for the creative cities debate: the spatial turn and the knowledge society. The former has reasserted the spatial dimension of social phenomena and the second has focused on the importance of knowledge in post-industrial societies. On this fertile ground new knowledge geographies were developed to examine the spatial dimensions of knowledge. Richard Floridas very influential book (at least among city managers) The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida 2002) appears in this context at the right moment: in the year 2002 space has been rehabilitated, innovation and knowledge have advanced to new promising fields. Floridas particular success may have been the product of a mix of innovative thoughts, interesting empirical data, perfect understanding of the zeitgeist, popular language, simplistic banalities, professional self-marketing or do-it-yourself recipes for cities. Yet, its a fact that we can not think of creativity today without him. Central to his thought is the importance of place even in a globalized world: a rather vaguely defined creative class, which is the future of our cities, chooses and appropriates urban living space with particular characteristics. For city managers then, the task would be to understand

For a more detailed analysis of the creative industries in Berlin see Kalandides and Lange 2007, where most of this information is taken from. 9

these characteristics in order to influence them or plan them accordingly. For Florida the three main criteria that will decide upon a citys life or death are the famous three Ts: Talent, Technology und Tolerance. There is of course something tautological here (talents are attracted to a place because of the presence of talents) and we also have to admit that there is nothing really new in making the connection between talent, technology and growth. Nevertheless his position on the importance of tolerance is quite tempting. But what does it mean? Put simply it means that the creative class will go where it finds a tolerant society. Quantitative data that Florida and his team collected in a number of American cities seem to support this position. The so called immigrant index and gay index show a correlation between tolerance and creativity. Cities, if they dont want to shrink and die, have to be open towards minorities. But who is creative or who are the creative groups leaving aside the word class? There seems to be a certain confusion here, because depending on the author and her/his political position different definitions are possible. Looking for a common core among them there is a certain overlapping: it seems that all professions based on knowledge can be defined as creative in the wider sense. In that sense, for John Howkins (Howkins 2001) it is the question of copyright that is central in creativity: professions based on copyright define the creative economy. It could be new products, new processes, new ideas in short innovation. If governments want to create a sustainable context for the Creative Economy they should deal with copyright questions. For Charles Landry (Landry 2000) creativity is the very essence of humans and its all about facilitating and empowering it. Creative Cities are the cities than can bring forth, activate and tap this creativity. In Berlin creativity is often used as a synonym for culture. Creative professions are artistic professions. For the Berlin administration there is no clear distinction between cultural and creative industries (Senatsverwaltung 2005) and as it was already mentioned above the main focus lies on design. I will try to show in the next sections of this paper that this vagueness of terms may finally be an advantage in city branding. There are an element that always dominates the discussion as soon as there is talk of creativity industries: lifestyle. It is based on ethnological observations on the life of the creatives: fragmented biographies, constant new self-invention, flexibility, precariousness, living in projects and networks. Their spaces are semi-public cafs, clubs, parties their time is hybrid both leisure and working time (Lange 2005a; 2005b; 2007; Friebe and Lobo 2006).

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There is a term that very well describes the particular situation of some of the creative businesses and is developed by Lange (Lange 2005a; 2005b; 2007): the term of culturpreneur. The term was first suggested by Davies/Ford (Davies and Ford 1998:13) following Pierre Bourdieus typological notion of an entrepreneur who embodies various forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986:241). It is a portmanteau word, comprising both the cultural and the entrepreneur. The term culturepreneur describes an urban protagonist who possesses the ability to mediate between and interpret the areas of culture and of service provision. There is as yet no adequate professional category for the curator, communication manager, trend scout, interaction designer who is transparently multi-skilled and ever willing to pick up new forms of expertise. He or she may then be characterised, first and foremost, as a creative entrepreneur, someone who runs clubs, record shops, fashion shops, galleries, and other outlets, who closes gaps in the urban with new social, entrepreneurial and socio-spatial practices. Such knowledge and information based intermediaries increasingly emerged in the gallery, art and multimedia scene in different European metropolises. Summing up the above, there are several elements in the creativity discussion that are interesting for city branding in general, but also particularly relevant in the case of Berlin: Firstly, and this is very interesting for city marketers, managers and other urban professionals worldwide, place matters again. Our cities are not interchangeable, but have particular characteristics that when identified and influenced properly can help them survive in the international competition. Secondly, in a post-industrial western world, knowledge and innovation are recognized as basic growth motors, that may give new chances even to cities with a weak industrial basis, such as Berlin. Thirdly, creativity has strong connotations of a particular (artsy) lifestyle with a subtext of freedom, individuality etc. Space and time become hybrid as work and leisure blend. Berlins highly cultural and hedonistic atmosphere seems to sum that up perfectly. Fourth, culturpreneurs are flexible and entrepreneurial. They represent a new paradigm of a postfordist society and are thus excellent for city marketing and in attracting businesses. Berlin can re-brand itself from the city of the old German protectionism to the city of the new millennium. Finally, diversity and tolerance become economic entities. They are drawn out of a political discourse to become apoliticized and central in attracting a new kind of elite, the creative class. Berlin as a multicultural and gay-friendly city scores high in both fields. There are many reasons to feel discomfort reading this short catalogue. Is creativity the Trojan horse of neo-liberalism? Does it re-label precariousness as 11

