What’s the story in this territory? Towards a spatially sensitive framework The transformation of the global economy and the new urban competitive strategies discussed provide the context for the phenomenon that the article seeks to explore but, before addressing the case study, the analytical framework is presented in the following section. The notion of plot is therefore essential as it is the meaning giving feature to any story. In the words of Polkinghorne:
C U L T U R E S T O R I E S : U N D E R S T A N D I N G
C U L T U R A L U R B A N B R A N D I N G
Ole B. JensenAalborg University, Denmark
Abstract This article argues for a narrative approach to the study ofurban branding and planning and presents an analytical framework forunderstanding narratives and place. The notion of the ‘representationallogics of urban intervention’ captures this idea that urban brandinginterventions are guided by certain representations and embedded incertain norms and values. The analytical framework is applied to a casestudy of cultural urban branding, the harbour front in Aalborg, Denmark,where a number of flagship architecture projects and cultural institutionsare planned. It illustrates the competing stories told by proponents andopponents of the interventions, and also shows how the relation to place in the stories differs radically according to their allegiances. Thearticle aims to throwing light on the complex relationship between storyand place.
Keywords cultural planning, narrative turn, urban branding
This article offers a conceptual frame for understanding the phenomenon ofurban branding as it applies to new forms of contemporary urban governance– in particular within the realm of cultural planning (Bianchini and Parkinson,1993; Evans, 2001; Kunzmann, 2004; Landry, 2000). The article argues for anunderstanding of cultural urban brands through a narrative turn in planning andsocial theory (Eckstein and Throgmorton, 2003; Finnegan, 1998; Sandercock,2003). Central to the argument is a notion of a more spatially sensitive approachto urban branding. The article is therefore about how different actors tell differ-ent stories about the same place. Within this sphere, the vocabulary of global
transformation, culture and the experience economy clashes with much lesscoherent narratives about how the city still needs to be accessible to all, andabout tax prioritization. The case study explored is the harbour front inAalborg, where the municipality has designated an area and some buildings tohost the cultural activities and functions of the ‘Culture Triangle’. The articleargues that a theoretical framework of narratives needs to be linked to notionsof place if we are to understand the ways that narratives of culture are used asurban branding stories in contemporary city planning.
The article is structured in five sections. After the introduction, the secondsection briefly describes the current urban situation as one of massive culturaltransformations following from new global competitive challenges to the city.The third section presents the analytical framework for understanding thecomplex relation between story and place, which is then applied to the empiri-cal case study in section four. Section five presents some conclusions.
The new cultural landscapes
The societal transformation process in western countries has been character-ized by a shift towards immaterial and experiential stimulation. Even thoughthere are massive inequalities and welfare problems, the global shift has givencompletely new tools social agents, both for constructing identities and relatingto one another. According to the German sociologist Gerhard Schulze, we areliving in the ‘Erlebnisgeschellschaft’ or experience society, where the primaryconcern has shifted from subsistence to making sense of the world by seekingever more stimulating experiences (Ritzer, 1999; Schulze, 1992). Owing to theglobal transformation processes of the contemporary capitalist economy, citieswith an industrial background and heritage are therefore busy transforming oreven erasing the traces of that historic legacy (Short, 1999).
According to Pine and Gilmore (1999), the hallmark of our economy is thatit is an experience economy. The addition of the symbolic dimension of a nicecafé atmosphere makes the ordinary cup of coffee multiply the revenue poten-tial. As part of the culture shift, cities now represent themselves as fun places(Metz, 2002), which means places where the ‘good life’ is not only aboutemployment but also increasingly about ample time for leisure (Short, 1999).Fun city and the new cultural narratives are thus part and parcel of each other(Boer and Dijkstra, 2003).
These major global transformation processes are reflected in increasingactivity at the urban level to attract attention, capital, residents and tourists.One such activity is the practice of urban branding.
Urban branding – a new role for cultureAs experience and culture gain importance, cities worldwide are engaged inconstructing images and representations of their locations in accordance withthese new trends. Therefore the culture-led, experience-oriented policy-makers are looking towards the discipline of urban branding. The etymologyof the word branding literally implies the notion of burning, but we have left
behind the notion of burning cattle and are now dealing with burning theconsumer-mind.
The literature on urban branding is extensive (see Jensen, 2005 for a generalcoverage of the city branding literature). The idea is understood to involve selec-tive storytelling, or attempts to re-imagine the city (Eckstein and Throgmorton,2003; Sandercock, 2003). It has to do with coining concepts and articulatingdifference and identity. Seen in this light, urban branding is evocative storytellingaimed at educating its recipients to ‘see the city in a particular way’ (Selby, 2004).However, branding for identity construction also means branding for alterityconstruction (Czarniawska, 2002). In Czarniawska’s words: there is no reason tobelieve that the question ‘Who am I unlike?’ should be less interesting andimportant than the question ‘Who am I like?’ Translated to the field of urbanbranding, this means that city managers represent their cities with an eye notonly to cities with which they would like to be compared, but equally importantlyto those in whose company they would prefer not to be found!
The role of the media and the public sphere in shaping the representationsof the city is important in this. Furthermore, there will probably be a numberof coexisting urban representations – often competing against each other(Greenberg, 2000). Greenberg sees urban branding as the creation of a mono-lithic, consumer-oriented representation. Thus the branding strategy, in acomplex manner, bears witness to the way in which the ‘word city’ is overlay-ing the ‘built city’ (Greenberg, 2000: 230). In a dynamic process of socio-spatialdialectics (Richardson and Jensen, 2003), the city becomes the frame uponwhich its physical surface is inscribed with new ways of playing the globalcompetitive game (e.g. by means of music houses at derelict harbour fronts orother expressions of cultural intervention). At the same time the city is repre-sented in images, texts and logos and is thus embedded in a certain logic specificto the urban intervention.
Creative cities and the rise of the new ‘creative class’As a consequence of the global shifts and transformation discussed so far,creativity and culture gain weight and importance on the agenda. There is aglobal discourse of the creative city, which gains currency by means of articu-lation and re-articulation amongst city fathers, developers, politicians, plannersand other urban stakeholders. New planning frameworks for cultural planning(Kunzmann, 2004) and an increased awareness of the importance of innovation,art and creative capacities in cities are much in evidence (Landry, 2000).Substantial research indicates the importance of culture in the making ofsuccessful contemporary urban economies (Hesmondhalgh, 2000; Markussen,2005; Stevenson, 2003; Thorsby, 2001). Also there is an increased awareness thatart and business are joining forces in the new urban competitive economy(Caves, 2000; Hall, 2000).
