The Political Economy of City Branding

Globalization affects urban communities in many ways. One of its manifestationsis increased intercity competition, which compels cities to increase their attrac-tiveness in terms of capital, entrepreneurship, information, expertise andconsumption. This competition takes place in an asymmetric field, with citiestrying to find the best possible ways of using their natural and created assets, thelatter including a naturally evolving reputation or consciously developed compet-itive identity or brand.

The Political Economy of City Branding discusses this phenomenon from theperspective of numerous post-industrial cities in North America, Europe, EastAsia and Australasia. Special attention is given to local economic developmentpolicy and industrial profiling, and global city rankings are used to provideempirical evidence for cities’ characteristics and positions in the global urbanhierarchy. On top of this, social and urban challenges such as creative class strug-gle are also discussed.The core message of the book is that cities should apply the tools of city brand-

ing in their industrial promotion and specialization, but at the same time take intoaccount the special nature of their urban communities and be open and inclusivein their brand policies in order to ensure optimal results.This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in the areas of

local economic development, urban planning, public management and branding.

Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko is Adjunct Professor in the School of Management at theUniversity of Tampere, Finland. His research areas include local governance,global intercity competition, e-government, public sector innovations and high-tech centre research.

Routledge Advances in Regional Economics, Science andPolicy

1. Territorial Patterns of InnovationAn inquiry on the knowledge economy in European regionsEdited by Roberta Capello and Camilla Lenzi

2. The Political Economy of City BrandingAri-Veikko Anttiroiko

The Political Economy of CityBranding

Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko

First published 2014by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2014 Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko

The right of Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko to be identified as author of this work hasbeen asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and PatentAct 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing fromthe publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks orregistered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanationwithout intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataAnttiroiko, Ari-Veikko.The political economy of city branding / Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.1. City promotion. 2. Branding (Marketing) 3. Municipal government—Public relations. 4. Economic development. I. Title.HT325.A54 2014659.2’930776—dc232013030993

ISBN: 978-0-415-85945-5 (hbk)ISBN: 978-0-203-78218-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Romanby FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield

Contents

List of figures viList of tables viiPreface viiiAcknowledgements x

1 Introduction 1

2 Challenges of globalization 19

3 Global urban hierarchy and asymmetry 26

4 Underlying dynamics: city attraction hypothesis 34

5 Living in a branded world 47

6 City branding as a strategic tool 61

7 Economic profiles of post-industrial cities 97

8 From win-win situation to creative class struggle 142

9 New paradigm for urban management 153

10 Conclusion 163

References 168Index 197

Figures

2.1 Dynamic and institutional aspects of local–global dialectic 224.1 Overseas offices and promotion desks of Osaka Prefecture 394.2 Illustration of city attraction hypothesis 425.1 Strategic brand management process 595.2 The spectrum of branding alternatives 606.1 The 7A destination branding process 746.2 Touchpoints to deliver on the brand 797.1 City profile typology by main economic sectors 997.2 City profile pie: eight post-industrial economic city profiles 1087.3 Innovative clusters in Seoul 1237.4 From cluster identification to a brand: the case of Singapore 1408.1 Three dimensions of an attraction oriented policy trap 1469.1 Compromise-seeking procedure and optimal local solution 160

Tables

6.1 Global top 10 city brands 847.1 Structure of 2012 NAICS 1027.2 Examples of service and high-tech clusters derived from US

economic statistics of 2002 1037.3 Top 20 headquarter cities by total revenues 1107.4 Office presence of international companies by city 1117.5 Major financial centres in the world 1127.6 Top 10 global cities for business activity in 2010 1137.7 Top 10 global cities for human capital in 2010 1167.8 Cities with high intellectual capital and innovation 1177.9 City innovation ranking, 2012–13 1187.10 Airports ranked by international passenger traffic 1257.11 International meeting cities, 2009 1277.12 Top 20 shopping capitals by food and non-food sales 1307.13 Top 10 global cities for cultural experience in 2010 137

