Per Olof Berg

City branding: a state‐of‐the‐art review of the research domain

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to carry out a contemporary and concise “state-of-the-art” review of the city branding research domain, in particular how scholars have approached this field of st ...

Strategic creation of experiences at Shanghai World Expo: a practice of communification

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the underlying rationale for why companies participate in mega‐events in general, and in mega‐events in emerging economies – such as the 2010 Shanghai Expo – in particular. Of particular interest are the ways that companies use an event to advance their own purposes, and how experiences are created that use aspects of an event setting such as Expo 2010.Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on a participatory, ethnographic and longitudinal field study focusing on the VIP section of the Swedish Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, using additional data from other national pavilions and respondents with insight into Expo 2010 and its organization.Findings – The study indicates that even though companies operationally used the World Expo and the VIP section in many different ways, an underlying element appears to be to use the event for the “practice of communification”.Practical implications – The study provides practitio...

Introduction: setting the scene

The purpose of this introductory chapter – as the title says – is to set the scene for the coming chapters: providing definitions of some of the more central concepts, and a description of the overall structure of the book and how the different chapters relate to each other. However, we would like to start the chapter with some general comments on the role and importance of cities in the world today.

The Political Economy of City Branding

Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko’s The Political Economy of City Branding addresses ways in which globalization affects several types of cities through increased intercity competition and, subsequently, leads to efforts to increase the attractiveness of places. The author promises to inspect seriously the strategic environment of modern cities such as the impact of globalization on competitiveness, and to look critically at the cities’ struggles for attractiveness. Anttiroiko’s core argument is that such intercity competition takes place in an asymmetric political economic field, where cities attempts strategically to distinguish and position themselves and their resources in relation to other cities. Thus, with its expressed strategic focus and political-economy perspective, the book at the outset seems to be rather different from the majority of ‘how to do city branding’ manuals now flooding the fast-growing literature market on city and destination branding. The main line of argument (which also roughly corresponds with the chapters of the book) is built upon a long causal chain, including the following main elements: the process of globalization – affects on urban communities – leading to increased intercity competition – compelling urban communities to increase their attractiveness – in an asymmetric field – where the urban communities attempt to use their resources – in order to improve their competitive position. The advantage of this transparent line of thought is obvious: it makes the chain of argumentation clear and often compelling. The disadvantage, on the other hand, is that it based on an idea of causality in relationships where interconnection might not be the case. So, with this in mind, let us take a look at the various arguments and where they might lead. In chapter 1, the author states that he will apply a political-economy perspective on place branding, even though he claims that political economy is a somewhat vague concept. His reason for applying this particular perspective is that it provides a critical approach to economic development and social issues. He also claims that the particular Marxian version of the perspective upon which he leans is also particularly well suited for analysing social change in relation to the totality of social structures, materiality, and the free and creativity activity of people. For us who have had more than enough of descriptive and normative studies of place branding, a critical (though not necessarily critical from a Marxist perspective) and strategic stance is indeed a promising beginning of the book! In the two following chapters the author continues to discuss the ways in which cities are challenged by the current globalization, as well its consequences in terms of an emerging hierarchy of cities and increasing structural urban asymmetries. This discussion provides valuable insights in the contemporary strategic context of cities, and serves as a background to understanding the ‘spiky’ topography of the urban environment. An interesting part of the book comprises the presentation of the ‘city attraction hypothesis’ in chapter 4. It is based on five postulates that, according to the author, constitute the ‘premises of the attraction based global intercity competition’ (p. 41). According to the hypothesis, cities are to be seen as rational (in searching for the highest possible value of global value flows), instrumental (in their pursuit of resources and positions), and strategically conscious about them and finally goal-oriented (focusing on local prosperity). Even though few researchers – or practitioners for that matter – would agree that this overly rationalistic view of city development reflects reality, the very formulation of the hypothesis is valuable as it mirrors general assumptions of why and how cities should get involved in branding activities. It should be noted, though, that the prescriptive character of this city attraction hypothesis is quite distant from the critical society perspective set out in the beginning of the book. This deflection from the original promise of an intellectually critical perspective on strategic city branding becomes even more apparent in chapters 5 and 6, where the author takes on the theory and practice of city branding as a strategic tool. Here the perspective changes and becomes more managerial than social, the arguments are often turned into prescriptive statements, and models and practises become ‘how to’ manuals. Statements like ‘early phases of the branding process require good ideas and a lot of creativity’ (p. 75) and ‘communication should be designed to help in branding’ (p. 78), where the reasons for why something is ‘required’, or ‘should’ be done, are not accounted for. What we expected to find here after reading the first Regional Studies, 2016