‘Green cities’ going greener? Local environmental policy-making and place branding in the ‘Greenest City in Europe’

A growing number of cities around the world have taken advantage of their green image of the purpose of place branding. In the research literature, it is suggested that these practices are motivated by place-based competition over financial and social capital, combined with more holistic motives of sustainable urban development. However, although an increasing number of green cities are engaged in place branding, few studies have researched the impact of place branding on environmental policy-making in a city, building up to the question: how is local environmental policy-making affected by green place branding? Addressing this issue, this paper critically investigates how the continuity of local environmental policy-making is affected by place-branding practices. To tackle this task, the paper firstly develops an analytical framework aiming to understand how green cities emerge and become famous based on their policy-making. Secondly, using that framework, this paper present an in-depth case study of a city branding itself as the ‘Greenest City in Europe’. Drawing on the growing body of work on green cities, this paper investigates the ‘understudied’ practice of using policy for the purpose of place branding as well as the impact of place branding ‘on the environment’.     

Branding Knowledge-intensive Regions: A Comparative Study of Pisa and Oulu High-Tech Brands

Place marketing and branding have drawn much attention both in the literature and in practice especially in the 1990s and 2000s. However, the research literature of place branding related to the dynamic evolution of knowledge-intensive regions is limited. This article aims at providing an analysis of place branding processes in knowledge-intensive regions in relation to the evolution of their high-tech clusters, in an attempt to identify the relation between brand development and cluster performance from a longitudinal perspective. The article discusses the results of a multiple case study, including Pisa, Italy and Oulu, Finland. The findings suggest that, in these two cases, branding consisted more in labelling an existing economic phenomenon rather than in fostering or having a bet on it in a visionary way. This is related to the political nature of branding which may provoke a mismatch between the timing of the high-tech cluster dynamics and the timing of branding initiatives, a mismatch which is likely to affect branding effectiveness and which should be considered when evaluating branding impacts.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Mussels,Tourism and Community Development: A Case Study of Place Branding Through Food Festivals in Rural North Jutland,Denmark

Abstract

Rural areas are facing prospects of marginalization and peripherality in an age of globalization where the attention of governments and media focuses increasingly on the (lack of) competitiveness of urban and metropolitan regions in Europe. Many rural areas have, therefore, searched for ways to improve their position vis-à-vis other localities by mobilizing local resources and employing policy tools that are believed to foster indigenous social and economic development, including place branding. Unsurprisingly, using food as a means to profile rural localities has become widespread, with branding efforts revolving around local food festivals that commodify local cultural resources. The article attempts to illuminate the challenges faced by branding processes in rural areas through a case study of Løgstør, a small rural town in North Jutland, Denmark, which builds its branding efforts around an annual mussel festival. The analysis focuses on the relationship between stakeholders and branding strategies, and in particular aims to uncover the role of the food festival in aggravating or alleviating inherent tensions between different stakeholders and target groups. It is argued that in the case of Løgstør making a food festival pivotal, a signature event for the place branding efforts has been created, which appeals to both external and internal audiences, and that this may hold wider lessons for place-branding initiatives in other small towns across Europe.     

Effect of dimensions of place attachment on residents’ word-of-mouth behavior

The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the effect of residents’ different dimensions of place attachment on their word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior in two cities: Sydney, Australia and Shanghai, China. A six-dimensional construct of place attachment is proposed based upon a detailed literature review: four attitudinal dimensions (place identity, place dependence, affective attachment, social bonding) and two interactional dimensions (place memory, place expectation) are proposed to reflect different aspects of a resident's attachment to a place. To test the dimensionality of place attachment and relationships between constructs, a survey was completed by 691 residents in the two targeted cities (361 from Sydney and 330 from Shanghai), and a structural equation modeling instrument was applied to analyze the data. The findings of the empirical study statistically support the dimensionality of place attachment proposed, and reveal that, in general, interactional dimensions of place attachment have an effect on WOM behavior. The results suggest that WOM behavior of residents of the two cities is influenced by different attitudinal dimensions of place attachment: Shanghai resident's place identity and social bonding predict one-to-one WOM, while Sydney residents’ affective attachment to Sydney influences their one-to-one WOM behavior. This analysis provides insights into residents’ psychology and behavior in different tourism destinations, as well as important inputs for the sustainable development of destination branding and C2C tourism communication in these two cities.     

