Historical limits: narrowing possibilities in ‘Ontario's most historic town’

Abstract

Place branding in heritage tourism development is presented as a strategy that opens up new possibilities for attracting investors and visitors by distilling, capturing and shaping what is distinctive about a place. This representational fix is an efficient marketing device in the sense that it represents places through widely intelligible symbols. Branding is also a limiting activity that locks places in time and class relations. While place branding has always had this dual effect, we argue that it has particularly insidious and limiting consequences for local development under current conditions of roll‐out neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, several prominent residents and outsiders initiated efforts to transform the Town of Cobalt, Ontario, into a mining heritage tourism destination. In 2001, the town entered and won a contest to be named Ontario's Most Historic Town. The following year it persuaded Parks Canada to designate it as a national historic site. These two events provided renewed external validation for the efforts to brand Cobalt as a heritage site and began a new cycle of mining heritage tourism development. However, instead of breaking the dependency relationships that characterize resource regions, the current round of place branding has acted to circumscribe the range of possible economic development options.

Community branding and brand images in Ontario, Canada

“…For the last three decades, local practitioners and policy makers have utilized the principles of branding in communities in all geographical contexts (Pasquinelli, 2010(Pasquinelli, , 2013Stern and Hall, 2010;Dinnie, 2011). The rationale for this adoption of branding at the community level is situated within the broader framework of global economic changes.…”

“…The diversity of the economy allows communities a range of potential assets in which to communicate through place branding. Traditionally, communities in Ontario outside the largest cities have been typically identified with a single economic activity (Stern and Hall, 2010).…”

Creative food clusters and rural development through place branding: Culinary tourism initiatives in Stratford and Muskoka, Ontario, Canada

“…However, it is frequently argued that there is insufficient stakeholder collaboration in tourism development. For example, Reid (2003) and Stern and Hall (2010) argued that tourism development in rural settings is usually oriented strictly towards economic growth. Consequently, rural tourism development is focused almost exclusively on assisting the tourism industry to fulfill tourists' desires for experiences rather than empowering local residents by providing them with opportunities to participate in such development.…”

Deconstructing place identity? Impacts of a “Racino” on Elora, Ontario, Canada

“…Our findings suggest, therefore, that although material change causes places to be fluid and dynamic, that place identities may, sometimes, be sticky and self-reinforcing (Stern and Hall, 2010). As described earlier in this paper, this scenario arises when an "early collective identity" generates trajectories that both "enable and constrain" current action (Molotch et al 2000, p. 298).…”

“…In its material form, this "multi-sensory landscape" (Daugstad, 2008) offers a triad of distinctive products, dining venues, and experiences that build on the qualities, or "cultural markers" (Ray, 1998), of a specific place. Included here are: traditional foods (Everett and Aitchison, 2008;Sims, 2009), music and dance (Gibson, 2002;Gibson and Davidson, 2004;Knox, 2008), arts and crafts (Halpern and Mitchell, 2011), agricultural practices (Walmsley, 2003), extractive production techniques (Ballesteros and Ramirex, 2007;SummerbyMurray, 2007;Stern and Hall, 2010), significant flora and fauna (Halpern and Mitchell, 2011), and, more generally, rural heritage (Kneafsey, 2001;Burchardt, 2007;Carter et al, 2007), with its "traditional cultures, national identities, and authentic lifestyles" (Kneafsey, 2001, p. 763). Each of these qualities provides the foundation for creation of a place of consumption that is both morally good (Sack, 2003), and heterotopic (Foucault, 1986;Halfacree, 2009), in its ability to provide guests the opportunity of seeing "through to the real" (Sack, 2003, p. 155; see also Gill, 2005).…”