Preface

Thematically the first seeds of this book were planted in the early 1980s in thesense that my interest in marketing arose when I studied this subject in theBusiness College in Kokkola, Finland. While working for the municipality ofHimanka in the first half of the 1980s, I got first-hand experience of marketing inthe rural town context. While an undergraduate in Municipal Studies at theUniversity of Tampere a few years later, I was still interested in applying market-ing to local government, which actually became the topic of my Master’s thesis.Broad interest in the political economy of local government and also in compar-ative local government studies together with numerous visits, especially to EastAsian cities in the 2000s, increased my interest in the global view of local govern-ments. My teaching on global governance relations of local and regionalgovernments at my alma mater provided a good chance to deepen my under-standing of global intercity competition and its implications for local government.Visiting lectures on this topic in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK),the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), Hanoi, RitsumeikanUniversity, Kyoto, and in some workshops and conferences in different parts ofthe world provided opportunities to learn more about this topic and to get feed-back on my ideas from colleagues and students. One such occasion was thesession ‘Innovative cities in global competition’, which I organized withProfessor Nicos Komninos in the ‘Knowledge cities summit’ in Shenzhen inNovember 2009. The core topic of this book, city branding, came into the picturemore recently. My presentation ‘City branding as a response to global intercitycompetition’ at the third global conference on economic geography in Seoul insummer 2011, was an important turning point serving to fuse my interests withRoutledge’s ‘Advances in Regional Economics, Science and Policy’ series. Theidea turned quickly into a book project, resulting in the book at hand.My focus in this book is on branding in the context of the economic develop-

ment policy options of post-industrial cities. This is not a textbook on citybranding, but rather a book that points out how branding relates to economicdevelopment policy. In the post-industrial context this dilemma relates first andforemost to service sectors, which is sector-wise the primary focus in this book.This part of the book, even if not particularly practical in all respects, in any caseclosely resembles the normative or ‘government-advising’ approach to city

branding. This approach has its roots in my twenty-year involvement in localgovernment research, through which it became habitual to consider economic,administrative, political and social issues from the point of view of local govern-ment and even of the perspective of the top management of local government.The other side of political economy is more contextual and critical, relating tosuch topics as the city attraction hypothesis, global urban asymmetry and criticalremarks on city branding and creative city developments, which are good to keepin mind when considering industrial profiles and brand management issues. Mypersonal orientation towards city branding is positive. I see it as an essential stepin the sophistication of city marketing and local industrial policy. Yet I alsoacknowledge that it should be based on sufficient understanding of local govern-ments as locally rooted institutions of local choice, in which local people shouldbe given a voice and in which local reproductive functions must be given highpriority. In this sense, increased professionalism should develop hand in handwith community orientation.This journey has been intensive and exciting. While writing the book I worked

mostly in the pleasant environment of my university, working probably more inthe main library than in my office. I had already made several visits to most ofthe cities I write about in this book. However, I organized a special visit toSingapore in November 2012 to learn more about such issues as design in urbandevelopment policy. At that time I had a discussion with representatives of theDesignSingapore Council about Singapore’s approach to design as a part ofcreative city development. On the branding side I had a chance to benefit fromthe collections and pleasant environment of two libraries, The Lee Kong ChianReference Library at the National Library Building in Singapore and Thomas J.Long Business Library of Haas School of Business, University of California,Berkeley. I also followed branding guru and Haas Professor Emeritus DavidAaker’s presentation on branding at the Haas School in April 2013. I had anopportunity to discuss this topic with Professor Saskia Sassen and many othercolleagues at the 43rd Urban Affairs Association Conference in San Francisco inApril 2013, where I gave a presentation on ‘City attraction hypothesis and globalintercity competition’. That occasion provided an opportunity to learn more aboutSan Francisco’s economic development policy with Sean Randolph, Presidentand CEO of BayArea Council Economic Institute (BACEI). Discussions on post-industrialism and high-tech development on various occasions with ProfessorJohn Zysman of BRIE, University of California, Berkeley have been of specialimportance to my project.It is my sincere hope that my readers find this book inspiring and find at least

some points useful for their teaching or studying this topic or for working in thechallenging field of the promotion of local economic development.