These understandings go alongside the development (and marketing) of the most widely known concept in this field, that of the new ‘creative class’.Coined by Richard Florida, the notion of a new social class with a particularcreative potential has gained immense influence in urban policy and planning
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circles worldwide. The discussion is how to create attractive urban environ-ments for the new class. Florida defines this as some 38 million Americanswithin the fields of science and engineering, architecture and design, education,arts, music and entertainment (Florida, 2002). However, Florida’s conceptual-ization has not been without opposition; Kunzmann for instance sees simpleanswers to complex questions in Florida’s work (Kunzmann, 2004), andMarkussen finds the creative class a ‘fuzzy concept’ mainly covering educationaldifferences (Markussen, 2005).
Another very influential voice in the field of cultural planning is Britishurban planning consultant Charles Landry, who has developed a differentnotion of the creative city based on decades of consultancy work (Landry, 2000).According to Landry, a good quality of life is to be used as a competitive tool.Leaning on the notion of agglomeration economies, Landry revokes Hall’snotion of the milieu:
A creative milieu is a place – either a cluster of buildings, a part of a city, a city as awhole or a region – that contains the necessary preconditions in terms of ‘hard’ and‘soft’ infrastructure to generate a flow of ideas and inventions. Such a milieu is aphysical setting where a critical mass of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, social activists,artists, administrators, power brokers or students can operate in an open-minded,cosmopolitan context and where face to face interaction creates new ideas, artefacts,products, services and institutions and as a consequence contributes to economicsuccess. (Landry, 2000: 133)
Clearly, the presence of artists is the hallmark of vibrant urban sites, and thechallenge to policy-making and planning is to make places attractive to suchartistic communities, with their preference for dynamic networks, a climate ofsupport for the arts and a good and affordable quality of life (Gertler, 2004;Markussen, 2005; Markussen and King, 2003; Markussen et al., 2004). Manylarger city centres might be able to offer these facilities, but smaller urbancommunities would find it more challenging to make themselves attractive inthis way. The relationship between the presence of vibrant artistic communitiesand the spatial transformation processes that are emptying industrial pro-duction sites is a well-known story, as described for instance in Zukin’s notionof New York ‘loft living’ (Zukin, 1988). What seems to happen when artists re-appropriate industrial sites is the generation of a value increase in the housingstock, as well as added brand value for the city as a whole (Gertler, 2004), allone might add, at the risk of producing gentrification (Bianchini, 1993).
How cities might profit in the market place from hosting creative communi-ties of people is one way of thinking about the notion of urban culture (Caves,2000). However, interesting experiences with more direct involvement of artistsand communities are also being explored within more progressive forms ofurban planning (Dang, 2005; Gordon, 2005; Landry, 2005; Sandercock, 2005;Sarkissian, 2005; Shaw, 2005). The point is that culture stories are found atdifferent levels and that facilitating empowering processes may be a point ofdeparture in the arts and their potential for unfolding such place-basednarratives.
The transformation of the global economy and the new urban competitivestrategies discussed provide the context for the phenomenon that the articleseeks to explore but, before addressing the case study, the analytical frameworkis presented in the following section.
What’s the story in this territory? Towards a spatially sensitive framework
The central claim of this article is that cultural urban branding can be under-stood better when analysed through a spatially sensitive narrative frame. Thissection of the article presents such a framework.
According to Jessop, all narratives have three elements: a selective appro-priation of past events and forces; a temporal sequence (Aristotle’s beginning,middle and end); and a ‘relational emplotment’ of the past events and forcesinto a more general story that provides causal, or even moral, lessons to belearned (Jessop, 1997). Or in the words of planning scholar Bent Flyvbjerg:
Events are then structured into a narrative by the conventional means of time, place,actors and context. . . . No phenomena can have only one narrative or a singlegenealogy. . . . Narratives not only give meaning to our past experiences, they alsohelp us vision alternative futures. (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 8)
Finnegan also recognizes that some temporal ordering is necessary but that theroute is not always linear (Finnegan, 1998). Therefore the articulation andorganization of stories by means of constructing a plot or ‘emplotment’ is atleast a fundamental dimension of narratives. According to Ricoeur, ‘emplot-ment’ is the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession(Kaplan, 1993). The distinction made by E.M. Forrester is helpful in under-standing this. Accordingly, ‘the king died, and the queen died’ is a story, but ‘theking died, and the queen died of grief’ is a plot (Kaplan, 1993: 172). Taking inspi-ration from historian Hayden White in particular, Czarniawska argues for amore narrow understanding of narrative:
Usually, however, a narrative is understood as a spoken or written text giving anaccount of an event/action or series of events/actions, chronologically connected . . . Historian Hayden White . . . has convincingly demonstrated the advantages of anarrower definition of narrative indeed of distinguishing between narrative andstory. (Czarniawska, 2004: 17)
Authors such as Hayden White and Polkinghorne agree on an understanding ofstories as more than mere narratives (Czarniawska, 2004). Accordingly, narra-tive in the broad sense understands any story as a narrative, whereas the narrowdefinition sees the adding of a plot to the narrative as what makes a story. ToFinnegan (1998: 190), narrative is a category within the broader field of story:
a mere listing of past events with no connecting thread does not make a story. Weneed something more than just temporal sequence, something to give it anintelligible plot. (Finnegan, 1998: 10)
Jensen Culture stories: understanding cultural urban branding 215
The notion of plot is therefore essential as it is the meaning giving feature toany story. In the words of Polkinghorne:
Plots . . . is [sic] the basic means by which specific events, otherwise represented aslists or chronicles, are brought into one meaningful whole. (In Czarniawska, 2004: 7)
Emplotted narratives – stories in this terminology – are central to any form ofurban intervention. Whether it be regional planning or urban design, a story isconstructed to motivate and legitimate the intervention. Furthermore, themaking of such a story is an act of re-presentation. No narrative re-presentationcan be made without a more or less explicit set of guiding principles. Such prin-ciples may be strongly normative and related to notions of the good life,whereas other logics of representations might be more instrumental, such ascost estimates. Then how should we start thinking about such examples of‘representational logics’ in the act of urban intervention? A helpful notion hasbeen developed elsewhere (Jensen and Richardson, 2004), where brands mustbe understood as articulations within discourses. Discourses are articulated inspecific vocabularies, and transformed into social reality through the actions ofsocial agents within institutional contexts. Thus a discourse is an entity ofrepeatable linguistic articulations, socio-spatial material practices and power-rationality configurations (Jensen and Richardson, 2004: 56). An urban inter-vention framed by a narrative may then be part of a larger discourse based uponunderlying rationales and values, relating to a particular strategy, product, inter-vention, plan, artefact, etc.
