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100 chapter four The Luxury City By summer 2002, the elements were in place for the administration to prepare “all of New York to compete, and win” (Bloomberg 2004). The ceo mayor had put the “right people” in place, drawing on the best offered by the private , public, and nonprofit sectors. He had established clear benchmarks and methods of measurement that would allow for the evaluation of performance. Bloomberg and his ex–private sector compatriots were applying their corporate management experience and deep knowledge of the private sector to create the organizational capacity necessary to achieve results. Agencies were being reorganized, core missions redefined, strategic plans written, and PowerPoint presentations prepared. Only one thing was missing: a strategy for competitive success. In June 2002, edc President Andrew Alper told the city council how the administration was going about developing such a strategy: We are, with a lot of people’s help, trying to make sure that we do a better job of marketing and positioning New York City as a brand. McKinsey & Co. [has] interviewed companies . . . to help us think about what are our competitive advantages and disadvantages. . . . We are thinking about what companies we should target. . . . We want to put together a high impact road show, talk about the benefits of New York City, why it is a good place to live and to do business, and convince companies they should be here. . . . In the past, I think, we relied on the fact that New York is the crossroads of the world, it is the business capital of the world. We sort of let people come to us. Well, you know what? We need to go to them now. It is time for us to get on the road and tell our story. It is a very compelling story. Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it is crowded, but there is a reason it is crowded. It is a great place to live and to work . . . we have to get that story out. (2002a, emphasis added) For the administration, competitive success required nothing less than the rebranding of New York City. The Luxury City • 101 urBan Branding and its potential Since the mid-1960s, urban political elites have been faced with the difficult tasks of countering images of urban crisis and attracting investment, jobs, and desirable residents in a context of fiscal austerity and increasing interurban competition. In the United States, one of the responses has been to strengthen the “boosterist city marketing . . . deeply entrenched as a part of the North American agenda for the city” (Ward 1998a, 34).1 However, these placemarketing practices quickly developed into something new. Contemporary place marketing, “while rooted in a long tradition, is distinguished both qualitatively and quantitatively from the past” (Holcomb 1994, 120). First, contemporary place marketing is a constitutive element of the dominant entrepreneurial model of urban governance; earlier place marketing did not rise to such importance (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Hall and Hubbard 1998a; Harvey 2001). Second, place marketing was boosted by the growth of the “modern ‘institutional matrix’ of media and marketing” in postindustrial cities in the last decades of the twentieth century (Greenberg 2008, 21). Innovations in marketing , along with the expansion of the mass media and the growing importance of tourism to city economies, helped provide a supply-side impetus for the intensification of place marketing brought on by increased interurban competition (Ashworth and Voogt 1994, 39–42; Greenberg 2008, 20–24). Most important for our discussion here was the emergence of “branding” as a corporate practice and professional field (Ashworth and Voogt 1994, 41–42; Greenberg 2008, 31–34). Branding is centered on the notion that images or meanings can be marketed “even as the products to which they relate remain vaguely delineated or even non-existent” (Ashworth and Voogt 1994, 42). If traditional marketing was dependent on the fetishization of the commodity, that is, the attribution of qualities to a product in and of itself and the concomitant obscuring of the process of production, branding “promote[s] a fetishizing of the fetish: that is, the commodification of the reified image of the commodity itself” (Greenberg 2008, 31). Many corporations have become convinced that the images and meanings attributed to products not only have quantifiable value in and of themselves but are more important than the products. From the 1970s to the 1990s, many corporations “shifted their resources away from production and human resources via outsourcing and downsizing while concentrating the bulk of their capital on building powerful...

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