Preface ix

Acknowledgements

The body of knowledge eventually condensed into a book is usually built up overseveral years. This is certainly the case with this book. I have received help andinspiration from many people long before this process began, as well as duringthe writing process. Numerous visits to various cities over the years – Athens,Barcelona, Beijing, Birmingham, Boston, Busan, Daejeon, Frankfurt, Glasgow,Hong Kong, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Manchester, New York, Osaka,Rome, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Tokyo, and manyothers – have been conducive to forming a general impression of global cities. Inthis respect the San Francisco Bay Area occupies a special place; I feel gratitudeto the colleagues and experts with whom over the years I have had stimulatingdiscussions, most notably with Professor John Zysman of University ofCalifornia, Berkeley and Sean Randolph, President and CEO of BACEI, SanFrancisco. In addition, Professor Emeritus William F. Miller, Professor EmeritusHenry S. Rowen and Associate Director Marguerite Gong Hancock of SPRIE,Stanford University, have inspired me to think outside of the box, while myTampere colleague Pekka Valkama and I were visiting scholars at SPRIE a fewyears ago. I have also had several enlightening discussions with ProfessorEmeritus Gerald Caiden of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Iam grateful for the help of Professor Barney Warf of the Geography Departmentof the University of Kansas, a co-editor of Growth and Change, for his help inimproving my article on the city attraction hypothesis to be published in Growthand Change in 2013/2014. I want to acknowledge also Professor Saskia Sassenfor the tips of how to go further with the analysis of space of flows. Lastly, onlinediscussions with James Heaton, President of the New York-based Tronvig Group,have been stimulating, concerning the nature of branding.Another direction of special importance to my work has for years been East

Asia, especially Japan and South Korea. From there I would like to thank first andforemost three colleagues: Professor Hiroyuki Mori of Ritsumeikan University,Kyoto, and Professors Hiroshi Toki and Akira Anami of Daito Bunka University,Tokyo. Professor Mori’s help in organizing visits to Rinku Town, Osaka BayArea, Osaka City (incl. Knowledge Capital), Kobe Biomedical InnovationCluster at Port Island of Kobe, City of Kyoto, Nagano and other places in Japanhas been especially invaluable for a city branding book project and for many

other projects in which I have been involved during the past few years. In thesame way I wish to thank my friend Tadakazu Nakamichi, a visiting associateprofessor at Digital Hollywood University (Graduate School), Osaka, who as anofficer of Osaka City Government taught me about the new developments in thecity, such as the Knowledge Capital project.A person worthy of special mention is my friend and colleague, Sang-Chul

Park, Professor at Graduate School of Knowledge-Based Technology and Energy,Korea Polytechnic University and Visiting Professor at Graduate School ofBusiness, Economics and Law, Gothenburg University. He kindly contributed tothis book by writing a section on the industrial policy of Seoul MetropolitanGovernment. I am also grateful to other Korean colleagues I have met in Seoul,Daejeon, Daegu and New Songdo City in Incheon, including long-servingPresident of the National Information Society Agency (NIA) and Professor atSunkyunkwan University Seang-Tae Kim, Professor Sang-Ho Lee of HanbatNational University, Professor Sun Phil Kwon at Mokwon University, ProfessorSung-Gul Hong of Kookmin University, Professor Mooyoung Han of SeoulNational University, Professor Surk-Tae Kim of Kyungpook National Universityand many others.Visits to Singapore have also been rewarding in many ways. From there I

would like to thank especially Director Yeo Piah Choo and Deputy Director JacksYeo of the DesignSingapore Council as well as my colleagues Vice Dean KennethPaul Tan, Assistant Professor Ora-orn Poocharoen and Assistant Professor YuminJoo at Lee KuanYew School of Public Policy of National University of Singaporefor enlightening conversations. It has also been great to collaborate withProfessor Arcot Desai Narasimhalu of Singapore Management University andretired Professor Jon S.T. Quah of National University of Singapore.I have had the pleasure to collaborate with a number of colleagues from

Europe. Concerning city branding, a special mention must be made of AssociateProfessor Inga Vilka of the University of Latvia, who provided for me some rele-vant materials as well as a chance to learn from real-life cases in city branding.From the University of Tampere, Director of Research Pekka Valkama andFiDiPro Professor Stephen J. Bailey have for years been my close collaborators.Special thanks for Pekka for great companionship. Concerning this project,Professors Ilari Karppi and Hannu Laurila have kindly commented upon someparts of my texts. Institutionally, thanks go to the University of Tampere and itsSchool of Management and especially Professor Arto Haveri, for providing mewith excellent working facilities and support through the years. From the admin-istration of the School thanks go to the Dean, Professor Markku Sotarauta, theHead of Administration Sari Saastamoinen and Administrators Anita Vieru andSirpa Rämö, who have been of great help in different phases of the project.Financial support from the University of Tampere as well as from Tekes – theFinnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation – have been indispensa-ble in making the internationalization of my research activities possible.From Routledge thanks go to Robert Langham and Natalie Tomlinson for

encouragement and help during the project. I’d also like to thank Damian Penfold

Acknowledgements xi

for his careful copy-editing, and to express my gratitude to Ms. Virginia Mattilafor the initial language checking.Last but not least, I wish to express my gratitude to my wife Young Shin Lim

and my son Pauli for their tolerance of my absence from home while writing thisbook, and my parents-in-law, Seong Bun Cho and Eun Kyu Lim, for becoming animportant part of my life.

