Politics of Belonging and Exclusion
in the Branded Metropolis

Review by Nadia Kaneva

University of Denver

Branding Cities: Cosmopolitanism, Parochialism, and Social Change, edited by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Eleonore Kofman, and Catherine Kevin. New York: Routledge, 2009. ISBN 0-415-96526-8. 232pp.

Place branding has become a fashionable topic in policy and scholarly debates in the past few years. The topic has prompted a slew of publications which take for granted the proposition that globalization – understood as the liberalized flow of capital and people across borders – mandates that places (cities, countries, regions) now stand in competition with each other as they aim to attract investment, tourism, workers, and cultural recognition. Such totalizing claims have received insufficient scrutiny from critical scholars, despite the existence of a rich body of thought in various disciplines that takes issue with the underlying neoliberal agenda of globalization. Thankfully, this edited volume by Donald, Kofman, and Kevin offers a respite from the dominant discourse on place branding and presents essays that undertake nuanced and grounded examinations into the politics of belonging and exclusion that are implicated in the branding of metropolitan cities.

Despite the book’s title, however, the editors’ ultimate interest lies less with city branding per se and more with the contradictory pressures of cosmopolitanism – understood as a “process of the human imagination” (p. 3) – and its inverse notion, parochialism, as these play out in relation to contemporary urbanity. In their introductory chapter, the editors reveal that they intend to issue a provocation by drawing a connection between cosmopolitanism, parochialism, and branding. They explain that this move is based on the supposition that an analytical focus on branding can productively defamiliarize long-standing debates on the meaning of the cosmopolitan/parochial binary. Furthermore, they propose that examining the processes of city branding can serve to ground inquiries into the negotiations of inclusion and exclusion that occur at the intersection of cities’ cosmopolitan aspirations and parochial entrenchments. This grounded approach to scholarship, evident in most of the essays, is one of the main strengths of the volume.

The volume is organized in four sections, each focusing on a different set of issues pertaining to urbanity and drawing on a different disciplinary approach. Nevertheless, a focus on the tensions between the global and the local is a theme that runs across the different sections. Chapters two through five discuss the dynamics of urban settlement and migration and focus on the lived experiences of migrant groups that are often specifically excluded from the glitzy narratives of city branding. The key insight that emerges from these studies of particular groups in London (chapters two and four), Berlin (chapter three), and Manchester (chapter five) concerns the ambivalent and unstable role of migrant populations in relation to the production of identity narratives about the city. How and why migrants are obscured by or showcased in branding campaigns relates to class and racial politics, historical conditions, and the centrality of ideas of diversity and multiculturalism to the urban imaginary. These four chapters rely on qualitative interviews, in combination with other sources, to deliver rich details about the practices of particular migrant groups. Chapter six is the exception to the bunch in this section (and, in my view, the least interesting one) as it presents the concept of “cultural quarters” in theoretical and policy terms, without connecting it to ethnographic data.

The second section of the volume shifts the disciplinary and methodological focus and presents three excellent studies of how the urban imaginary is constructed and contested through the modern medium of film. In chapters seven through nine we see how specific film texts can poach the narratives of city brands, resist them, or be appropriated by them. Chapter eight offers one of the most nuanced and insightful discussions in the volume by situating branding in relation to ideas of the modern. Going beyond textual analysis, this chapter also provides rich historical background and illuminates the role of political ideologies in constructing the identities of cities. Its most contentions, as well as thought-provoking, proposition may be the implication that the ideological genus of modern branding is similar to that of fascist propaganda.

Part three of the volume presents three essays that approach the urban experience through family narratives. These chapters shift in tone from previous ones to explore the themes of belonging and othering in more personal terms. They are also the furthest removed from a direct discussion of the topic of city branding, although the idea that global cities have recognizable brands is implicitly present in all of them.

The final chapter of the collection, set in its own section, returns specifically to the idea of city branding and its political implications for the political lives of cities. It takes a strongly critical approach as it interrogates the assumptions behind city branding as an ideology. Using as its main example events in Sidney in 2005, this essay exposes “the gap that readily opens between the brand and the reality” of urban existence (p. 191). Moreover, it raises questions about the meaning of citizenship and of cosmopolitanism in the context of global cities, and insists on situated analyses of the praxis of urban belonging. In that sense, the chapter provides a fitting coda to the volume and suggests the need for continued inquiry into the dangers of commodified and branded forms of cosmopolitanism.

Overall, the collection’s main strengths stem from its inclusion of multiple disciplinary and methodological approaches, its emphasis on empirical grounding, and the attention to historicity. In addition, this is a highly readable set of essays that would be equally accessible to graduate students and more advanced scholars. While the entire collection may not be appropriate as reading for a particular class, individual essays may be helpful as supplementary materials in courses on urban sociology, cultural geography, film and media studies, and cultural studies

There are, of course, limitations to this volume. To begin with, the reference to “social change” in the book’s subtitle is a bit misleading as this concept is not explicated in the editors’ introduction or directly engaged in any of the chapters. Interestingly, it does not even appear in the book’s index. While all of the chapters are in some way discussing processes of change on the terrain of modern urbanity, they do not connect this to any particular theoretical frameworks of social change or reproduction.

Another limitation may be seen in the particular selection of cities represented in the chapters. The majority of essays focus on cities in Europe (Berlin, London, Manchester, Nantes, Paris, Rome), two focus on Asia (Shanghai and China more broadly), and one on Australia (Sidney). References to other cities around the world are made in different chapters, but the overall mix remains skewed in favor of Europe and, specifically, its Western parts. Notably absent are the Americas with such iconic city brands as New York, Las Vegas, and Rio de Janeiro. The Arab world and Africa are also not represented. Of course, no collection can include every relevant example and there may be good reasons for focusing on particular cities and not on others. However, in a book that aims to discuss global processes and trends, the basis of these choices should have been noted by the editors. At the same time, the limited selection only suggests the need for continued work on this topic. Thus, this edited volume makes its most important contribution by offering more than a collection of case histories of city branding projects. Rather, it thoughtfully interrogates the complex and multiple histories of modern urban experiences as they relate to political, cultural, and economic conflicts and accommodations between the global and the local.