freedom, urban poverty as an artsy lifestyle? Is it the demise of collective action and the final victory of individualism? Or is it simply an attempt at coming to terms with the turmoil of western societies in the post-industrial era, a survival strategy of those left outside the economic system? This is one of the many questions this paper will have to leave open2.Yet, creativity is a perfect example of a still rather open concept, that can be filled with meaning at will. There is still space for many different interpretations, and political perspectives. As long as it stays this way, it remains an inclusive rather than an exclusive notion. It seems to fit Berlins desire for a new image perfectly. Discussion (and some thoughts on competitiveness) Reading the above, Berlins situation becomes visible: On the one hand the city has a serious issue of image, but also concrete demographic and economic problems and thus needs some kind of action. On the other hand, place branding campaigns select out of several possible narratives and are thus reductionist and oversimplifying. They risk destroying exactly what makes a city most fascinating, namely its complexity and contradiction. Fortunately reality knows ways around intransigent quandaries. Even though city marketing itself may be oversimplifying, and probably the images created to fit different target groups may be just that, the multiplicity of oversimplified images is a diversity on its own. Or put in different words: numerous simple pictures produce a complex one. Even a quick look at the different target groups of tourism marketing mentioned above (lets take for example marketing tourism for family or for gays & lesbians) suggest a broad multiplicity of messages. More interesting still is the plurality, not of target groups and messages, but of the multiple actors involved in city marketing. This is not even a closed group, but one whose composition is constantly changing, one which is not even necessarily inside the physical borders of the city and whose actors may easily contradict each other. This approach is far from an essentialist understanding and communicating of identity . It grasps the way it is constantly constructed and contested. This does not mean that hegemonic relations do not exist. On the contrary: As different actors have different resources (mostly about money and networks) their degree of influence varies. Their access to media, the professionalism of their PR, the interests behind them are far from being equal. But if Berlin is branding a blurred image, how is it supposed to help a city in the international competition?

See Manske 2007 for a detailed discussion of this question. 12

We have good reasons to question competition itself and not to take it for granted. It is often seen as just being there, the way that natural disasters just happen and we need to adjust to them. This is a very dangerous rhetoric, since it presents competitiveness as the nature of man .That competition is also a social construct and that globalization is produced somewhere is thus obscured. It is the kind of argument that pushes flexibilization, reduces human rights, reproduces exploitation and depletes natural resources finally becoming a race to the bottom. As Christian Felber suggests (Felber 2006: 149-164) place competition knows many losers and few winners. Or in Harveys analysis of the entrepreneurial city (Harvey 1989) it simply fuels further rounds of speculative development, while strengthening transnational capital classes. There are alternatives, though, based on a radically different conceptualization of place: Central to this understanding is the way that space and place are conceptualized is the seminal work of Doreen Massey. First of all place is seen as constituted through human relations and practices, actions repeated in daily routines or habitualized in everyday life. These everyday spaces of action, e.g. do not take place in a fixed and predetermined empty container waiting to be filled, but are being produced and contested constantly. Secondly, and this goes far beyond the first point, place in its turn influences the social forces that have created it. It is not just a passive product, but becomes an constitutive agent of new social relations. Thirdly place is relative and relational (Massey 1994; 2004; 2005) rather than a bounded location. It is constituted through interconnections with rather than through opposition to other places. Finally, place is not seen as stasis, but as the point of negotiation and mutual constitution of space and time. All of the above leads to an understanding of place as the nodal point of interrelations through space/time. This by no means obliterates power relations as a constitutive element of this interrelatedness, but on the contrary enables us to examine them. This understanding of space has direct consequences on the conceptualization of place identities (the main focus of place branding). For Massey: If space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if we

make space through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local to the (so-called) global, then those spatial identities such as places, regions, nationals, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable in any absolute sense, and inevitably historically changing. (Massey 2004:1)

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In this sense, places are not only internally multiple, but are also the products and the agents of relations that spread way beyond them. In other words there is a responsibility of place for global phenomena. Following the same train of thoughts, one way of understanding the city would be as a network of social relations that reach far outside its physical borders. Doel and Hubbard (Doel and Hubbard 2002) suggest a type of city marketing based on this relational and relativized understanding of the term world city. They argue that [t]his is a conception of world cities where each city ceases to be a clearly defined, bounded spatial entity and is re-imagined as a assemblage of (more or less) distanciated social relations. (idem 354). This way place competition takes over a new meaning, since individuals or institutions important for a citys prosperity may well be far beyond its physical borders. Such a conceptualization entails a different way of understanding globalization and the position of cities in it: cities are not just the victims of globalization but active agents of its production: In this view local places are not simply always the victims of the global; nor are they always politically defensible redoubts against the global. For places are also the moments through which the global is constituted, invented coordinated, produced. They are agents in globalisation. (Massey 2004:11 emphasis in the original). Following this train of though, [i]nstead of a place-based politics of competition, we hold to a distributed politics of flow whose degree of concentration, dispersion, consistency and efficacy will be both contingent and context dependent (Doel and Hubbard 2002:363, emphasis in the original) and if city governors begin seeing cities as potential collaborators rather than competitors, then the possibility of a more radical form of urban politics may emerge. (idem 363). In other words, a more radical form of urban politics may mean that the agents of globalisation people, businesses, institutions have a responsibility that goes far beyond the physical borders of place. They are the conscious producers of competition of the same force that can ultimately be destructive. Prerequisite of a different city marketing concept would be a deep understanding of the interrelatedness between places. The consequence would be prioritizing cooperation and networks over competitive strategies. Ideally, city marketing would make itself redundant by not being marketing. More realistically though, what I am suggesting here is that radical conceptualization and critical self-reflexion may at least reduce side-effects. City marketing is in itself neither good nor bad. It is how you do it that can be either one. References

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