Ari-Veikko AnttiroikoTampere

xii Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

Globalization is dramatically changing the context of urban communities and thepremises for urban development policy. Due to increased cross-boundary flows ofresources, urban governments have become increasingly concerned about theirrole in the global economy. Such an orientation paves the way to a new role forcities, their strategic task being to adjust to the conditions of the global economy(Sellers 2002; Douglass 2002; Savitch and Kantor 2003; Anttiroiko and Kasvio2005; Kresl and Fry 2005; Sassen 2006; Chien 2008; Anttiroiko 2009b).In the context of global intercity competition, the major goal of cities is to

increase their competitiveness, in which the positioning and attractiveness of acity have a critical function. Attraction-oriented strategy aims at effective absorp-tion of external resources from the global space of flows. The operational side ofattraction rests on promotion activities with tempting incentives offered to busi-nesses, but it is assumed that such a competition is risky and may lead to a raceto the bottom. Therefore the emphasis is increasingly on less costly and moresynergistic city marketing, which utilizes symbolic assets through city brandingand smart specialization though ‘city profiling’ that aim at attracting value withinsome special high-value adding service or high-tech sector.Mayors, councillors and urban managers know that they are in competition

with other cities on various markets. There is thus an imperative to learn moreabout city marketing. As stated by Kapferer, ‘[by] creating a good reputation fortheir town they give themselves a voice. Like brands, towns need to grow: theytherefore need to attract new resources (people, workers, companies, finances andso on). Like any brand, they must also be able to define where their unique attrac-tiveness lies, or what is known as positioning’ (2008: 126). Practically all citieswith direct connections to the international economy have already met this chal-lenge. They are engaged in some form of city marketing, projecting their imageor brand to the outside world. Marketing and branding place most emphasis onpromoting the attractiveness of the city as a business or tourist location.This book proposes a city attraction hypothesis that states that global intercity

competition is essentially about a city’s ability to attract the highest possible valuefrom global flows of values in order to promote local development. The result ofsuch a global intercity competition determines cities’ functions and positions inthe global division of labour and thus in the global urban hierarchy. Ultimately it

determines city governments’ ability to increase prosperity and welfare in theircommunities. We look at this scene through ‘First World’ lenses and thus from theperspective of challenges faced by cities in the developed world. In practice, thediscussion concerns primarily cities in North America, Western, Northern andSouthern parts of Europe, and Asia-Pacific with a focus on East Asia, Singaporeand Australia. What most of the major cities in these regions have in common isthat they have faced the need to revitalize their industries and to restructure theireconomy from industrial to post-industrial. Practically all cities ranking higheston the ladders of the global urban hierarchy are in these areas. In this sense wediscuss the global benchmark cities. This makes the discussion focused andmanageable, even if it undeniably increases conventional wisdom at the expenseof intellectual surprises, and erases the nuances and diversities inherent in theglobal urban system as a whole, characterized by the huge differences in profilesand scales of cities as well as their special national, cultural and historicalcontexts.The purpose of this book is to describe how globalization and especially global

intercity competition pose challenges to the development of post-industrial cities.The term ‘post-industrial’ may not be particularly fashionable in the postmodernage, but as the focus is on economic restructuring, diversity of post-industrialactivities and local industrial policy, the chosen term is probably the best avail-able. This book aims at analyzing the fundamental logic of attraction-orientedintercity competition, categorizing the economic city profile options associatedwith post-industrialism, identifying advanced cities in each post-industrial activ-ity area on the basis of empirical sector-specific city rankings, and lastly,discussing the strategic and social dimensions of such attraction-orientedeconomic city branding.In order to shed light on the framing or contextual issues relating to city brand-

ing, we next briefly discuss:

(a) the approach applied in this book, i.e. ‘political economy’;(b) globalization as a mega-trend of our time and a conditioning factor for cities;(c) the rise of post-industrial society and the nature of post-industrial cities;(d) city branding in context;(e) the role of city rankings in analyzing cities’ global competition and position-

ing.

In the following pages this first chapter provides background ideas of the contex-tual view of city branding. In the subsequent chapters these topics are elaboratedfocusing in detail on both the ‘city’ and ‘branding’ side of our topic.

