But if you travel around America these days, you may find that it’s the struggling cities that begin to look alike — the successful ones succeed in their own individual ways. At least, that’s the argument of longtime urban consultant Ryan Short, who makes his point rather convincingly in a new book, The Civic Brand. Short tells us cities that simply copy strategies that have worked elsewhere are the ones that usually go wrong. The happy places are the ones that find the ingredients of success in discovering their individuality and building on what makes them different.
Short’s argument is far from airtight, but it’s true that in the past half-century cities all over the country have sought to renew themselves by spending fortunes on ideas that have worked elsewhere. The examples of this are all around us.
When festival developments such as Quincy Market in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore created vitality and brought in substantial revenue, at least a dozen other cities decided to try something similar. They have almost all failed, or have barely hung on. It worked in Baltimore. It didn’t work in Toledo, Ohio. Even Manhattan’s ambitious South Street Seaport had trouble attracting visitors.
When massive indoor shopping malls brought life to suburbs in diverse parts of America, planners trying to revive city centers invested precious resources in big, boxy, windowless malls, hoping to work similar magic downtown. It didn’t happen. Milwaukee’s much-touted Grand Avenue downtown mall, opened in 1982, failed so badly that it was sold at auction in 2012 and foreclosed upon two years later, much of it destined to become a parking lot. Lately it has revived a bit as a much smaller and locally focused enterprise.
The early success of pedestrian malls in small cities led to the decisions of many city leaders to make some of their busy downtown streets pedestrian-only. This was a flop virtually everywhere. Chicago’s expensive State Street pedestrian mall attracted so few shoppers that it was restored to automobile traffic a decade and a half later. The few success stories among these malls are mostly in college towns.
There has been one lasting consequence, however, of all this copycat urbanism. It is that the downtowns in dozens of cities have come to look monotonously alike, with the same chain restaurants and clothing boutiques. Are we in downtown Atlanta or downtown Cincinnati? It isn’t always easy to tell. “We live in a time,” Short writes, “when places are being commodified and standardized at a breathtaking pace. Entire neighborhoods are being remade according to the latest trend or urbanist fad.”
THERE OUGHT TO BE, it seems, a better way for challenged cities to revitalize themselves. Short is convinced there is. It’s to stop imitating what other places have done and to cultivate a separate identity — to find something the community can do really well and start focusing on that. Or, in Short’s words, to establish and maintain a brand. “The key to place branding,” he says, “is uncovering what exactly makes the people in your community unique and then using that to shape policy, priorities and the place itself.”
To argue the point Short’s way, it’s fair to look at a number of American cities that have forged new identities and used them to regain some of their vitality. Deep in the doldrums caused by the departure of the steel industry, Pittsburgh decided to focus on health care and higher education and has come back in a significant way. Civic leaders in nondescript Indianapolis decided to create a sports-focused metropolis and did that by attracting teams and league gatherings and building arenas to house them, and that strategy has largely worked.
Those are big cities with more resources than the average struggling town, so they may not be perfect examples. Short offers some successful branding experiments in much smaller and less familiar places. High Point, N.C., facing a downturn in its dominant furniture industry, decided it wasn’t just a furniture maker but a town whose residents excelled at making almost anything. That seems to have done some good. Mountainous Salida, Colo., began promoting itself not just as a tourist attraction but as a place where tour and adventure guides could learn their trade, find a job and do something they enjoyed. This seems to have worked as well.
Sometimes the elements of branding can be small, even seemingly trivial. Hamilton, Ontario, wanted to be a music city, but wasn’t attracting the artists it needed to make that possible. So Hamilton made it easy for performers to park their large and ungainly vehicles right next to the performance venue. The city also repealed an ordinance preventing homeowners from hosting concerts on their patios. Hamilton still isn’t exactly Nashville or Austin, but in Short’s recounting it has found a way to make the smallest gestures part of a viable branding commitment.
Short is a little deficient in laying down the specifics of how a city should actually set about branding. He does offer a few warnings about things they shouldn’t do. They shouldn’t confuse quickie campaigns with long-term commitments; adopting a new slogan and logo is merely a preliminary, not a solution. Cities also shouldn’t let individual departments and agencies experiment with their own ideas; there needs to be movement of the entire city and government in a direction that will enhance local identity and community. Fragmentation and duplication are a good way to deflate a branding effort before it has even begun.
And cities shouldn’t adopt long-term plans focused on dubious goals that are likely unachievable. They still have a habit of doing this. They promise to double transit use in a decade without having the slightest notion of how this might be accomplished. That may sound like branding; it is actually faulty specifics based on wishful thinking.
BUT THERE IS ONE TROUBLING ELEMENT in Short’s manifesto: the nagging suspicion that many struggling cities don’t really have a special sauce to cook up. They are facing the same problems that cities all around them are facing, and they can’t come up with a unique identity no matter how hard they try.
Some years ago, I was visiting a struggling medium-sized city in western Pennsylvania and asked the head of the local chamber of commerce a simple question: “If you were trying to convince a corporation to move here, what special quality of the community would you tout to get them interested?” He couldn’t think of one.
Now, that could be because the town hadn’t tried the multiple branding exercises that Short recommends. But it also could be because the place just wasn’t different in any particular way. It was on the same downward trajectory as hundreds of Midwestern industrial cities and didn’t possess any obvious exploitable qualities. It still doesn’t.
Having said that, I’m willing to concede that trying to revive urban life with Ryan Short’s recipe can be worth the effort. A few cities, maybe more than a few, will work themselves out of a box that way. But most won’t. Their efforts to recharge themselves by uncovering a dormant special identity will be long shots. Given that reality, it’s no surprise that they reach out to copy an interesting scheme that has worked elsewhere.
Short understands that. And he doesn’t totally condemn it. “One of the biggest misconceptions,” he writes in his final chapter, “is that adopting an idea from another city means becoming like that city. That’s just not true.” If a neighboring community has found a way to deal with its parking problem, for example, it makes sense to give it a try. You just have to know where to draw the line.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
