Branding soft spaces

Kaj Zimmerbauer and Kees Terlouw

European Planning Studies, 2024, vol. 32, issue 6, 1318-1336

Abstract: This paper discusses how newly-conceived soft spaces – typically with fuzzy boundaries and less formally organized institutional structures – are ‘commodified’ through visualizations in promoting practices. By discussing those practices, the article argues that promotion and branding are fundamentally processes where these soft spaces become hardened. This hardening is embedded in branding-related ‘speech acts’ and visual framings in particular. The article states that although new soft spaces are considered highly useful in competitivity-enhancing spatial policies where flexible spaces and fuzzy boundaries are typically emphasized, paradoxically their ‘softness’ gradually decreases as a result of branding process consisting of elements of expressing, mirroring, impressing and reflecting. It thus needs to be asked whether soft spaces can be branded without using framings and speech acts that harden them. The soft regions of the Bothnian Arc, a Swedish-Finnish coastal region around the Gulf of Bothnia, and the Region Foodvalley, an agrarian region in the middle of the Netherlands, are used here as examples to discuss how soft spaces transform in this context.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09654313.2024.2303469 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eurpls:v:32:y:2024:i:6:p:1318-1336

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEPS20

DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2024.2303469

Access Statistics for this article

European Planning Studies is currently edited by Philip Cooke and Louis Albrechts

More articles in European Planning Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().