Narrative acts of representation are central to city planning and thereforemay be said to resemble storytelling. If planning is storytelling then we shouldnot only seek an answer to ‘who or what authorizes the authors?’ (Sandercock,2003: 199), but also try to grasp how places are juggled at changing scales inorder for some ‘authors’ to describe the place and its potential future: ‘story and imagined communities always have a spatial dimension and make ageographical claim. Neither authors nor readers always recognize this spatial-ity, but it is present nevertheless’ (Eckstein and Throgmorton, 2003: 6). Thislinkage between place and narrative is an under-developed theme in theconceptualization of narratives, and crucial if we are to understand contempor-ary cultural urban branding. In an interesting piece of urban ethnographicresearch on everyday life in Copenhagen, Simonsen argues for a narrativeunderstanding that explicitly links the spatial and the narrative (Simonsen,2005). Taking her point of departure in the work of De Certeau (1984),Simonsen argues for a spatiality of urban narratives and an understanding ofhow multiple narratives are organized in a play of shifting relations betweendifferent places. In Simonsen’s words, the narratives of the city makes the cityinhabitable (Simonsen, 2005: 74). In parallel with this insight, we find that story-telling and narrative according to Eckstein are about setting community bound-aries and thus defining some audience members within its territory whilstexcluding others (Eckstein, 2003; Throgmorton, 1993). Thus the theme of poweris added to the fundamentals of place and narrative. In fact one could say thatpower is what links narrative and place.
When the issue is planning and urban intervention, no plan is made withouta narrative element. However, no plan is made without a spatial referent either.Therefore the importance of understanding the relationship between the narra-tive and its place-bound context is of great importance. American geographerEd Soja goes a step further and gives voice to a critique of narratives on thegrounds of their silencing of the spatial:
those promoting the usefulness of storytelling and the narrative form in planningand elsewhere need to be constantly aware of the challenges raised by the criticalrebalancing that is taking place among historical, geographical, and social modes ofanalysis and interpretation. (Soja, 2003: 215)
Soja sees a danger of the narrative turn becoming preoccupied with thediachronic (time) and historical, neglecting the basic understanding of place andits link to the third element of his ‘trialectic’ ontology, namely sociality (Soja,1996). This critique is timely and it is worth paying attention to it. However, theanswer is not to dismiss the potential of the narrative turn but rather to openthe theoretical and analytical focus towards an inclusion of the spatial. This isa solution that Soja himself seem to be aware of as a potential option, when heclaims that ‘a new mode of narration is developing to meet these contempor-ary challenges, one that is thoroughly spatialized’ (Soja, 2003: 224). This critiqueis exactly what feeds this paper’s approach to the linkage of place and narra-tive – a notion of a ‘spatialized narrative’. What is needed is a refinement of ourthinking about the relationship between power, the social and place to enhancean understanding of the ‘social production of space’ (Harvey, 1996; Lefebvre,1974 [1991]). This means that places are represented by and intervened inaccording to a complex dialectics of socio-spatial relations:
The basic proposition is that the socio-spatial relation works by means of its coerciveor enabling capacities for spatial practices. Furthermore the socio-spatial relationconveys meaning to social agents via multiple re-presentations, symbols, anddiscourses. Thus the socio-spatial relation on the one hand expresses possibilities andlimitations to social actions within the built environment. On the other hand themeaning and valuation of this relation is constantly negotiated and re-negotiated onthe basis of social imageries and cultural values. (Richardson and Jensen, 2003: 15,emphasis in original)
Coming from such relational socio-spatial optics, the issue then becomes howto understand representational logics in their spatial context? This amounts todeveloping a notion of spatial narratives as not only representations of space,but also as performative and interventional ‘space producers’:
Discourses produce lived spaces and actions within lived spaces in turn shapediscourses. If discourse is necessary for attaching meaning to things in everyday life(as much as in policy-making, which is just one of those things that happen ineveryday life), then analysis of discourse is inseparable from the analysis of space. Infact, analysis of space requires analysis of discourse if we are to understand howspaces come to be as they are, how people exist and act within spaces. (Jensen andRichardson, 2004: 43)
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Physical attributes (buildings, signage, etc.) must be understood as ‘signs inplace’ in order to grasp how, for example, the culture hub of the ‘CultureTriangle’ is narrated, since ‘the way we narrate the city becomes constitutiveof urban reality, affecting the choices we make, the ways we then may act’(Sandercock, 2003: 182).
It is of great importance to recognize the ‘plurality of narratives’ stemmingfrom a number of heterogeneous voices (Finnegan, 1998; Sandercock, 2003;Simonsen, 2005). Such plurality immediately raises the issue of the relationshipbetween these multiple stories and their author/reader subjects, and thus aboutthe power-plays of urban representation that lie within the representationallogics of the respective narratives. Moreover, this is the main reason for theterminology of narrative ‘turn’. There is no one way of doing narrative analysis,and there is no one narrative approach, let alone paradigm; rather there is an‘ample bag of tricks’, to use the words of Czarniawska:
In my rendition, the narrative approach to social sciences does not offer a ‘method’;neither does it have a ‘paradigm’, a set of procedures to check the correctness of itsresults. It gives access to an ample bag of tricks – from traditional criticism throughformalists to deconstruction – but it steers away from the idea that a ‘rigorously’applied procedure would render ‘testable’ results. (Czarniawska, 2004: 136)
Understanding the complex relationship between narrative, story and place iscrucial to the exploration of contemporary cultural urban branding practice.Here we shall now summarize the analytical framework.
