Naming Rights, Place Branding, and the Cultural Landscapes of Neoliberal Urbanism

Reuben Rose-Redwood, Jani Vuolteenaho, Craig Young, Duncan Light

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000404258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In recent decades, urban policymakers have increasingly embraced the selling of naming rights as a means of generating revenue to construct and maintain urban infrastructure. The contemporary practice of toponymic commodification has its roots in the history of philanthropic gifting and the commercialization of professional sports, yet it has now become an integral part of the policy toolkit of neoliberal urbanism more generally. As a result, the naming of everything from sports arenas to public transit stations has come to be viewed as a sponsorship opportunity, yet such naming rights initiatives have not gone uncontested.

This edited collection examines the political economy and cultural politics of urban place naming and considers how the commodification of naming rights is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities. Drawing upon case studies ranging from the selling of naming rights for sports arenas in European cities and metro stations in Dubai to the role of philanthropic naming in the "Facebookification" of San Francisco's gentrifying neighborhoods, the contributions to this book draw attention to the diverse ways in which toponymic commodification is reshaping the identities of public places into time-limited, rent-generating commodities and the broader implications of these changes on the production of urban space.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.

“This venue is brought to you by…”: the diffusion of sports and entertainment facility name sponsorship in urban Europe

Jani Vuolteenaho, Matthias Wolny and Guy Puzey

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a database of 193 football (soccer) grounds and 115 indoor arenas, as well as press releases and media reports associated with them, this study charts the diffusion of sporting and entertainment facility name sponsorship across metropolises, cities, towns, and smaller settlements in six European contexts. Our results show the emergence of naming rights deals in the 1990s, their peak in the mid-2000s, and the current situation with a steadier growth of name sponsorship. Thus far, the corporate re-branding of venues has remained less prevalent in Italy, Norway, and Scotland than in England and Wales, Finland, and above all Germany. In financing newly built venues, however, the corporatized landmark language in focus has become a practically invariable part of local growth, austerity and (re)branding policies. Despite voices of resistance in all regions studied here, pressure towards the corporate renaming of even hereditary, communally endorsed football stadiums is increasingly being felt by municipal and private-sector venue owners.

Introduction

In Ethics, Money and Sport, Walsh and Giulianotti write that contemporary sporting venue and competition naming rights herald “a revolutionary attitude towards nomenclature almost as radical as the Bolshevik renaming of the ancient city of St Petersburg, or the Khmer Rouge’s re-titling of city streets in Cambodia” (2007, p. 2). Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge in venue naming and name-changing exercises for commercial ends, starting in cities of the United States, and subsequently spreading to practically all urbanized parts of the globe (see more generally on the commodification of urban place naming: Light & Young, 2014; Medway & Warnaby, 2014; Rose-Redwood, 2011; Vuolteenaho & Ainiala, 2009). Across Europe, too, an increasing number of sporting and entertainment facilities (and, more recently, other types of principally “public” urban infrastructures) have become stages for this “innovative” revenue-generating strategy. Naming rights have been sold for many hundreds of European venues, whether by local councils with shrinking finances, or by private teams and corporations attempting to stay competitive. Nevertheless, comparative analyses portraying and attempting to explain this phenomenon on a continental or sub-continental scale have remained rare to say the least (for a partial exception, see Bezold, 2013). This article will, therefore, seek to explore the diffusion of naming rights sponsorship across a set of European national contexts with variably resource-rich sporting leagues and different venue infrastructures. By combining quantitative and qualitative comparative methodologies, we will ask what kinds of diachronic trends and explanatory factors (for instance in terms of city size and venue capacity), as well as manifestations of neoliberal urbanism and civic opposition, have characterized the adoption of venue name sponsorship in England and Wales, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Scotland (see a detailed list of research questions in the methodology section below). In particular, the focus will be on the extent to which this business-oriented toponymic alternative has been implemented at football (or soccer, the biggest spectator sport by far in most European national contexts) grounds, and with indoor sporting and entertainment venues.