Political economy of city brandingPolitical economy is a somewhat vague concept owing to the disciplinary differ-ences in understanding its meaning. In social sciences, however, it is usuallyassociated with a critical approach to economic development and social issues

2 Introduction

with a special reference to the political dimension of broadly defined economy,deriving its original meaning from the school of classical British economists,most notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who developed an analysis of thebourgeoning economic system of their day, capitalism (Gough 1988: 5). Politicaleconomy is essentially about the interrelationship between political institutionsand the economy and, as an important third element, the critical assessment of thesocial outcomes of their interplay.

Understanding political economy

Political economy is often contrasted with neoclassical economics and this is,indeed, a good way of pointing out some of its special features. In spite of criti-cism from many directions, neoclassical economics is still a model formainstream economics, which is fairly formal and reductionist, but more impor-tantly, eliminates the political dimension from its analysis of economic life. Whatis essential in understanding the background of political economy is that histori-cally economics was placed in the broader context of social science before itstarted to be narrowed by William Jevons, Alfred Marshall and a range of otherneoclassical economists. It was also primarily interested in the state and thedevelopment of national economies, hence the term ‘political economy’. Even ifsuch a broad perspective went out of fashion in the eyes of many economists andsocial scientists, it never died and it has even started to revive since the 1960s. Wemay identify three major schools of thought that have maintained some of thebasic tenets of political economy. They are: (a) from the radical libertarian rightthe Public Choice theory, which since the 1960s has started to rekindle the inter-est in ‘political’ within economics, though retaining some of the fundamentalprinciples of neoclassical economics; (b) institutionalists and evolutionary econ-omists wishing to put economy into a wider framework, their lineage going backto John R. Commons and Thorstein Veblen; and last (c) from the political left,various forms of Marxism, which as a tradition is probably most commonly asso-ciated with political economy as it is understood today (Mosco 2009). Thisimplies that political economy may be associated with various ideologicalfactions and theorizations. Let us take a closer look at selected aspects of Marxist-oriented political economy for the purpose of explicating some of the mostrelevant aspects of political economy approach to city branding.The school that actually never abandoned the terminology and approach of

political economy is Marxism in its various forms. It has been claimed that theintellectual roots of Marxism are in classical political economy, German philoso-phy and French socialism. Marx’s major work, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischenÖkonomie (Capital: Critique of Political Economy), published in 1867, marked aradical reformulation of the most basic concepts of classical political economy.This new social theory came to be known as historical materialism: ‘materialist’because of its conviction that the material conditions explain our behaviour and‘historical’ because capitalism was seen as only one historical stage in the processof the historical development of human societies. To conceptualize the latter Marx

Introduction 3

developed the concept of mode of production, of which capitalism was only oneamong many (Gough 1988: 5–6). This implies that economic phenomena weresystematically approached within a broad historical and social framework. This isin sharp contrast to neoclassical economics, which abstracted economic processesfrom social relations and from specific social structures of capitalist society. AsHarvey puts it, ‘Jevons transformed political economy into economics with itsemphasis on sophisticated theoretical devices for marginal analysis. These sophis-ticated devices, insightful as they may prove in certain respects, turn out to beweak tools for handling some of the important and relevant problems posed inclassical political economy’ (1975: 153–4). Parallel to this development in sociol-ogy, the study of social behaviour, relations and structures – and later also inpolitical science, the study of power and political behaviour and institutions – wasseparated from economic fundamentals (Gough 1988: 6). This gives a disciplinaryviewpoint to perceive political economy as a unifying approach to economic,social and political life.Concerning political economy as an approach or as a framework, one of its

tenets is the conviction of the need to analyze social phenomena in relation tosocial structures and the basic conditions of our material existence. It is in thisgeneral sense about the conditions of control and survival in social life. In thisconfiguration control is fundamentally political as it involves the social organi-zation of relationships within a community, and survival processes in turn areeconomic as they concern the production of what a society needs to reproduceitself (Mosco 2009). This is another way of pointing out the fundamental rela-tionship between political and economic dimension of social life.Thematically, political economy has been associated with the profound under-

standing of social change and historical transformation. In its classical formsince Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, attention was mainlydirected to the great capitalist revolution and the rise of industrial societies.Radical political economists like Karl Marx were attracted by the historical analy-sis of capitalism and, even more importantly, the dynamic forces in capitalismresponsible for its growth and change, and the inherent contradictions of thissystem that caused intolerable inequalities among human beings (Mosco 2009).The other characteristic feature of political economy is its insistence that thediscipline should be firmly rooted in an analysis of wider social totality, includ-ing issues that are currently compartmentalized into different disciplines, such aspolitical science, economics, sociology, communication studies and so forth(ibid.). It is also sometimes emphasized, especially by certain proponents ofMarxist tradition that the formal ontology of social world is dialectic in nature,i.e. it is composed of the parts and the whole, organized in the concrete totality ofintegration and contradiction that constitute social life, which reveals varioustensions that are inherent elements of our lives and also forces of social changeunder capitalism. The principal tension in Marxist political economy is betweenlabour and capital, and thus the primary classes of society that are fundamentallyin antagonistic relation to each other are respectively the working class and thecapitalists. The social setting has changed dramatically since Marx’s days, most

