“Turn your brand into a destination”: toponymic commodification and the branding of place in Dubai and Winnipeg

ABSTRACT

The selling of naming rights to corporate sponsors has led urban policymakers to increasingly view the identities of public places as rent-generating assets to fund urban infrastructure. Yet few scholars have critically analyzed this emerging global trend of toponymic commodification and the seeking of “naming rent.” Through a combination of archival research, on-site field observations, and semi-structured interviews, this study examines how the practice of toponymic commodification is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities by considering two naming rights programs: Dubai’s Metro Naming Rights Initiative and the Sponsor Winnipeg Program. In each case, we explore the implications of commodifying public place names as well as the conflicting perceptions of such sponsorship programs. In doing so, the present study illustrates how the selling of naming rights is reshaping the built environment into a space of symbolic/economic capital transformations as brands become destinations and public places are reconceived as marketing opportunities.     

Climate change policy and practice in regional New Zealand: How are actors negotiating science and policy?

Regional governance to address climate change is being constituted in New Zealand through domestic policy measures and international discourses. We examine climate change responses in two regions: Marlborough and Waikato. Informants expressed a desire for more transparent government policy; that planning for climate change makes good business sense for farmers and other businesses; that technology is sought to increase productivity and decrease environmental impact; and research networks build capacity for local action, linking sectors and organisations. Often conflicting, these responses to climate change were informed by a mix of discourses shaping New Zealand, including participatory democracy, the knowledge economy and sustainable development.     

Contested and congested spaces: Exploring authenticity in New Zealand farmers' markets

This paper considers issues of authenticity as they apply to the evolution of farmers' markets in New Zealand. Following a discussion of the nature of authenticity and its deployment by farmers' market organisations in several jurisdictions, a two‐part case study is presented. An analysis of the strategies adopted by Farmers' Markets New Zealand to ‘protect its brand’ nationally and an examination of the disputation of authenticity in the Marlborough Farmers' Market reveals the potential of the ‘authenticity project’ to be a lightning rod for heightened tension and the fracturing of the relationship between competing interests in New Zealand farmers' markets.     

Purely Xenophobia or Confusion Over Planning Procedures?

Getting approval to invest in New Zealand's tourist sector is a risky business. A comparison of the Hopai Bay Resort proposal (of the Marlborough Sounds) and the Millbrook Country Club, Queenstown reveals much ambiguity in New Zealand's planning practise.     

Naming rights,place branding,and the tumultuous cultural landscapes of neoliberal urbanism

ABSTRACT

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. This practice of “toponymic commodification” first emerged with the commercialization of professional sports during the second half of the 20th century and has 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 special issue examines the political economy of urban place naming through a series of case studies that consider how the commodification of naming rights is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the geographies of toponymic commodification as an emerging research focus within the field of critical urban toponymies and propose several theoretical approaches that can enhance our understanding of the commodification of naming rights as an urban spatial practice. We then discuss the main contributions in this special issue and conclude by exploring potential directions for future research on the geographies of urban toponymic commodification.     

Language contact and ‘the Catch’: Norfolk Island fishing ground names

The author uses Norf'k fishing ground names on Norfolk Island (South Pacific) to illustrate how toponyms can be exposed to geographic, anthropological, and linguistic scrutiny. The grammar of the names demonstrates how Norf'k, the language of the Pitcairn descendants, typifies an esoteric insider language because of its ecologically connected toponyms and pragmatic determinants. Norf'k fishing ground names vary in their linguistic form and hence in their geography and spatiality. The toponymic and linguistic landscape of Norfolk Island reveals several processes that are significant for understanding sea-based geographies and the intertwining of creole languages, other contact languages, and the environment.     