国外人文地理学尺度政治理论研究进展

尺度政治理论产生于生产方式的变革与全球化的深入发展、新自由主义的兴起与治理方式的转型以及西方人文地理学的尺度转向等实践和理论背景中。其研究经历了由重点关注尺度的政治建构到重点关注行动者的话语和实践的转变。以此为基础,从结构-行为-行动者视角可以总结出尺度政治研究的三个方向:作为政治过程的尺度结构转变、跨尺度的政治行为与策略以及跨尺度的政治行动者联系网络。随后,本文回顾了当前研究中的三个案例以进一步阐明尺度政治理论的实践应用以及上述三个方向之间的区别与联系。最后,基于国内语境,本文从理论和实证两方面出发初步探讨了国内下一步研究应重点关注的问题。     

Historical limits: narrowing possibilities in ‘Ontario's most historic town’

Place branding in heritage tourism development is presented as a strategy that opens up new possibilities for attracting investors and visitors by distilling, capturing and shaping what is distinctive about a place. This representational fix is an efficient marketing device in the sense that it represents places through widely intelligible symbols. Branding is also a limiting activity that locks places in time and class relations. While place branding has always had this dual effect, we argue that it has particularly insidious and limiting consequences for local development under current conditions of roll‐out neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, several prominent residents and outsiders initiated efforts to transform the Town of Cobalt, Ontario, into a mining heritage tourism destination. In 2001, the town entered and won a contest to be named Ontario's Most Historic Town. The following year it persuaded Parks Canada to designate it as a national historic site. These two events provided renewed external validation for the efforts to brand Cobalt as a heritage site and began a new cycle of mining heritage tourism development. However, instead of breaking the dependency relationships that characterize resource regions, the current round of place branding has acted to circumscribe the range of possible economic development options.     

Radical Urban Horticulture for Food Autonomy: Beyond the Community Gardens Experience

For those who are interested in radical changes, it is important to analyze the forms of resistance that promote self‐managed practices, also at apparently very small scale. In Italy the experience of “community gardens” is usually named “orti urbani”. In the last 10 years, the occupation of abandoned urban spaces to set up orti urbani has increased within the squatting movement. The case of the city of Rome is interesting because there has been a widespread activity to organize self‐managed spaces to grow fruit and vegetable plants. These initiatives make up not only potential spaces of dense social networking, political action and discussion on environmental issues, but also supporting large food autonomous configurations such as Genuino Clandestino, that are challenging dominant food production. A proliferation of orti urbani located in Social Centers, squatted houses or other abandoned spaces represents a scalar strategy to re‐appropriate and commune urban space.     

'GLOCAL' MOVEMENTS: PLACE STRUGGLES AND TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZING BY INFORMAL WORKERS

This paper investigates the scalar practices of collectively organized informal workers and the political implications of such practices. It illustrates how the studied group organizes across scales – hence, a 'glocal movement'– and stresses the importance of an analysis that integrates these multiple scales of collective organizing, as they may have a bearing on each other. In so doing, it contests a common tendency to analytically privilege one or other scale of resistance and agency. In particular, I argue that networking across scales may be of significance for local struggles and thus play a role in local politics. The transnational activities of the studied group assist it in challenging local power relations and dominant place projects that repress informal livelihood activities. This paper comprises a conceptual discussion of notions of scale, of conceptions of the spatialities and scales of resistance as well as of place, followed by an empirical illustration that refers to an association of informal vendors in Maputo, Mozambique, and its international connections. The analysis is based on interviews with vendors, leaders of the association and with the international partners of the association.     

Mapping Illegality: The i‐Map and the Cartopolitics of “Migration Management” at a Distance

Cartographies for “migration management” are part and parcel of controversial border practices far from conventional borderlines. Focusing on the i‐Map, this study renders how the European Union's current practices of remote border control are visualised among migration policy circles and expert security actors through a “mapping migration matrix”. The lines portraying migration flows in recurrent maps generate a shared expert language and a common geographical imaginary reinforcing practices of contention and classification of those assumed to move toward the European Union irregularly. It is argued that illegality is constructed in ways that target border crossing long before any border is crossed, making someone illegal at the very moment and place where s/he might decide to migrate. This paper analyses the cartopolitics and limits of cartographic expertise in the production of a “routes thinking” able to legitimise extra‐territorial interceptions and practices of remote border control.     

