Whose Space is it Anyway?

Whose Space Is It Anyway? Place Branding: Past, Present, Future

Pascale Cohen-Avenel & Graham H. Roberts

‘[W]‌hen we reject the single story,

when we realize that there is never a single story

about any place,

we regain a kind of paradise.’

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The eponymous hero of Douglas Stuart’s recent novel Young Mungo is a gay, working-class, Protestant teenager growing up in the fiercely sectarian Scottish city of Glasgow in the early 1990s. At one point in the novel, the narrator describes the profound contempt felt by Mungo’s older brother Hamish towards the English students living in the city. The narrative continues (Stuart 2022: 191–92):

Yet to Hamish, the worst of them were not the English. The worst were the chinless lambswool milksops from the West End or Perth or Edinburgh. These Scots spoke the Queen’s English with a snooty clarity that would embarrass even Etonians. […] Middle-class Glaswegians were the worst; they had no loyalty, when it suited them they draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket, but they knew none of its chill, none of its need. These Glaswegians were acceptably foreign and endlessly entertaining to the English. Their das were not being put out of work on the Clyde or pulling slag from the coalfaces in Cardowan. Their daddies were catching the commuter flight down to London and eating smoked Scottish salmon at business lunches in Canary Wharf. They preferred to take their oatcakes with French pâté and drank uisge beatha by the glass, not by the bottle. Hamish took one look at them and knew he hated them.

In Hamish’s mind, there is a very sharp divide between those with a legitimate claim to move freely within Glasgow’s urban space, and those with no such claim. This divide cuts across the city itself. This is especially clear in the bloody street fighting he organises between his own, Protestant, gang and a group of young Catholics living on a neighbouring housing estate. The violence these rival gangs mete out to each other is driven by a particular worldview. As such, it is eloquent testimony to the way in which public space, and more specifically the policing of that space, is bound up with questions of identity – both individual, and collective.

The brutality with which Hamish and his acolytes seek to impose their own specific worldview calls to mind recent events in Iran. On 16 September 2022 the young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested in Tehran for the way she was wearing her hijab (Rana 2022). At the time of writing – December 2022 – protests sparked by her death are continuing across the country (Wintour 2022). Many of those protests have involved women reclaiming the kind of access to public space that has been denied to them by Iran’s Islamic regime for decades (Agence France Presse 2022).

Deciding who should, and who should not, gain access to public space raises a whole raft of ethical questions. More importantly – at least for our purposes here – that decision process may be intricately bound up with how a given place sees itself, and how it wishes to be seen by the outside world. An excellent example of this is Qatar, a country which at the time of writing is hosting the 2022 Football World Cup. This sporting event is the latest in a long series of branding initiatives undertaken by the Qatari regime (see for example Knott 2022). In this respect it appears to have been highly successful (Meryn 2022). At the heart of this initiative, however, lies a contradiction: if (wealthy) foreign fans have been given free access to public space in Qatar, the same freedom has been denied to groups such as (poor) foreign workers, and members of the LGBT+ community within Qatar itself (see for example Boycott Qatar 2022, and Moss and Parry 2022).

As this last example suggests, place branding is inherently political. This is because it discriminates in the way it presents, represents and indeed allocates one resource in particular, namely public space. But just whose space are we talking about? Our approach to that question is avowedly multidisciplinary. This is because the very raison d’être of the CRPM (Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues), our research centre at Paris Nanterre University (as indeed of Peter Lang’s TRIP series), is to foster dialogue, not just between researchers studying different parts of the world, but also between academic disciplines as diverse as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, geography and marketing. In our own research we have explored identity politics in a range of areas, including corporate branding, fashion, dance, universal exhibitions, and the satirical press. The main aim of the present volume is to bring together researchers working – each from their own perspective – on this particular aspect of place branding. In doing so, this collection of essays contributes to the broader research undertaken within the CRPM on space – more specifically on the representation of both local and global space in today’s hyper-connected world.

The two chapters in section one, ‘Imagining Space’, examine the role the visual arts can play in helping to (re)shape public perception of a given place. First, contemporary artist Heidi Wood describes the art project she recently led with students from a school in the underprivileged French département of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. As she shows, this project was designed to counter negative representations of the area in the French media. This is followed by a chapter in which Tania Rossetto and Giada Peterle explore what they call ‘the spectacularisation of urban diversity’. In particular, they focus on the representation of Milan’s Chinatown in Italian graphic novels. As they show, these novels challenge clichés both about Chinese immigrants in Italy, and about the city of Milan itself. The next section, ‘(Re)fashioning space’, contains a chapter on contemporary Mongolian fashion by Natascha and Babette Radclyffe-Thomas. They discuss the Mongolian influences of British-based sustainable luxury fashion brand Tengri. In their close and sensitive analysis, they show how Tengri actively contributes, not just to the international reputation of Mongolia, but to the country’s sustainable development. Section three, ‘Displaying space’, contains chapters on the role of sport in place branding. In a chapter which will resonate with today’s Qatar-watchers, Lukas Aubin discusses the way sport has been exploited by local authorities in the Russian city of Kazan. This is followed by an exploration by Bernard Cros of the importance of rugby for post-apartheid South Africa’s image. As Cros points out, the sport has played a crucial role in the recent construction of what he calls ‘an inclusive collective memory’ at home, and the country’s nation-branding efforts abroad. Next, Yéléna Mac-Glandières’ contribution focuses on the importance for post-Soviet Azerbaijan’s nation-branding initiatives of key architectural and infrastructure projects. What she calls the ‘narrations of logistics’ are central to geopolitical discourses in the region. The final two chapters focus on the way branded places are not just represented, but actually consumed. Akbar Keshodkar examines the deleterious impact of mass tourism on the local residents of the rural coastal community of Newport, in the US state of Oregon. Finally, Joy Logan discusses the contemporary re-imagining of Mendoza, Argentina’s major wine-producing region. Logan highlights the threat to Mendoza’s traditional identity posed by government plans to extend fracking in the region. As she shows, the debate this has sparked between policy makers in Buenos Aires on the one hand, and locally based environmental activists on the other, reflects diametrically opposed views of the region’s very identity.

Our volume is rounded off with an Afterword by Nadia Kaneva which looks at the future of place branding. One forthcoming challenge for brand managers will undoubtedly be the economic fallout from COVID-19. The pandemic has already had a major impact on place brands across the planet (see for example Skinner 2021). As Kalemba (2022) has argued, cities, regions and countries will now have to rethink not just their branding strategies, but what it actually means to be a place brand in a post-COVID world. If the current volume can contribute to that process, then it will have achieved one of its major objectives.