4 Introduction

notably in developed Western societies, and it is extremely difficult to definethese classes and to find coherence and unified class interests within them, but thefundamental tension is still there and has many manifestations. For instance,Manuel Castells’ (1979) structural analysis of urban conflicts as a reflection ofsocial contradictions of capitalist society, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s (1971)analysis of bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, reveal how thistension between accumulation of capital and the reproductive aspect of everydaylife can be seen in urban political analysis. More indirectly, the same tension canbe seen in the core notion of Manuel Castells’ (1999a) later work on the bipolaropposition between the Net and the Self, which can be interpreted as the transla-tion of the analytical core of Marx’s thesis applied to the conditions of a worldthat is pervasively globalized, digitized and networked.Lastly, another aspect of the political economy approach is praxis, which in a

general sense refers to human activity and specifically the free and creative activ-ity by which people produce and change the world and also themselves. Thispoint has an important role in the discipline to counterbalance structural orienta-tion, which is fairly strong in most of the traditions associated with politicaleconomy (Mosco 2009). This dimension is of particular relevance to orthodoxMarxist analysis, which was anchored in the idea of class struggle and revolution.Later, especially in critical theory, it was rightly pointed out that in modern timesin the developed world it was increasingly difficult to identify the subject of revo-lution. Yet this dimension continues to be relevant, and is apparent incritically-oriented urban research. Namely, the idea of the ‘right to the city’, aslogan originally coined by Henri Lefebvre (1968), which expresses a need forinclusiveness and shared power to reshape the processes of urbanization and thusthe right to change not only our environment but also ourselves, is an importantmanifestation of radical urbanism (Purcell 2002; Harvey 2008).

Urban political economy

Above we mentioned the ‘urban’ dimension of political economy, as an instanceof class relations and a revival of the ‘right to the city’ movement. Yet, ‘urban’ isan important dimension here also in many other respects, for city branding ispursued by city government and from an input and/or output direction connectedwith urban communities, including the citizens and the business community astheir most relevant stakeholder groups. What the preceding discussion clearlyimplies is that political economy does not take ‘urbanization’, ‘urban’, ‘space’ or‘community’ for granted, as abstractions, but contextualizes them with social,economic and political contexts with the capitalist mode of production at theircore. As crystallized by Newton (1981), urban economy cannot be understoodoutside its political context, and conversely, urban politics cannot be understoodwithout its economic background. Thus, new urban political economy starts fromthe premise that the city is a reflection of the larger socio-economic fabric, withfar-reaching ramifications. This implies that each city must be understood as aninstance of a particular society at a particular time. This can be discussed at two

Introduction 5

different levels. First, the local and the national are knitted tightly together toform a single system, i.e. a national urban system consisting of an integrated andhierarchically organized set of urban places in which each unit plays a particulareconomic role (Newton 1981). Second, the urban is increasingly connected toglobal capitalism, or in more neutral terms to ‘globalized economy’, which at thesame time challenges the previously mentioned state-centric view of urbansystem formation and its dynamics. Yet, from a political-economy perspectiveeven capitalism as a contextual element is seen as a constantly evolving systemof production and social relations. Such an approach is in stark contrast withconventional urban analysis, which commonly leads to a historical, ethnocentricview of urbanization and urban development (Sawers 1984: 4–5).In the globalized world, urban political analysis has increasingly directed its

attention to urban regions as competitive collective units within the globaldynamics of capitalism. As interpreted by Harvey,

each urban region has the autonomy to pursue whatever course it will, but inthe end each is disciplined by the external coercive laws of competition. Itsindustry has to compete within an international division of labor, and itscompetitive strength depends upon the qualities of labor power; the effi-ciency and depth of social and physical infrastructures; the ‘rationality’ oflife-styles, cultures, and political processes; the state of class struggle andsocial tension; and geographical position and natural resource endowments.