Transitions in Social Organization: A Predictive Model from Southwestern Archaeology

A number of studies from experimental psychology suggest the existence of information-processing constraints that place limits on the number of people with which an individual may simultaneously interact. The existence of such constraints means that increases in the size of a human group will push that population toward “scalar thresholds,” at which point a transformation of the social order must take place to reorganize patterns of group interaction. The model developed here incorporates ethnographic data into the scalar theory of social change in an attempt to refine the precision with which scalar thresholds may be predicted. This scalar model contributes to an understanding of social change in small- to midsized sedentary populations and provides insight into processes by which social differentiation can emerge in these societies.     

Heritage designation and scale: a World Heritage case study of the Ningaloo Coast

As heritage research has engaged with a greater plurality of heritage practices, scale has emerged as an important concept in Heritage Studies, albeit relatively narrowly defined as hierarchical levels (household, local, national, etcetera). This paper argues for a definition of scale in heritage research that incorporates size (geographical scale), level (vertical scale) and relation (an understanding that scale is constituted through dynamic relationships in specific contexts). The paper utilises this definition of scale to analyse heritage designation first through consideration of changing World Heritage processes, and then through a case study of the world heritage designation of the Ningaloo Coast region in Western Australia. Three key findings are: both scale and heritage gain appeal because they are abstractions, and gain definition through the spatial politics of interrelationships within specific situations; the spatial politics of heritage designation comes into focus through attention to those configurations of size, level and relation that are invoked and enabled in heritage processes; and researchers choice to analyse or ignore particular scales and scalar politics are political decisions. Utilising scale as size, level and relation enables analyses that move beyond heritage to the spatial politics through which all heritage is constituted.     

Black Geographies of Respite: Relief,Recuperation, and Resonance at Florida A&M University

In this article, I argue that places of respite provide relief from the burdens of oppressive articulations and experiences of society and space and are produced through three general practices: relief as a practice that mitigates psychological and physical burdens of oppression; recuperation as a form of (self-)care that can help heal harms; and affirmative resonance as a practice of counter-storytelling that challenges hegemonic social narratives and internalises affirmative narratives for marginalised peoples. Through a case study with members of the Marching 100 at Florida A&M University (FAMU), I demonstrate how these relational practices produce FAMU as a multiscalar place of respite for black students. Finally, I claim that places of respite, produced through a black sense of place, offer scholars interested in affirmative black geographies an ontological object produced by (and productive of) visions and practices of black life and produced for the celebration and protection of black lives.     

Whose Heritage? Immigration and Place Narratives in Denmark

Questions of heritage, of ownership of discourses of past and present are important elements in present‐day struggles over identity and belonging, not least those related to immigration policy. None the less, the perspective of immigrant groups is often overlooked when decisions are taken concerning preservation of heritage sites. Since the late 1960s the area around Frederiksværk, Northern Zealand has become the home of large numbers of immigrants, notably from ex‐Yugoslavia, who were brought to Denmark to serve as rank and file in the then booming steel industry. In spite of their undeniable contribution to the development of the town, the cultural heritage of this relatively large immigrant population takes up very little space in the official branding of the town as a key site in the industrial history of Denmark. This article discusses the various place narratives in relation to immigrants in the case of Frederiksværk. We take as our point of departure the Danish notion of kulturmiljø (cultural milieu), which is more material than the notion of heritage. This discussion focuses on the ability of kulturmiljø to capture and incorporate the multiple and often contradictory cultural practices of different groups of actors and not the least to transgress the often rather static and confined view on local history, which often results from the heritage perspective. We analyze how different actors, notably the Yugoslavs, are represented in the narratives of the town, and how Yugoslav immigrants themselves perceive their position in Frederiksværk. Furthermore, we attempt to register some of the imprints made by immigrants on the material and cultural fabric, possibly useful to include in a kulturmiljø of Frederiksværk. The conclusion assesses the potentials and limitations of the kulturmiljø approach with regard to making visible the place narratives of immigrants.     

