Alberto Duman Urban Pamphleteer N.2 Place Branding Agency: an ‘urban fiction’ speculative project for the control of uses of place names towards the local distribution of its immaterial equity.

The notion of cities –or neighborhoods– being traded as commodities seems today hardly a novelty to reckon with or a strategy to demystify anymore. Place marketing techniques as ways to ‘revitalize’, change or reconfigure entire areas of cities for a variety of purposes have been with us for several decades, the upshot of which is that any ‘I heart (add your place)’ campaign ever since NYC’s in 1977, goes only to reconfirm how matters of value perception in urban environments –like any other products– precede their actual formation in material terms. 1 And just like in contemporary product design, where the manufacturing of desires that pre-empties the product desirability is of central concern for designers, so in urban design, the city conceptualized as a product fuels the intense production of scattered signals that boost the city in its image. This is Urban 'Design' as the organized creation, promotion and marketing of the patterns through which the city grows and multiplies its own order, a pre-designing of the aspirational aura that contends with desires in advance of their conscious materialization. Whether these perception influence exercises are the motivational efforts of public administrations boosting or rebuilding constituents’ perceptions of their own area, promoting ‘cleaner, safer streets’ or developers tropes to boost sales is nowadays a less and less relevant distinction.

                                                                                                               1 See I Love Hackney http://www.hackney.gov.uk/hackney-the-place-love.htm - .UcwRG93dxX8 or even I Love Chatsworth Road as a take on it: http://www.ilovechatsworthroad.co.uk/

The advanced degree of osmosis between public government and private entities in their shared intents of attracting inwards investments and economic activity for the benefit of the citizen/consumer, means that they are now largely enmeshed in the same efforts of immaterial value capturing through the use of a place name to be transformed into material gain. Who are the losers and winners of these games has been for a while the contentious ground of debates framed under a popular index: ‘Whose city?’. One of the most overlooked aspects of the legacy of the London 2012 Olympic Games will certainly be the unmatched strict code of branding policing and marketing management of its associated sponsors.2

In its utmost overzealous care of the London 2012 names, words and images, it focused our attention on the immaterial equities of place distinction and identification that are at the heart of the cognitive capital market of the world-class city and its areas as products or opportunities to become such. Some prefer to call such phenomena simply ‘the market’ with a sense of inescapable inevitability but the unavoidable presence and increasing weight of the activities of city marketing, PR boosts and social networks in the propagation and reproduction of such inevitability, reveal how self-consciously and deliberately generative such activities are in a world-class city and these force us to consider how such mechanisms impact on the value extraction activities that specifically employ the name of any urban location as a device to capture such perceived values. The fact that the existing perceptions of an area might themselves have been forcefully created by media-fuelled negative branding hardly matters: characterization ranging from ‘Murder Mile’ to ‘Estate Agents paradise’ means that we have been accustomed to inhabit such swinging spaces of representation with accelerating patterns, with the press doing its best at keeping in the game.3 At the centre of such intense production of place identity is the cultural life of the city/place/commodity in all its forms and human character; in this contemporary economy of immaterial producers where algorithms and people replace workers and factories, it’s no surprise to see how the same entities who are actively producing the hyperbolic accelerated images that constitute the mass concept of this self-perpetrating spectacle are also the same ones reaping most of its trickled effect in the form of profit. A clear example was that the protection of the value of the investment in the Olympic brands enacted by the ODA was understood as a paranoid but necessary service for the public good, since successful value capturing of branding means –in the minds of those conceiving such strategies– successfully confirming the value of the place and its capacity of attracting further investment and producing capital accumulation. In turns, –so the story goes–, ‘the most enduring legacy of the Olympics will be the regeneration of an entire community for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there’.4 For a while now, this is where the narratives of regeneration/rebranding have grounded into a murky mix of lack of proper evaluation, unfinished businesses and mountains of empirical and anecdotal evidences pointing to its inconsistency and false mythologies. The easy oppositional gain paraded as ‘murders vs coffee shops’ coats such process with intrinsically positive qualities the results of which cannot be discussed if not in terms of unquestionable improvements.                                                                                                                2 http://www.london2012.com/about-us/our-brand/using-the-brand/ 3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/27/dalston-cool-london-suburb 4 p.19 The Olympic Bid book: http://www.gamesbids.com/english/bids/london.shtml

In most cases, the ‘value capturing mechanisms’ that are supposed to redistribute the ‘place value’ back to the ‘place inhabitants’ are sharply asymmetrical and their outcomes are failing in securing housing tenure, deliver partial benefit to limited sectors of the local constituency and aims only at providing structures without acknowledging that changes in the area become an economic challenge for most. Even without entering in ideological, class-driven debates, the main and most recurring failure of regeneration schemes or softer rebranding exercises is their failure in capturing and distributing the value they generates for the beneficiaries they purports to serve, namely the generic inhabitants of the area in the process of rebranding whose main concern is to maintain, if not increase, their capacity to cope with rising costs of living. In more specific terms, as Harvey sees in Art of Rent, ‘uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents’ and through the perception of place distinction (the ‘this could only be here’ feeling) the ‘sequestration’ of value can begin to take shape. In Hackney Central, a new development initiated by the fashion house Burberry on the premises of their ex-factory is highlighting this industrial heritage through the use of a sheep as their logo and by using the name ‘The Textile Building: made in Hackney Village, London UK’ as their brand. Beside the sheep jokes, and the hijacking of the ‘village’ ethos in the midst of large-scale urban development, there is perplexity of where ‘Hackney Village’ might be, but all of this is a clear example of immaterial value sequestration or extraction. From the place, to the brand, seamless connections are drawn in which ‘Hackney Village’ is the brand of value.