To bolster our empirical mapping of this largely uncharted terrain, in the following theoretical section we will contextualize the new urban “landmark language” (Viljamaa-Laakso, 1999) in question as an aspect of the neoliberal city, generally characterized by a heightened entrepreneurial ethos, place-marketing initiatives and proactiveness in capturing globally mobile investment flows. Often implemented in connection with one-off or continual sporting events, venue naming rights deals represent a particular type of sponsorship that has had its recent popularity boosted by a decline in public financing in the context of urban austerity. Meanwhile, acts of selling venue naming rights facilitate commodification-led tendencies of cultural-linguistic globalization and (pseudo-)anglicization, public-private partnership arrangements, and arguably also new types of transurban connectivities in terms of learning profit-driven policies. While expected gains in return for naming rights deals range from image enhancement and new revenue streams to increased investment prospects, earlier studies have indicated that levels of acceptance for the sale of naming rights have tended to vary considerably among locals, and especially fans. In Europe, football venue naming rights deals, in particular, have not infrequently faced “traditionalist” opposition (e.g. Church & Penny, 2013; Woisetschläger, Haselhoff, & Backhaus, 2014). Next, we analyze a database of over 300 football grounds and indoor arenas, firstly through nation-specific overviews and exemplifying vignettes, illuminating trajectories, peaks and other characteristics in how the naming rights phenomenon has spread in these settings. In the synthesis that follows the nation-specific snapshots, we highlight general European trends and local- and national-scale peculiarities in the (non-)diffusion of this particular form of commodification of urban space. In conclusion, we propose future research directions for urban place-name studies suggested by our findings.

A remedy for event cities in financial straits? Conceptualizing venue name sponsorship as a corporatized landmark language

The recent surge in naming rights deals can be seen as a particular “cultural” aspect in the world-wide mobilization of entrepreneurial discourses, as well as a dimension of event-led urbanization aimed at encouraging inward investment and facilitating the rebranding of cities and their landmark infrastructures (on entrepreneurial urbanism and event-led urban growth and branding policies, see e.g. Broudehoux, 2017; Gratton, Shibli, & Coleman, 2005; Harvey, 1989; Lauermann, 2016; Smith, 2016). In neoliberal event cities where spaces such as football stadiums and multi-purpose indoor arenas are perceived as key catalysts of urban growth, the financial and promotional “gravity” of urban place and event names has been increasingly recognized by transnational mobile capital and local policy-makers alike. While the consequent interest in selling naming rights is certainly not restricted to sports facilities, sport sponsorship has long been a realm where enormous sums of money circulate annually. In these markets, locally influential growth coalitions and marketing partnerships have emerged, weaving city-specific webs between corporations and sports teams, developers, investment companies and local authorities.

Globally, the impact of sponsorship on urban redevelopment has been most commonly analyzed in relation to the bidding, planning, implementation, and aftermath of the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Championship tournaments as well as other one-off urban mega-events (e.g. Broudehoux, 2017; Klauser, 2011). In the United States, by contrast, sport-associated regeneration strategies have normally focused on facilities built predominantly for domestic spectator sports (Gratton et al., 2005). Importantly in this regard, Giulianotti (2011) has noted that it is not only major international events hosted in state-of-the-art arenas of world-class metropolises, but also “more time-space diffuse sporting occasions” (p. 3294) associated with domestic tournaments (such as the English Premier League) that influence economic and social fortunes in the cities of North America, Europe and beyond. Indeed, it is not only stadiums of worldwide repute, with veritable potential for mobilizing sponsorships with select world-class corporations, that have been subject to corporate name sponsorship in recent decades (Bezold, 2013; Herstein & Berger, 2013).

From a transurban interconnectivity or diffusion perspective, critical theorists from Harvey (1989) to Klingmann (2007) have labeled the “serial repetition” of successful redevelopment and marketing models as a hallmark of contemporary entrepreneurial urbanism. The iterative practices of neoliberal urban reforms cover the creative borrowing of architectural-stylistic fashions, implementing redevelopment solutions, commodified standardization of many urban symbolic forms, and privileging the use in urban branding of select “world languages,” especially English as the globally hegemonic lingua franca of business. Instances of such linguistic landscape transformations, with urban spaces increasingly (re)signified through “immediately recognizable” designations, can be seen across continental Europe, and elsewhere, as typified by Yurchak’s (2000) semiotic reading of toponymic “westernization” in post-Soviet Russia. Similarly, Vuolteenaho and Kolamo (2012) have explored the blossoming of “overworked globalisms” in Finnish urban settlements, arguing that these “ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: naming rights, place branding, and the tumultuous cultural landscapes of neoliberal urbanism
• 1 “This venue is brought to you by. . .”: the diffusion of sports and entertainment facility name sponsorship in urban Europe
• 2 Scalar tensions in urban toponymic inscription: the corporate (re)naming of football stadia
• 3 Who owns the name? Fandom, social inequalities and the contested renaming of a football club in Timişoara, Romania
• 4 Data, dispossession, and Facebook: techno-imperialism and toponymy in gentrifying San Francisco
• 5 “Turn your brand into a destination”: toponymic commodification and the branding of place in Dubai and Winnipeg
• 6 City renaming as brand promotion: exploring neoliberal projects and community resistance in New Zealand
• Afterword: the names of urban dispossession: a concluding commentary
• Index