The representational logics of urban intervention – framing the‘narrative turn’There are a number of important clarifying statements to be made. First, thereis a hierarchy of concepts in this frame. Accordingly, narratives are smaller,meaning giving entities within stories that are themselves then nested withindiscourse. Second, all stories contain plots that are their identifying character.Third, there is a link between the narrative framing and the spatial interventionsmade in the city. This idea is captured by the notion of the representational logicof urban intervention; any given urban intervention is embedded in a linguisticrepresentation (and at times a visual one). Such representation is understood tobe based on a set of values and norms that guide the intervention. Using theconcept of the representational logic of urban intervention, therefore, meansthat interventions are framed by representations that express a specific logic, inthe sense of a set of guiding principles and values. Social agents give voice toideas of spatial change in the city by means of local narratives and stories nested within discourses. Any discourse, according to this frame, must be thought of interms of how the representations in words and images are linked to agents ininstitutional settings with the purpose of following certain normative ideas andrationales. Narratives are then embedded in localized stories that may link tolarger discourses, as for example global urban competitiveness via culture-ledinterventions (often pitted against coalitions of agents telling stories aboutalternative uses of tax money). Finally, such representations are always spatiallyembedded.
The analytical framework contains a hierarchical order of these concepts toenable a better understanding of their applicability to the case analysed in thisarticle. To take this forward towards a more operational analytical framework,the more narrow definition of narrative will be followed from hereon. Accord-ing to Czarniawska (2004), we can separate mere listings, as found in texts fromnarratives that are temporal in their organizational structure, from stories, inthat the latter contain a plot. Seen in this way, texts are turned into narrativesby means of temporal ordering and structures (beginning, middle and end).Narratives are turned into stories by means of emplotment, which is the basicmeaning giving dimension to stories. Furthermore, stories are embedded withindiscourses as larger meaning framing systems. This conceptual hierarchy and itsrelation to various narrative modes of representations can be illustrated as inTable 1.
The modes of narrative representation suggest that attention should be paidto how the place is framed in words. Is it a case of a mere listing of information,or is there a temporal structuring leading to a notion of cause and effect? Orperhaps the agents go further and represent the place by telling a story wherethe plot makes the intervention comprehensible. Finally, the hierarchy suggeststhat such explanatory stories may be linked to larger systems of institutional-ized meaning and thereby nested within discourses. In such a case, it is thestruggle for hegemony that we should be looking for, together with how thestories of the place link to notions of the ‘inevitable’ form of intervention orplan proposal.
However, such a frame for understanding the modes of representation needsto be spatially sensitive. As presented here, it is taken as the point of departurethat any planning story has a spatial referent (be that a building site, or a largerspatial entity such as a city). In this sense, places are embedded within the repre-sentations in ways that make the narration of place inevitable:
Places are never emptied. Rather what occurs is a form of discursive displacement.Planners and designers substitute a professional narrative for a multitude of sharedhistories, collective remembrances, and personal experiences. Unwieldy stories aboutthe place are suppressed and replaced by more actionable understandings. Plannersand designers abhor narrative vacuums. Even a cleared site has to have a meaningattached to it. To be cleared is to be prepared for, receptive to, a particular
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T A B L E 1 Modes of narrative representation
Mode of representation Characteristics Examples
Text Detached information Tables, lists, annals
Narrative Information, temporal ordering, Chroniclesstructure and causality
Story Information, temporal order, Life storiesstructure, causality and plot Novels
Discourse Structuring meaning systems and Political ideologiesinstitutionalised stories Scientific medicine
intervention . . . intervention cannot occur, development cannot happen, until site isbrought under control, situated in a professional discourse. To arrive there, priornarratives are reduced in number or, in some instances, totally eliminated.Emboldened by simplification and standardization, analytical description thrives.Such representations cast a particular place in terms of a category of ‘problems’ thatthe professional knows how to solve. (Beauregard, 2005: 54)
What Beauregard voices here is an understanding of the profound relationshipbetween the representational framing and the place as it turns into a site ofintervention. This resonates with the works of Allen et al. as they speak of a‘relational’ understanding of place:
That is, it [the relational understanding of place] understand both space and place asconstituted out of spatialized social relations – and narratives about them – whichnot only lay down ever-new regional geographies, but also work to reshape socialand cultural identities and how they are represented. (Allen et al., 1998: 1–2)
In a study of the south-east of England, Allen et al. show how this region isconstructed as the dominant region both materially and discursively (Allen etal., 1998). According to this approach, any place must be thought of in terms ofnetworks of relationships and interconnections stretching beyond the place andinto the wider world (Allen et al., 1998). This way of thinking offers two import-ant insights that have inspired this article. First, places must be thought of interms of their relation to other places, and second, places have social as well asphysical dimensions. Translated into the analytical framework, this means thatthe representations of the place must be checked for references to other places,and that the social agents narrating the place must be mapped. Analytically, thismeans that one should explore the ‘sense of place’ present amongst the socialagents involved in the narrative framing of the intervention. From the relationalunderstanding, the particular place is understood as related to other places thatthe social agents find of significance.
Summing up, this means that an operational frame for understanding therepresentational logics of urban interventions should contain both a narrativedimension and a place dimension (Table 2). In order to comprehend thecomplex relationship between story and place in cases of cultural urban
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T A B L E 2 Analytical frame for understanding the representational logics ofurban intervention
Narrative dimension Information
Temporal order/structure
Causality
Plot
Discourse institutionalization
Sense of place dimension Relations to other places
branding, the analytical frame is a checklist that needs to be taken into account.From here, and applying the framework, I shall now look into a case of culturalurban branding.
The new ‘culture hub’ of Aalborg – a case of cultural urban branding
I shall now apply the analytical frame to an empirical case by means of identi-fying culture stories as they are articulated by agents in institutional settings.