But what about the ‘villagers’? How can the ‘community’, –the local ‘villagers’ used in the marketing of place by developers in Hackney for example– control the appropriation of the name of a place to capture and redistribute the capital generated by those using it for private

gain? In the past and until now, the planning system has only managed to extract some private gains from developers through the famed ‘section 106 agreement’ but the dependency of this mechanism to straightforward property values and the built environment restricts its understanding of value to material assets, leaving unobserved the use of place names as immaterial collective equity produced by those actually living in the named place. If that wasn’t the case, why flaunting the ‘Hackney’ brand? The identification of people and product in specific local terms is a classic advertising device; last year Adidas campaign –as an official main sponsor of the Olympic– stretched the brand embrace to incorporate the citizen-consumers success story, by featuring young East London musicians dressed in Adidas gear, with the tagline: ‘We Are London’.5 Recently the Localism Act has opened up some avenues of rights and control mechanisms to reconfigure the development of a local economy, but in its constituent parts this is still too dependent on the initiative of those who already have privileges to act in the interest of those who don’t, therefore leaving unturned the asymmetrical distribution of social capital in the local and more than often provide entry for capital without powers of –for example- local taxation schemes. What I am proposing to investigate here is rather different. The ultimate consequence of internalizing the concept of the ‘city as commodity’ is that the character of distinction, manufactured by marketing urbanism and reaped by its clients (developers, estate agents) must prove itself to be consistent with its ground level (the local) and driven to its ultimate degree of credibility in the most literal sense. Capital flows into an area of regeneration in order to increase its overall monopoly rent value; how such value is captured as it is created through marketing and image repositioning? ‘Appellation of origin’ legal protection schemes denominate and safeguard the area of production in order to maintain the links between people, places and their economy; how could we envisage such denomination to exist for cities, areas, quarters, and streets? Let’s call this a PLACE BRANDING AGENCY. Such denomination would operate –if you wish–a degree of inclusion in which those within the boundaries of any defined area are automatically given a participation in the shares derived from the future immaterial equities involving the use of the name of that area. Crucially such mechanism would be recognized as operative as a given blanket right of the area inhabitants, and as such before the area emerges as a high-end speculative territory of value-extraction through its name. Other means of central redistribution from higher level of taxation from the local authority enact their supposed benefit to the residents only after the area has been already transformed to a certain degree and new capital has entered the area, with the consequence that defense mechanisms to compensate the rising rent and purchase values for those on the lowest income scale arrive too late to act as credible means of protection. In a nutshell, for the Place Branding Agency every product or service whose name is or invokes the name of an area, but whose production site or company address does not fall within the defined boundaries of such area must incur in a value-extraction exercise that reflows capital in the area itself through the collection powers of the local Place Branding Agency.                                                                                                                5 http://www.jdsports.co.uk/page/we-are-london

This would mean for example that a fictional Dalston Branding Agency would file claims for equities from John Lewis for their use of the name ‘Dalston’ in their ‘Dalston Leather Messenger Bag’ sold in their stores nationwide. The capital collected could then used to progressively compensate the lowest or faster rising private rents of the area as they grow within time, support start-up grants or finance community initiatives aimed at helping the initial occupants of the area at the moment of its identification by the Place Branding Agency to remain in their place.6 Any company whose products or services are produced/aggregated within the area or whose company offices are located within the defined boundaries of that area are exempt from the collection of revenues from the local Branding Agency. Of course, the identification of clear boundaries of the area would be crucial to the setting up of such inclusion mechanisms7, and on this note, a confrontation with the mechanisms provided by the Localism Act is relevant. The first constitutive act of a CIC (Community Interest Company) is that of creating new boundaries for its activities, which overlap with existing wards boundaries and such self-deliberated boundaries in which specific self-interested groups incorporate all others within the reach of their decisions, have already been source of much discontent. The fictional idea of Place Branding Agency is a way to instigate more seriously ways of

                                                                                                               6 See for instance the recent troubles caused by Hackney Council shifting an old peppercorn rent from £10 p.week to £37.000 p.year to the Centerprise Bookshop/Café in Dalston High Street: http://www.centerprisetrust.org.uk/ 7 A poignant confrontation is between this http://www.dalston4london.org.uk/webdocs/where.html, and this http://euanmills.com/ methodology and results. Beside the anecdotal, the point at which differences become crucial is in the designation powers that determine how zones for development or rebranding are set out.

understanding the creation, promotion and extraction of flows of immaterial place values and how a social equality agenda of redistribution could be enacted within the territories where ‘immaterial civil wars’ are clearly taking place. To flush these invisible flows back into a conscious, visible territory is suggested as part of a critical agenda for regeneration studies. Alberto Duman 27.6.2013