Place branding and the neoliberal class settlement

Place branding is much more than helping cities become more competitive. It is an aspect of the class settlement in which neoliberalism displaced social democracy. By developing an interdisciplinary political approach it may gain the reflexivity needed to fully understand its role in society. Place branding does not sell places by changing their image, but actively engages in the political transformation of cities as well as displaying many of the assumptions of that settlement which it helps to legitimate. It also creates a consensus in people’s minds that obscures neoliberalism’s political impacts in shifting power away from ordinary people. By looking at some vignettes of place branding, including London’s South Bank, Glasgow, New York, the Great Exhibition and Canary Wharf, it is clear that we should evaluate the impacts of its policies by looking at people not at places; rather than trying to encourage tourism, for instance, we should be asking what different forms of tourism can do for the inhabitants

Back to basics in the marketing of place: the impact of litter upon place attitudes

YesAttempts to apply marketing theory and principles to place have become a legitimate area of academic and 'real world' practice. However, place marketing does not typically incorporate all elements of the traditional 7 Ps, focusing far too often on just one of these - promotion. Besides this rather myopic approach, place marketing suffers from an overly strategic view of the world that ignores the meaning and lived experience of places to individuals, especially residents. The purpose of this article is twofold - first, we investigate the impact of litter on place attitudes. Litter is a common, but negative, element of place, which is intimately connected to the lived experience of a place but typically far removed from the positive promotional activity favoured by place marketing efforts and the study thereof. In this sense, the article reframes place marketing from a strategic to a micro-marketing endeavour. We found that exposing respondents to litter significantly lowers their place attitudes. Our second contribution is to demonstrate the relevance of classic marketing research approaches, such as attitudinal measures, to investigate litter and its impact on place evaluations, through quasi-experimental design (with 662 respondents). Through this, we extend the range of theory and method applied in place marketing - away from controllable promotional endeavours investigated through case-studies to a more holistic and robust interpretation of place marketing, which has a measurable impact upon the places where people live and visit

Van der Waals enhancement of optical atom potentials via resonant coupling to surface polaritons

Contemporary experiments in cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED) with gas-phase neutral atoms rely increasingly on laser cooling and optical, magneto-optical or magnetostatic trapping methods to provide atomic localization with sub-micron uncertainty. Difficult to achieve in free space, this goal is further frustrated by atom-surface interactions if the desired atomic placement approaches within several hundred nanometers of a solid surface, as can be the case in setups incorporating monolithic dielectric optical resonators such as microspheres, microtoroids, microdisks or photonic crystal defect cavities. Typically in such scenarios, the smallest atom-surface separation at which the van der Waals interaction can be neglected is taken to be the optimal localization point for associated trapping schemes, but this sort of conservative strategy generally compromises the achievable cavity QED coupling strength. Here we suggest a new approach to the design of optical dipole traps for atom confinement near surfaces that exploits strong surface interactions, rather than avoiding them, and present the results of a numerical study based on $^{39}$K atoms and indium tin oxide (ITO). Our theoretical framework points to the possibility of utilizing nanopatterning methods to engineer novel modifications of atom-surface interactions.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Tourism, class and crisis

The academic literature on tourism is focused on its problems – its lack of sustainability, its lack of responsibility, its poor treatment of its workers, its contribution to climate change, terrorism, its environmental impacts, its responsibility for evicting people from their land. It is assumed that these are discrete problems that are soluble – that mass tourism with a responsible face is a possibility. This approach tackles each problem separately and argues that with cooperation, goodwill, a stronger state and an educated public, solutions are possible. In this paper we start with the profits crisis of the early to mid seventies and argue that a range of counter tendencies developed that was able to resist the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Tourism expanded rapidly with the rise of that neo-liberal class settlement in the eighties because it embodied many of those counter tendencies. It was not, however, just a reflection of neo-liberalism which emerged as the way to restore the rate of profit, but helped to lay the groundwork for it. Tourism’s natural features, its use of space, the relatively small workplace, the use of unskilled labour, are all counter tendencies. In the article it is argued that they are essentially about intensifying class relations and at that stage in the economic cycle they were successful. However the problems that now plague tourism are a result of those trends. The second part of the article looks at how these counter tendencies also have negative effects – that is they are internally contradictory. Class relations in particular are now causing problems. These problems are so severe that it is arguable that the sector is coming up against the limits of accumulation because of the way that it expanded. If one looks at it from capital’s perspective the sector may indeed not be viable, because the externalities that it ignores involves the state in remedial work. Ultimately capital pays those costs but indirectly. Possibly this is an early sign that neo-liberalism itself is reaching the limits to its accumulation

The politicisation and contradictions of neo-liberal tourism

Neo-liberalism is often portrayed as a stable state, a set of social relationships designed to oppress labour and redistribute income and power to capital. In this paper it is, however, argued that it is a contradictory class settlement that has implications for tourism. Tourism is a product of and a means of constructing the neo-liberal class settlement. Yet despite the synergy between tourism and neo-liberal politics, tourism brings up issues that weaken that politics. The paper focuses on four aspects of tourism – consumerism, democracy, the work ethos and urban class politics – arguing that the relationship between this politics and tourism is contradictory in each of these areas. The result is the increasing politicisation of tourism and that is likely to weaken both neo-liberalism and tourism itself