The site is the harbour front in Aalborg (Figure 1). Located in the (periph-eral) northern part of mainland Denmark, the city of Aalborg is illustrative ofthe transformation in old industrial production areas brought about by pressurefrom global economic competition, whilst at the same time the attention of localand regional stakeholders has shifted towards culture, creativity and innovation.Shipyards and other heavy production facilities have employed decreasingnumbers since the late 1980s (Aalborg Municipal website). Parallel to this shift,the city has hosted Aalborg University since 1974. The university, acting as aregional motor in a number of activities as well as a branding icon, has put itsmark on the city in terms of spin-offs in the retail market, housing market, thenight-life, etc. But the difficult task of transforming the regional workforce intohighly employable knowledge workers is still far from completion. The regionaland local employees are still below the national average when it comes to
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educational background (Nordjyllands Amt, 2003). According to the (nowabolished) County of North Jutland, there is need for a regional, targetedinnovation policy and for an increase in the use of research into regionalproduction, if Aalborg is going to make a successful transformation towardsthe knowledge economy (Nordjyllands Amt, 2003).
During the last few years, there has been a lively public debate in the localmedia on how the city and the region should face the issue of globalization andcompetition (see e.g. Hagerup, 2004). In the 2005 proposal for Municipal Plan,the Municipality of Aalborg identifies the new economy and the restructuringof both the economic and the physical urban landscape as the main theme forthe future (Aalborg Municipality, 2005a). Accordingly, future urban develop-ment in Aalborg should take stock of density, variety, urban qualities, and streetculture in its attempt to re-orientate towards an ‘experience city’ with a largeinput of service, knowledge and culture (Aalborg Municipality, 2005a, 2005b).
The Culture Triangle – towards a new culture hubThere is an increasing awareness of the potential, especially of harbour frontlocations in inner cities, for cultural and creative planning strategies (Anderssonet al., 2004; Carlberg and Christensen, 2005; Dovey, 2005). According to the plansfor the transformation of the harbour front in Aalborg, there will be greatemphasis on culture and cultural institutions. In the municipal vision document(Aalborg Municipality, 2004a) for the future development of the harbour front,there is specific focus on the triangle formed by the former power plant Nord-kraft, the new music hall (the House of Music, designed by Coop Himmelblau),and the innovation incubator for small creative businesses (Dreamhouse). Thisselection of institutions and places is linked in a common narrative of the CultureTriangle (Table 3).
The multiple global narratives and flows of ideas unfold around this ‘CultureTriangle’. The case paves the way for an understanding of how particular websof meanings and ways of doings are articulated with the intention of facilitating
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T A B L E 3 The activities of the Culture Triangle
interventions in urban space. The culture hub known as the ‘Culture Triangle’is one such strategic point of intervention. A culture hub is understood here asa site with high inputs, awareness and levels of cultural urban interventions.Furthermore, as there is more than one culture story, culture clashes occur; inthis particular case where narratives of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture meet.
Dreamhouse, the innovation incubator, is host to a number of smaller busi-nesses working within the fields of architecture, design, art, culture, IT andmultimedia, communication and biomedicine. This intervention is an index ofthe transformation towards a more knowledge- and culture-based economicportfolio. However, its impact in economic terms is not to be overstated. Here,its main function is to serve as the creative business dimension of the newculture hub and its accompanying narrative.
The old power plant of Nordkraft (Figure 2), after its transformation and re-building, will host facilities like a theatre, music venue, sports centre, cinema,shops, businesses, art schools, a youth music school and exhibition places. Manyof the urban stakeholders who have given voice to a story of Nordkraft, are also the opposition to the elitist House of Music. Thus, there is a storyline incirculation identifying the ‘high cultural’ with the House of Music, and the ‘lowcultural’, or popular, with Nordkraft.
The House of Music (Figure 3) is planned to contain a concert hall. This isthe flagship project at the harbour front. The financing of the House of Musicis a complex affair involving privately collected donations, municipal andcounty funding, state money due to the presence of the conservatory, and even
Jensen Culture stories: understanding cultural urban branding 223
regional funds from the European Union. The House of Music was initiallygiven the public nickname of the ‘golden shrimp’ due to its spectacular design.However, due to budget disagreements with the Austrian star architects, thedesign has now changed considerably and is (next to the cost overrun) the mainreason for public resistance towards the project.
Figure 3 shows:
The House of Music in North Jutland seen from south-west with the large flyingconcert hall gesturing towards the fjord. One of the primary characteristics is toretain contact with the fjord through the elegantly lifted building volumes. Aconstant view towards the fjord from Nyhavnsgade has been maintained giving theimpression of an open connection to the city. The functions in the foyer are locatedbelow the flying concert hall which stretches out towards the fjord and NorthJutland. From the upper balconies the audience can enjoy the view of the windingriver, Nørre Sundby and Aalborg. The northern part of the building contains themusic education programs for the Aalborg University as well as the Academy ofMusic and Aalborg Symphony Orchestra. (isochrom.com)
The story of the Culture Triangle is the first narrative to be related to theanalytical frame (Table 2). Given the vast number of activities and plans for thewhole harbour front area, the narrative framing of these three institutions andprojects are an expression of some arbitrariness. However, by spinning them
into the narrative of the triangle, they are framed as if they where parts of amore coherent whole. This whole is exactly the story of the new cultural hub ofthe harbour front in Aalborg. It is a hub provided with a story, and with linksto the wider global context of interurban competition and branding based uponnew cultural strategies and plan-making.
The account of the Culture Triangle is one of a unison articulation. The voiceof the municipality is dominant in its story of how the harbour front is trans-forming according to a specific logic of cultural branding. In the narrativedimension, factual information exists according to which one can understandthe functionality of the place as well as the number of different activities to beinscribed in the new site. The temporal structuring is weak at the specific level.However, at the general level, the Culture Triangle is narrated into thebefore/after temporality of the shift from hard industry to cultural city. The plotof the Culture Triangle story is linked to the new cosmological figure of thetriangle (much like the socially arbitrary notions of star signs). The story unfoldsthe plot with a clear reference to its wider discursive institutionalization: globalinterurban competition leaves no other option for telling a successful story ofthe harbour front in Aalborg than the one institutionalized in the municipalplan; this grants Aalborg a competitive cultural harbour front site with inter-national branding qualities. In this sense, the narrative dimension is intimatelylinked to the sense of place articulated. The city and the harbour front (howeverabstract) are seen as linked to other sites and cities on the global horizon.Furthermore, the story of the Culture Triangle is imminently conditional on thephysical attributes of the harbour and the fjord. Thus the water and the massiveindustrial building of Nordkraft is drawing on the historical continuity of a story where the site is changing by means of a deliberate mix of old industrialaesthetics and contemporary iconic architecture.