(1985: 158)

In fact, in the 1980s, urbanization and urban development were more directlylinked with globalization, giving impetus to a completely new discourse with afairly contextual and macro-theoretical nature in which the historical incorpora-tion of cities into the world economy was the core topic. This is the time whentheorizations of world cities and global cities started to infiltrate the urbanresearch agenda. Two important figures behind this paradigm shift were the urbansociologists Manuel Castells and David Harvey, who in their works of the late1970s linked urban formation with the wider historical movement of industrialcapitalism and its structural conditions (Friedmann 1986: 69). They had slightlydifferent focus than many of their predecessors and contemporaries who workedin the same or related fields of globally oriented urban analyses with a focus oncities linked to colonialism and the capitalist world-system (King 1991b). In anycase it seems that the genuinely ‘global’ dimension as we understand it today wasconceptualized in the 1980s, having its paradigmatic expressions in the works ofJohn Friedmann (1986), Manuel Castells (1989) and Saskia Sassen (2001 [1991])(King 1991a: 3, 7–8).In political economy attention is also paid to class relations and internal divi-

sions into working class and capitalist class, which are most apparent in the urbancontext owing to the role of cities in the production and reproduction of capital-ist societies (Castells 1978). An interesting case in this respect is the growthmachine thesis, which explicitly discusses the role of parochial capital in building

6 Introduction

the urban growth agenda (Logan and Molotch 1987; Logan 1999). The dual citythesis also echoes the contradictions associated with class relations and theirspatial expressions (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991). An institutional formationthat mediates between the working class and capitalists is government, an insti-tution with a special place in political economy. Traditionally, the primary interesthas been in the relationship between government and economy, especially in itscritical analysis of the state as the servant of the capitalist class as well as its localcounterpart, local government or the ‘local state’, as the guarantor of collectivereproduction and management of people, as hypothesized by Cockburn (1978) inher version of local state theory (Sawers 1984: 7–11). The relationship betweenlocal political authority and economic interests within the urban region is one ofthe core issues in urban political economy, even though most notably in Marxist-inspired works this local ‘political’ or ‘governmental’ dimension usually remainsconceptually underdeveloped (see e.g. Harvey 1985; Castells 1989).What, then, are the implications of political economy for research on city

branding? First, we approach this phenomenon in a contextual way, focusing onthe control and survival aspect of communities and institutions. The question isas much of an attempt and ability to control urban growth as it is of the capitalistworld system and neo-liberal globalization policy that create special conditionsfor global intercity competition and the city government’s strategies and means,including city branding. Another important dimension is historical in the sensethat our focus is on a specific historical era of globalized capitalism. To be moreprecise, our attention is directed to the metropolitan areas of advanced countrieswith a tendency to focus on post-industrial activities in which they have compet-itive advantages in the condition of globalized late capitalism. This approachreveals contradictions and tensions that are visible at the local community level,as manifested in the conflict between the preferences of local residents and themotives of entrepreneurial local governments’ business site development projectsintended to serve global businesses, or differences between the interests of localresidents and especially those who live in deprived areas versus the transnationalcreative class, which tends to inhibit privileged areas rebuilt at the centres ofmetropolitan cities in the name of creative class-oriented development policy.Lastly, the practical dimension or praxis calls attention to the premises, forms andstrategies of city branding, thus bringing the civic, and more importantly, themanagerial dimension into play. Actually, the political-economy perspectivebuilds a view of city branding by rationalizing the role of ‘local’ in theglobal–local nexus. As, for example, explained by Amin and Thrift, even if glob-alization undoubtedly reflects the compression and transgression of time andspace barriers, even globally-oriented actors in economy ascribe a sufficientlystrong salience to place as the specificity of each locality may provide somecompetitive advantage: ‘Place-marketing in this context, is said to constitute acritical element both for success in the interregional competition for investment… and for global industry itself to derive competitive advantage and corporatedistinctiveness’ (1996: 6–7). From this observation it is a short step to a very prac-tical challenge of city marketing and city branding: how should politicians and

Introduction 7

public managers at the local level utilize city branding to achieve the best possi-ble result in the given circumstances? Political economy adds to this question aninherent question of how well the approach to city branding is rooted in the iden-tity of the local community, how various stakeholders and especially citizens areinvolved in constructing brands and visions, and how democratically such abrand-making process is governed.

