Branding the City: The Democratic Legitimacy of a New Mode of Governance

Introduction Branding has become an empirical phenomenon in the governance of urban districts and communities, especially in urban regeneration programmes (e.g. Van Dijk and Holstein, 2007). Branding has been widely applied to change the image of regenerated areas, with the aim of attracting investors and new residents. In the UK for example, branding has become increasingly central to regeneration partnerships in order to “market schemes to developers, business and the public” (Jones and Evans, 2008, p 75). According to the literature on place branding, the branding of districts or communities aims to create a favourable image of the place by emphasising certain functional, symbolic, and experiential aspects (cf. Kavaratzis, 2008). The place brand is a symbol that suggests ways of experiencing or relating to the community (cf. Arvidsson, 2006). Place branding is used as an urban governance strategy for managing perceptions about places. It includes perceptions of opportunities within a place and its identity, and it may involve ideas about economic and spatial development. Place branding may be directly coupled to urban governance, following the rationale that a place first decides what kind of brand it wants to become and then enhances developments to support that brand (Kavaratzis, 2008). In such cases, branding plays a role at both the symbolic level and the level of urban policies. The upsurge of place branding can be linked to the emergence of “the entrepreneurial city” (Hall and Hubbard, 1998) and neo-liberal policy programmes in American and European cities (Hackworth, 2007; Greenberg, 2008). Based on a free-market ideology, these programmes propose a decrease in state regulation and the introduction of private-sector strategies. Marketing-led strategies of economic development have come to play a more important role (Greenberg, 2008). Doubts have, however, been raised concerning the effects of branding in terms of democratic legitimacy. Although comprehensive research on the democratic legitimacy of place branding is lacking, scholars have been critical about several issues. They argue that place branding and place marketing have been applied as a form of spin that prevents the public from properly knowing what their government is doing (see Brownill, 1994; Greenberg, 2008). Kavaratzis (2008) points to the risk of governments and public–private partnerships launching place brands without consulting local communities. Analysing the case of Amsterdam, he asserts that citizens were hardly involved in selecting the main dimensions of the place brand: a consultancy selected the three main brand values. Bennett and Savani (2003) describe how public officials, in consultation with private parties, bypass elected politicians when taking