‘Aalborg – seize the world’: the branding context for the ‘Culture Triangle’The next narrative account to be presented is the official municipal brandingcampaign, another example of unison narrative framing. The Branding Aalborgcampaign has ‘Aalborg – seize the world’ as its motto (Aalborg Municipality,2004b). Under this heading, four values are identified that are supposedly quin-tessential to the identity of Aalborg:
• diversity• wide prospects• teamwork• drive.
On the basis of the four values a short vision is presented.
Aalborg wants to be a contrast to the traditional city. A bigger heart in a smallerspace with wider prospects. We will cultivate the contrasts and create space fordiversity. Seize the world. And through knowledge, teamwork and drive, secure theframework for a life in development. (Aalborg Municipality, 2004b)
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Unsurprisingly, the wording and articulation of the values have been heavilycriticized in both public debate and the media (assessment based on the debatein the local newspaper Nordjyske from November to December 2004). Somefind them too generic and general to be specific to Aalborg and thus notemblematic of the character of the city. The main critique raised has thereforebeen an issue of identification, and what sort of city the citizens think they livein. Others find that the four values are too broadly formulated, and thus notable to guide future branding actions. One of the other issues in the publicdebate has been whether the money spent (five million Kroner) would havebeen better used on other types of public services, like care for the elderly ormaintenance of the municipal infrastructure – an argument to which the LordMayor countered ‘it’s no use that someone points at holes in the road when weare working to make more jobs’ (cited from Nordjyske, 26 November 2004).
The motto ‘Aalborg – seize the world’ is accompanied by a logo (Figure 4).The logo tries to capture the idea of the outward-looking and global perspec-tive phrased in the motto ‘Aalborg – seize the world’ as the colourful squaresopen up and connect to the wider global space. However, it might also be ‘read’as a city in disintegration and lacking in coherence, rather than posing a positiveconnotation of the medium-sized city with an eye to global potentials.
The branding booklet states that ‘we are not like anyone else’. From thispremise, the four values are described. First of all, the notion of ‘diversity’ canbe seen as one of opposites; small and yet globally connected, the rural country-side and the city core, the buzz of the big city and the quietness of small villages,peaceful enclaves and upbeat entertainment districts. In short (to quote thebranding text), ‘Culturally Aalborg has the whole palette – from fine culture tosubculture and avantgarde’. This clearly articulates an understanding of thelocal identity as being polychrome and diverse. But it might also be read as asymptom of indecisiveness and thus less precision – a major problem in framingidentity as this triggers the before-mentioned reactions to the generic andempty categories with which the inhabitants rarely identified.
The second value is ‘wide prospects’. This is an interesting value as it indexesnot only the normative value of open mindedness and inclusiveness, but also
Planning Theory 6(3)226
F I G U R E 4
Logo for ‘Aalborg – seize the world’ (public domain)
the physical and geographical region in which the city is located. Thus, there isa conflation in the semiotic ‘work’ as it refers both to values and place. Forgenerations, there has been a public notion of North Jutland as being special interms of its blue sky and its wide horizons. Here, the branding taps into someof the folkways that could pave the way for a positive frame of identification.However, some of the critiques in the local media have been precisely frominhabitants who were disappointed to discover that this was more of a physicaland geographical referent than anything else – and clearly not thinking thatwide horizons were enough to articulate a specific identity from.
The third value, ‘teamwork’, draws heavily on the local self-perception ofbeing ‘strong and peripheral’. Accordingly, since the region always has been onthe margins, a particular culture of collaboration and cooperation has developed(out of simple necessity the storyline implies). It is highlighted in the accompany-ing text that the transition from industrial city to knowledge city should beemblematic of this feature. Thus, the way in which the university, businesscommunity and local government has faced the challenges of industrial re-configuration is emphasized. Finally, the virtue of collaboration is also said to bedetectable in the many links that Aalborg nurtures with ‘friendship cities’ (twincities) on a global level. This furthers the impression of the globally awaremedium-sized city. On the other hand, the value of teamwork seems hard tounderstand as something profoundly belonging to Aalborg alone. Compared toother cities, Aalborg probably does not perform any better or worse. Again, theframing taps into more empty and generic concepts that void what reallymatters: local specificity and identity.
The fourth and final value is ‘drive’. Again the peripheral identity of thenational underdog is articulated, but this time with a twist as the merchanthistory of the city is included into the story of the city of high performance andactivity. The before-mentioned transformation from the industrial society to theinformation society is again presented as an example of a particular entre-preneurial culture. The major events in the cultural sphere, such as the carni-vals and the Tall Ships Race, are substantiating this claim to action. This valuehas the most specific examples attached to it. However, public critique of termsof extreme generalization has also been articulated. More interesting isprobably the notion of Aalborg as characterized by ‘drive’ when seen articu-lated against the capital city of Copenhagen. It is said that Aalborg is not justa merchant city of some weight in the region, it is an ‘anti-dote to Copenhagen’.Clearly, this goes to illustrate the underdog complex and residents’ perceptionof their region.
The values, the vision and the logo do seem to expose some degree ofcoherence, especially the elements articulating the global–local nexus and theimportance of Aalborg as outward-looking. What works less convincingly is thewidespread use of generic and general terms and descriptions of what shouldhave been the identity-building place-specifics of Aalborg. Moreover, the down-right negative labelling of ‘others’ as a way of promoting oneself does not seemto be in accordance with a cultural climate favouring tolerance and inclusion.This is an example of the old habit of ‘blaming the capital’ for all the evils of
Jensen Culture stories: understanding cultural urban branding 227
today. Such branding practices might backfire since Aalborg is still dependenton good relations with all its urban contacts – including Copenhagen.
