Place marketing as politics: the limits of neo-liberalism

Place marketing should be regarded as a political activity that resonates with the dynamics of a particular class settlement. Each political era constitutes a class settlement in the sense that it is constructed around a particular relationship between labour and capital. For the last three decades place marketing has been associated with the transformation of the industrial city during the transition from social democracy to neo-liberalism, a politics that gave coherence to place branding in the form which we are all familiar with. While urban place marketing is concerned with the economic health of a particular city, it is nonetheless inextricably linked to the dynamics of the neo-liberal settlement which strengthened capital and weakened the working class. This settlement is multi-faceted, spanning measures to destabilise the working class, to create a global financial infrastructure that permitted the out-movement and privatisation of industry, to weaken the welfare state, to promote hyper-mobility for capital and labour through globalisation, and to oversee the creation of a business-friendly environment at the national, regional and local scale.