No place branding without place making!

The construction of (regional) identity

By: Gerard van Keken for Placebrandz.com

In one of our earlier blogs (Inspiring places: uninspiring non-places to sigh, part V) I mentioned the books by Relph, Augé and Ritzer on placelessness and non-places and their relevance today; considering places without an obvious apparent identity, places without a clearly observable sense of place, meaning or distinctiveness. The latter is one of the core issues in (place) branding.

It sounds so easy, when we talk about place branding, that places have to look for distinctiveness. It seems straightforward, for instance, when places boast recognised landmarks, buildings, monuments that are really distinct and unique. There are many examples that can be put forward here, but what to do when your village, city or region does not have such distinctive features at first sight? This is a good question to start with, when you want to do ‘something’ with place branding, as well as city marketing. We will return to that ‘something’ in one of our future blog postings.

In my opinion every village, city, region or even nation should start any branding initiative by examining its own identity. That is one of the conclusions I draw in my thesis, with which I received my doctoral degree last March at the Erasmus University Rotterdam School of Management. The English summary of this PhD can be found on this website as well (under Important Messages). The title of the PhD is ‘The Construction of Regional Identity: Zeeland; strategies on place branding and place making’, but the thesis itself is in Dutch.

The body of knowledge and (academic) discussion on place, city or nation branding is rapidly expanding. What is missing in these discussions, sometimes, is the active role that people can play to make places more - let me call it - meaningful, peculiar, extraordinary, special, distinctive. To state it bluntly, because of globalization the world becomes more uniform so it is more than necessary that places react and make the difference. My suggestion is that place making is the word and the act, even when this seems obvious, because place branding is done to counter processes of globalisation in the first place, in practice it is all too often forgotten.

Of course the word place making is not new. One of the organisations that came up with the word ‘place making’ is the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), which originated in the seventies in the US. They got their ideas from Jane Jacobs and William ‘Holly’ White, who offered groundbreaking ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to cars and shopping centers (www.pps.org).

I borrowed the word place making, to emphasize the difference between non-places and places, places with or without recognizable ‘identities’, to make a difference for places that are not distinct. My definition of place making is described as “the process of discovering, creating, developing and realizing ideas and concepts for reconstructing place identities, their defining traits and ‘genius loci’ and subsequently building the sense of place, by efforts and investments in hardware (e.g. infrastructure, buildings), software (e.g. events, stories), orgware (e.g. co-operative organisational structuring) and virtual ware (e.g. symbols and symbolic actions, websites)”. This focuses on the possibility of creating distinctiveness, defining traits and the uniqueness of place, which also connects with the environment, and where the perspective of the users is leading (locals first).

So no place branding without place making !