Decontextualized Knowledge,Situated Politics: The New Scientific–Local Politics of Rice Genetic Resources in Thailand

Recent practices of scientific–local knowledge interaction in Thailand surrounding rice genetic resources have led to a new phenomenon, which this article calls knowledge inclusion. This study explores several forms of knowledge inclusion —participatory science, localized science, scientized knowledge and hybridized knowledge— as new loci of political practices among government rice breeders, non‐governmental officials and farmers. Ethnographic studies are used to reveal that, through selectively incorporating elements of each other's knowledges, these scientific and local knowledge practitioners have drawn on the discourses of scientific–local knowledges to their political advantage. The ramifications of this new politics vary according to different political arenas in rice genetic resource management. Based on these findings, the article argues that recent practices of knowledge inclusion should not be obscured by the notion of situated knowledge, but should be understood as situated politics of decontextualized knowledge in genetic resource management. The argument reconceptualizes the new scientific–local politics as a synthesis between the power–knowledge relation and the power–structural context in which genetic resource management takes place.     

Order (and Disorder) in Early Colonial Moquegua,Peru

In the viceroyalty of Peru, Spanish authorities imposed several mechanisms to try to establish Christian social order among the colonists and dwindling indigenous populations, two of which were encomienda and reducción. The implementation of these and other policies and practices is examined using a case study in Moquegua, a colonial periphery in far southern Peru: the encomienda of Cochuna and the reduction site of Torata Alta. Incomplete knowledge of local conditions left the area vulnerable to social and religious disorder: overlapping boundaries, contested jurisdictions, and competing interests. Further historical archaeological consideration of such disorder can illuminate local impacts of colonialism.     

Making-Home From Below: Domesticating Footpath and Resisting “Homelessness” in Mumbai

Drawing upon ethnography among footpath dwellers in Mumbai this paper argues that hegemonic ideas and practices of urban inhabitation constrain subaltern visions of home as well as public space. In doing so, it warrants an ontology of urban inhabitation that transcends occupancy politics. It is not just the neoliberal state and property-entrenching capital but also the politics of inclusion that fragments subaltern subjectivities of belonging and dispossession. By highlighting everyday practices, particularly the use of footwear, food preparation and consumption, performance of modesty, and rearing of pets, I articulate two ways in which home is experienced and homelessness is resisted through claims where interlocutors have no spatial legitimacy: by (re)producing spatial and moral boundaries and practising multiple mobilities that enable transient domesticities. This paper thus provides an expanded sense of home that moves beyond the materialities of home making, and binaries of the “private” interior and “public” exterior.     

A POLYMORPHIC APPROACH TO POLICY ANALYSIS: A CASE STUDY OF ONTARIO'S ETHANOL IN GASOLINE REGULATION

This article develops a “polymorphic” approach to policy analysis, that is, an approach that draws on multiple forms of spatial reasoning. Specifically, the proposed framework deploys scale and network not merely as epistemological devices that make sense of “horizontal” and “vertical” politico‐institutional structures, but as co‐constitutive ontological processes that involve an ever‐shifting interplay among legacies, rhythms, and events. This polymorphic approach, we argue, facilitates the identification and the examination of the mobilization of social networks and of the attendant cross‐scalar interactions that must be articulated whenever a given policy is framed as a sensible and politically viable place‐based solution. The novel conceptual framework is then applied to the empirical investigation of the formulation of the complex moral, political, and economic environment that enabled the emergence of Ontario's controversial Ethanol in Gasoline Regulation. Our polymorphic approach reveals how this regulation is a (failed) attempt to reconcile Canada's legacy as a resource‐based economy and Ontario's legacy as a manufacturing‐based economy where value is added, with the need for more rational and less harmful resource extraction and for greener fuels that can sustain the current order. We build on the lessons drawn from this case study to suggest that our approach has wider applicability in that it can help create a process‐oriented, dynamic, and multi‐dimensional geography of policy‐making.     

How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota,Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.