In relating the branding campaign to the analytical frame, one should firstnote that there is a strong interpretative element at work here. The narrativedimension is much less factual and informational than that seen in the CultureTriangle story. Rather, we have left the realm of the factual, and becomeembedded in a visionary story of a city transforming its future in accordancewith its history and identity. Again the plot is articulated on the basis of thecity’s ability to compete globally. As such, the story merges into the discourseinstitutionalization of the municipality as found in the official planning docu-ments (Aalborg Municipality, 2004a, 2004b, 2005a, 2005b). The sense of placearticulated in the branding campaign is relational as it is very central to the storythat Aalborg is linked to the rest of the world. However, the story also containsa notion of Aalborg as distinct, with its own spatial identity. Moreover, thedifference articulated is an expression of alterity construction, as the capital cityof Copenhagen serves as illustration of what the city is not! The branding storyof Aalborg and how this medium-sized city tries to articulate a discourse ofglobal connectivity, as well as local identity, illustrates how urban interventionsare dependent on a specific representational logic.
Contested citizen voicesA research project on the various urban citizens’ attitudes to Aalborg harbourfront in general, found a number of interesting narratives on the cultural aspectsof these visions and plans (Jensen and Hovgensen, 2004).
The City Alderman with responsibility for urban planning frames the wholetransition theme in relation to the cornerstone of the ‘Culture Triangle’, namelythe House of Music:
We are facing a process of ‘urban conversion’ where we are leaving, what should wecall it, the heavy industry and then transforming into what will characterize Aalborgas a knowledge based city. When one wants to include the fjord and have the city tolook towards the fjord then the ‘House of Music’ is an example of how we are tryingto change. In relation to the demand and collaboration there is around the ‘House ofMusic’.
However, as an example of the (much less organized) voices on the marginsexpressing concern about the new culture-led urban strategy, we hear from amember of a local community organization bordering the harbour front areaclose to the ‘Culture Triangle’:
I don’t think it [the harbour front after the House of Music] needs to be a place forwhat do you say, people with a ‘fat wallet’, or what do you say . . . just for theordinary worker . . . [compared to] double income families dining at the harbourfront. It must be for other groups as well. (Member of a local communityorganization)
Another community organization member sees the new network constellationbetween the city and the university as the power base for an elitist project:
Many people see it [the House of Music] as a prestigious project. Given theintentions of the Lord Mayor and the University, right? Without its being forordinary people to use. (Member of local community organization)
Clearly, projects of this magnitude are prone to be linked to economic issues inthe public discourse. Thus another member of a local community organizationlocated on the opposite side of the fjord speaks of the power of money:
Yes, it is a question of money. That’s beyond any doubt. The land down there isworth a lot, isn’t it? So that’s beyond any doubt completely decisive. That’s also whyeverything is so heavily built at the other end, right? And that’s a bit worrying, thatthis could become too influential a factor. Those green breathing spaces we got outhere are immensely important. That is extremely important, because when first weplaster everything in buildings, then the damage is done. That we have seen.(Member of local community organization)
Looking from the viewpoint of the business community and the localdevelopers, a vivid sense of change and opportunity is seen as the storyline of‘rebirths’ and ‘cleaning up’:
Yes, yes there are some things which time sort have surpassed, right? Also becausethe infrastructure has changed, and there has to happen a rebirth I had almost said.That is, a renewal of those things. There has to be a certain cleaning up and thereneeds to be removed a lot of concrete-like things, cleaning up simply. And [thereneeds to be] made something that provides an active living to the city and the fjordagain. (Developer)
One of the central issues when discussing the efforts of culture branding is thenotion of the physical attributes. Since the National Exhibition in 1933, theAalborg Tower (a steel tower made at the old shipyard) has been seen as theicon of Aalborg. However, with the advent of the new harbour front develop-ment, and the plans for the House of Music in particular, this spatial referent isnow being contested:
I think that Aalborg’s new brand will be the House of Music. That I am rathercertain of. . . . And I think that the brand we are attempting to construct hassomething to do with the fact that there are wide prospects, that there are manycultural activities, and there is development. (City council member)
The City Alderman shares the notion of the importance of the new icon, butbalances it by recognizing that a city may have more than one landmarkbuilding in its branding portfolio:
We live in a small city in a big world . . . I don’t think people will accept if the Houseof Music became the new logo. They would still want the Aalborg Tower as it is. Butone could have more than one logo. (City Alderman)
These contesting voices do not seem to suggest a coherent culture story for theharbour front area. However, the institutional affiliation of each voice and theorganizational embeddedness of each of them should leave no doubt that the powerful and agenda-setting stakeholders are telling the same story aboutthe old industrial city facing transformation in terms of shifting into a culture
Jensen Culture stories: understanding cultural urban branding 229
and knowledge-led strategy. As such, there is a powerful network of urbanstakeholders telling the culture story of Aalborg with reference to Bilbao andother global narratives of successful urban transformation on a large scale, asthis developer claims: ‘I think that our House of Music eventually could havethe same effect for us as is the case in Bilbao’ (developer). Such an understand-ing is contested by this member of the city council as she states that ‘I don’tthink Aalborg will become the Bilbao of the North’ (city council member).
Looking across the three narrative domains presented in this article, thequestion is whether there are any patterns and any institutional linkages andnetworks that make certain outcomes of the culture stories more likely thanothers. If the harbour front transformation is taken as a whole, it seems clearthat there is a division between those social groups and agents in favour ofspending money in order to transform the city, and those actors opposing thenew transformations on less coherent grounds. The proponents and opponentsare thus articulating opposing stories about the harbour front as they give voiceto contesting representational logics of urban intervention. The differences aresummarized in Table 4, showing the proponents’ and opponents’ views of thecultural urban interventions.
Looking at the proponents of the new harbour front developments anddiscussing the themes of the analytical model, we find that information is factualand embedded in official planning documents. The temporal order/structure isone that stresses that previously the city was an industrial one, and now it isgoing to be a cultural one. The proponent story’s notion of causality sees thecausal mechanism as one of economic competitiveness being dependent onshifts towards the new cultural economy. There is a strong plot inscribing thecity into a new, culture-led branding logic. The plot is firmly embedded into thelocal and national policy interpretation of urban futures. Also it is stronglyinstitutionalized in formal and informal urban networks in the city wherestakeholders share the same story of ‘what must be done’. The place dimensionof the proponent’s story shows a very strong sense of the city’s relationalgeography (main argument in the plot). Furthermore, there is a strong emphasison the existing and planned physical attributes.