From globalization to location specificityGlobalization is taken here as an empirical fact, but interpretations of its naturevary for understandable reasons. In the mid 1990s a new discourse emerged insuch forms as the critique of unregulated global economy (Brecher and Costello1994), the perception of globalization as a fatalistic economic ideology (Michieand Grieve Smith 1995) and the critique of the increased role of corporate poweraffecting both national and global scenes (Barnet and Cavanagh 1995). There arealso claims that globalization itself is not as historically unique or pervasive as isgenerally assumed, for states are not as powerless as is generally believed in theface of global forces (Weiss 1999), and globalization itself has been challengedin the sense that we know it today. Hirst and Thompson (1996), for example,claim that globalization is a myth fabricated for ideological reasons, and that therehas always been an international trading system of some sort. All such perspec-tives help us to understand the various dimensions and nuances of globalization,but they do not dispel the dramatic impact this particular trend obviously has onall major dimensions and systems of society. That is why we need to provide aframework to understand how globalization changes the structural context ofcities. This discussion has been so well documented for more than twenty yearsthat only a short description will suffice to outline globalization as a context ofcities. Probably the major warning to issue here is not to see globalization as anexcessively simplistically interpreted contextual entity. Castells (1989; 1999a)was among the first to analyze cities in the context of globalization as a part of awider social theoretical scheme. Other frameworks for understanding globaliza-tion and cities include world systems theory (Wallerstein 1976) and Marxisturban political economy (Harvey 1982; 1985; 2012). Theories of modernity andpost-modernity provided other apposite sociological accounts of globalization(Featherstone 1990; Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Lash and Urry 1994; Beck et al.1994). All these theorizations provide conceptual tools to understand cities incontext, but at the same time it is important to bear in mind that globalization isnot an internally coherent external force monolithic in nature, but a complexsystem of different dimensions (Newman and Thornley 2005: 16–17). As pointedout by Harvey (2012: 101), globalization should be seen as a geographically artic-ulated patterning of global capitalist activities and relations.Globalization has been associated with two trends as regards the position of

metropolitan areas. First, it has been claimed to cause the death of distance, whichmakes the location of productive activities increasingly irrelevant. Second, thereare also claims that the ability to process and transmit information globally, and

8 Introduction

across great distances, undermines many traditional advantages enjoyed by estab-lished urban centres. These trends point in the same direction, whereas locationspecificity, differentiation and growth pole theorization have generated well-grounded counterarguments to these claims (see Hartshorn 1992: 400; Kotkin2005: 149–50). It seems that both tendencies are in play, having their location-specific consequences in spatially uneven geographies. This interplay has itsroots in costs, proximity and brand value. Firms need to assess how importantclose proximity to high-profile urban centres and thus to brand-enforcing clusterof advanced business services is for them when considered against the cost ofdoing business in a given location. In such a calculation it is not certain that thehigh-cost global cities are always the winners (Kotkin 2005: 150).Probably the most paradigmatic flows and networks of values on a global scale

are international transfers of funds. The USA has been and continues to be themost central for such flows, as an economy with two-way exchange of informa-tion (monetary flows) that both sends capital to other countries and receives itfrom them. More generally, the global community based on international mone-tary flows is composed of nations with the Western industrial powers at the centreand the less-developed nations on the periphery. Yet, even if the evidencesupports the view of an interconnected economic system, the nations and evenmacro-regions may be differentiated in terms of how central they are in thissystem (Salisbury and Barnet 1999: 47). Positions in such networks may changefairly quickly, within only a couple of decades. It is worth considering how globalfinancial crises and the shift in the economic gravity towards Asia transformglobal flows of values and global urban hierarchy.

The rise of post-industrial citiesThe story told in this book, even if fragmentary, revolves around economicrestructuring, deindustrialization, and the survival of the post-industrial city. Theindustrial city was for long a centrepiece of accumulation; and of the attention ofthe world business community and local developers. Geographical patterning oflabour and commodity markets, of spatial and social divisions of production andconsumption, and of differentiated socio-technical mixes within the labourprocess became pronounced on the urban landscape (Harvey 1985: 197). This isthe ‘thesis’ against which we can plausibly assess current trends associated withpost-industrialism and the expansion of the service sector in particular.

Services, multinationals and high rises

The trend that undermines industrial development is called deindustrialization; ithas caused decline and urgent need for restructuring in most of the cities thatsucceeded in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Emerging manufacturingplants hungry for manual workers reshaped the urban form and served as thecentres of capitalist production of global significance. Manchester in the UK hassometimes been symbolically referred to as the birthplace of capitalism. Many of

Introduction 9