Fictive clusters: Crafty strategies in the New Zealand beer industry

ABSTRACT

The authors bring together two theoretical and empirical strands in economic geography – established work on clusters and nascent research on ‘fictive place’ – in order to introduce the concept of ‘fictive clusters’. To explore this concept, they examine the New Zealand craft beer sector, which has evolved from non-existence since the year 2000. This growth has precipitated the rise of a dynamic and innovative cluster at the local scale in Wellington. The fictive cluster is explored through the Wellington case study, and the authors pose various questions for future work based on this discursive geographical device. The construction and complicit reproduction of what they term a ‘fictive cluster’ has been central to the evolving strategies of the involved agents. Through the use of this term, the evolution of Wellington place-based brands that are increasingly territorially specific are seen as building competitive advantage based on constructed histories, environments, and other geographic characteristics.     

南海诸岛海域地名国别地缘环境解析

“人类世”以来,南海海域因周边或域外大国等地缘行为体的介入,使地缘环境变得错综复杂,中国海洋权益不断遭受限制、挤压和挑战。文章从自然和社会基因子系统的地理环境、地缘关系和地缘结构出发,以地名为逻辑起点划分古代-遗传形地名DNA、近代-变异形地名DNA和现代-复合形地名DNA三种类型,构建南海诸岛海域地名国别地缘环境分析框架。结果表明：1）南海诸岛海域地名是在自然基因子系统和社会基因子系统交互耦合作用下形成的。2）因果关联作用下,南海诸岛海域地名遵从“主人―他人―主人”的历史演变规律,导致地名基因在转录和表达上呈现遗传、变异和复合的过程;建构作用下,周边或域外大国以非法手段构建多边争夺南海海洋资源和海洋权益的新型地缘关系。3）南海诸岛海域地名基因在转录与表达上是空间与物质显性基因和理念与历史演变隐性基因的交互耦合过程。     

HIDDEN PLACES AND CREOLE FORMS: NAMING THE BARBUDAN LANDSCAPE*

The decline of fieldwork in human geography in the United States is reflected in place name studies of the last 30 years, which have been founded on maps alone. Research in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles, demonstrates the importance of human informants and observations in the field for gathering toponymic information, and shows the axiom that place names alone are evidence of past landscapes and land uses to be unreliable. The study tests some accepted principles of naming against field observations and proposes the significance of creole language and diglossia in the place names of creole speech communities.     

The 'Grasses' of the Big Scrub District,North-eastern New South Wales: Their recent history,spatial distribution and origins

A feature of the pre-European landscape of the sub-tropical Richmond River district of north-eastern New South Wales was a large expanse of rainforest known as the Big Scrub. In and around the Big Scrub were small patches of grassland and grassy open-forest, known locally as 'grasses'. These were often given individual names, which indicated their importance in the early timber-based economy of this generally grassless district for camping and depasturing working stock. Historical records enable a reconstruction of the distribution of 56 named 'grasses', and also allow some inferences to be made about their botany and ecology. The 'grasses' appear to be natural features of the landscape, mainly relict areas following invasion of the late Pleistocene open-forest vegetation by rainforest, following sea level rise, during the Holocene. A toponymic study of the use of the term 'grass' in the Richmond River district is also included.     

Who owns the name? Fandom,social inequalities and the contested renaming of a football club in Timişoara,Romania

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship in critical toponymy has raised questions about the impacts on urban residents of selling naming rights and the possibility of contesting the commodification of urban place names. This article examines these issues using Poli Timi?oara, the major football team of Timi?oara, Romania, as a case study. The cash-strapped local authority sold the naming rights for the team to raise revenue. However, when the club’s private owner was unable to finance the team, the local authority reacquired the naming rights of Poli, now under the name Asocia?ia Club Sportiv Poli (a new team with a small fan base). Drawing on the everyday narratives of fans, this article explores how the commodification of a local club name can cause social tensions. This is important for understanding urban residents’ access, or lack thereof, to social capital resources and how this leads to the manifestation of social inequalities which co-determine fans’ reactions and responses to the change in the name of a sports team. The findings suggest that commodifying names can mobilize serious contestations among partisan groups about who owns the name, although such contestations appear to be on uncertain ground because of post-communist urban practices of delayed economic restructuring.     