Countering this with the opponents of the new cultural interventions at the harbour front, we find a much less organized picture. On the narrativedimension, the information of the opponent story is scattered, non-factual andexperiential. The temporal order/structure is one where there might be a senseof history and change, but no clear notion of what comes next. There is a lackof a clear causal link between the city history and its future. There is a weakplot, where the plot divides into a critique of use of tax payers’ money and acritique of elitist downtown investments. This leads to a lack of discourse insti-tutionalization at the local level. More generally the opponent’s story isinscribed into a populist shared fear of the elite. In the place dimension, thereis no articulated sense of the place being relationally linked to other places, asthe view is predominantly inward-looking and locally focused. In terms of refer-ences to physical attributes, there is a strong sense of existing and historicalphysical attributes.
Put on a formula, the stories can be seen as two sets of ‘master stories’ thatcould be synthesized in the following manner. The proponent master storymight sound like this: ‘If this city, once an industrial site, is going to prosper, ithas to change into a cultural and knowledge-intensive city with globalnetworked relations.’ The opponent’s master story is articulated on the basis ofa critical scepticism: ‘This city, once an industrial site, is now running the risk ofbeing socially segregated by elitist culture projects wasting the tax payer’smoney.’
The difference in narrative framing clearly has to do with the interestsdriving the different social agents. Thus, it is not surprising to see that theopposition tells a story about the place as it used to be and how this may becomejeopardized by what it sees as an elitist threat. The different stories also haveto do with the power bases and the networking capacities of the agents. So whenthe municipality, the university, the developers and the many vocal localpoliticians tell a story about the Culture Triangle and the harbour front trans-formation as a precondition for the city’s successful entrance into the newmillennium, this is more than a simple narrative framing. It is the official storyof a transformation that is being inscribed and institutionalized into the generaldiscourse of ‘what needs to be done’.
Concluding remarks
The narratives are grounded, or fixed, in the sites and buildings of the ‘CultureTriangle’. Therefore, a spatially sensitive narrative approach is vital, both inanalytical terms, as it enables us to get closer to the phenomena studied, butalso in a more critical sense. Thus, the narrative and physical construction of aculture hub, such as the one discussed, seems lacking in public validation. Thisis where the story cracks, as serious doubts are raised about community engage-ment and support, especially regarding the House of Music project. The factthat the project has been narrated under the label ‘elitist’ by some of its antag-onists shows this clearly.
The narrative of the ‘Culture Triangle’ in Aalborg illustrates the point thatplace and discourse are intertwined in very complex ways. The built environ-ment of the location is subject to physical interventions in order to express thenarratives of culture and thus serve as a material index of the new story. Atthe same time, the ‘Culture Triangle’ is being told into being, in the sense thatthe location is provided with a storyline of the new economy, urban trans-formation and competitiveness. The ‘Culture Triangle’ thus carries thehallmark of a place myth (Shields, 1991) and is an example of the socialconstruction of place, in much the same respect as an arbitrary collection ofstars in the sky might be bundled together in a story of a particular mytho-logical or astrological plot.
In Aalborg, there is a merging of multiple storylines and narratives into astory of urban transformation as the former industrial and peripheral city isbeing re-told as the new cultural centre of an experience and knowledge-driven
economy. The culture story in Aalborg is a complex narrative, woven with story-lines emerging from a very diverse set of sources: the municipal plan, thebranding documents, the local developers, city council members, the businesscommunity, the university, and the culture scene. As there is only scattered andunorganized opposition to these new interventions, the story seems all the more coherent. The only really strong local opposition is to the House of Music,owing to the fact that the project, even before being built, is facing severebudget overruns. Nevertheless, the persistence and perseverance of local stake-holders within the very broad spectrum of state, market and (to a certain extent)civil society in telling this culture story and embedding it in material inter-ventions alongside the harbour front, seem to make these changes inevitable,as the fusion of the ‘word city’ and the ‘built city’ keeps being told around theforceful culture story featuring the House of Music as a central plot.
In accordance with the analytical frame, ‘the representational logics of urbanintervention’ should be understood as pinning down two competing discourses.Mapping the representation in words suggests that there are two radicallydifferent stories, which see the harbour front interventions as either ‘necessaryfor attracting global capital and development’, or as ‘needless waste of taxmoney’ (the latter includes a smaller faction which argues that they are‘blocking investment in ordinary liveable spaces’). Mapping iconic represen-tation in images reveals two competing icons: the industrial age icon of theAalborg Tower versus the new post-industrial culture hub flagship of the Houseof Music. In mapping clusters of practices, agents and institutions the picture ismore complex; on one side are the municipality, most city council politicians,urban developers, the university, and some citizens and community organ-izations; on the other is a much smaller collection of citizens, politicians andcommunity organizations. In mapping power-rationalities, this corresponds to apro-growth rationale of urban competition and branding versus a less coherentmix of urban sustainability, anti-fine culture and tax expenditure issues.
Identifying two different sets of stories and agents is not a precise descrip-tion, however, of the de facto political situation, or of the power situationcurrent in the culture hub. The prevailing story is the narrative of culture of the‘Culture Triangle’, with its widespread support for any interventions helpful intransforming Aalborg from an industrial city into a new, globally aware, cultureand knowledge city. The opposing voices are clearly on the margins and seemto be pushed even further back with every new intervention that the munici-pality endorses at the harbour front. The point in this article has been to showthe complexity involved in understanding the way places are told and read,constructed and de-constructed – in this case by means of culture stories.
AcknowledgementsThis article is a revised version of a paper presented at the AESOP Conference‘The Dream of a Greater Europe’, Vienna, 13–17 July 2005. The author wishesto thank the House of Music secretariat for giving access to the illustration ofthe House of Music as it looked in January 2006.
Jensen Culture stories: understanding cultural urban branding 233
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Ole B. Jensen is Professor of Urban Theory at the Department of Architectureand Design,Aalborg University and Visiting Professor to the Department of Townand Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, UK. His main research interestsare within urban theory and power, the cultural sociology of space, city brandingand urban mobility.
Address: Department of Architecture and Design, Aalborg University, GammelTorv 6, DK-9000 Aalborg, Denmark. [email: [email protected]]
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