Regional dynamics in the globalising wine industry: the case of Marlborough, New Zealand

The rapid expansion of the New Zealand wine industry has rested largely on a specific wine commodity form, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Global demand for a specialised product has provided the impetus for substantial development at the regional level, an increasingly complex industry structure, and for the intrusion of international capital. This paper explores the contests and relations within the industry through attention to the commodity's value-added chain, wherein recent developments are interpreted as a contest over the brand rents. The contemporary situation therefore may be explained through overlapping organisational and geographic framings of these relations: producer versus buyer-driven dynamics; regional–national and global interests; and inter- and intra-corporate strategies. The commercial contest for control of the region-varietal commodity reveals some paradoxical outcomes in which the region is reaffirmed as a site of investment in an evidently globalised industry, and the significance of who controls what fraction of the value chain is re-asserted.     

Pathways to sustainable landscape management: peer recognition as an indicator of effective ‘soft’ actions

New Zealand is a food producer and exporter that combines neoliberal policy with performance-based environmental management, using ‘soft’ governance and actions where possible. Voluntary environmental farm awards are analysed to identify the landscape management activities recognised as best practice by peers at a farm level. Results highlight the importance of whole farm system management. However, the efficacy of reliance upon voluntary mechanisms is coming under increasingly critical scrutiny, as environmental conditions in intensive agricultural landscapes continue to decline. The research question this poses is whether whole farm plans can be practically and formally connected in three concurrent ways – to supply chain management, and to statutory planning frameworks and environmental regulations and to local landscape co-management – while still maintaining flexibility of action for the farmer.     

Managed Temporary Labour Migration of Pacific Islanders to Australia and New Zealand in the Early Twenty-first Century

ABSTRACT

Circular migration was one of several enduring themes in Graeme Hugo’s highly productive research career. Although his specialist field was Asian population movement, during the 2000s he became increasingly interested in labour migration in the Pacific Islands. This paper reviews the development of two managed circular migration schemes targeting Pacific labour that emerged following the UN High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in 2006. New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme and Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) have attracted international attention as the kind of ‘best practice’ temporary labour migration schemes that Hugo had in mind when he emphasised the positive contributions that circular forms of mobility could make to development in both source and destination countries. The two schemes have transformed mobility between the participating countries and have played a major role in the negotiations over a free-trade agreement between Pacific Forum countries, including Australia and New Zealand. Although the schemes have been in operation for almost 10 years, this paper argues that they are not becoming ‘business as usual’; they embody complex systems of relationships between multiple stakeholders that require ongoing management to ensure that they do not become traps for low-skilled, low-paid ‘permanent’ temporary workers.     

An Integrated Approach to Germanic Place Names in the American Midwest

Place names represent an established topic in sociocultural and critical scholarship on human space and place. Based on a comprehensive data set of Germanic names in the American Midwest, this article explores the value of a novel approach integrating advanced spatio-statistical measures with critical interpretation to revitalize the field of toponomy on a concerted methodological and theoretical level. Processed in a geographic information system (GIS) environment, the regional toponymic pattern provides a broad and reliable framework that evokes interpretative discussion of underlying structures and processes. This characterizes Germanic toponyms as versatile sociodemographic, political, and ethnocultural indicators.     

Climatic Conditions for Wine Grape Growing

Vineyards in New Zealand are pushing further south than anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere, this despite poor understanding of the latitudinal limits of grape growing. European experience shows a limit of 50^oN. Valuable pointers and cautionary tales from Germany encourage a view that the southern limit in New Zealand may be 45^oS. This is broadly confirmed by comparative climate data from Germany and New Zealand.     

Grassland revolutions in New Zealand: Disaggregating a national story

The grassland revolution is a national story but the intensification of New Zealand pastoral agriculture was made possible by many changes in farm practice, and application varied within New Zealand. This paper identifies aggregation issues in the narrative and explores their implications for any reassessment of the revolution. Data from six counties are analysed to illustrate some of the varied experiences across New Zealand farm districts. The paper redirects attention to local‐ and farm‐scale studies as a way to investigate the significance of the diverse drivers of pastoral productivity, their timing and effects.