Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and PresentAuthor(s): Jacquie BurgessSource: Area, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 201-202Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20002845 .

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IBG Annual Conference 201

a full length session with a larger number of contributors. Anyone wishing to know more about the activities of the Forum, or who might like to participate in the PGF session in Sheffield, is

welcome to contact a member of the Committee.

Nick Axford Southampton University

Selling places: the city as cultural capital, past and present The combined activities of members of the Social and Cultural Geography study group and the Historical Geography study group produced an exciting mixture of speakers and topics which had to be crammed into six modules on Friday and Saturday morning. Denis Cosgrove (Loughborough University) opened the first session with a paper on' Venice as cultural capital', in which he offered a reading of images of that city which suggested that the self promotion of cities should not be regarded solely as a postmodern phenomenon. Stephen Daniels (Nottingham University) followed with 'The difficulty of representing the city: Turner and

London ', arguing that the production of visual images of the Nineteenth Century city was constrained by technical difficulties which contemporary audiences, saturated by television and film, tend to forget. In Turner's paintings, he suggested, we find representations of city as process rather than place. Then Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift (Bristol University) considered how the social construction of the meaning of consumption has changed over time in their paper ' Urban life and modern consumption '. Contemporary discourses are characterised by an emphasis on novelty which finds expression in the postmodern city with its emphasis on lifestyle and consumer choice.

In the second module we witnessed a major ideological clash between Neil Smith and Laura Reid (Rutgers University) who, in their paper 'John Wayne meets Donald Trump: lower East Side as wild, wild west', explored the ways in which frontier imagery is employed by capital as part of their appropriation of poor neighbourhoods for gentrification, and two speakers currently engaged in economic development. Andrew Fretter (Gwent County Council) talked about 'Marketing a city in transition', drawing on his experiences as Economic Development Officer for Birmingham City Council to show how local authorities employ a number of strategies to attract inward investment. Ron Dane (MCA Enterprises) then discussed ' Leisure-a palliative or regenerative catalyst', in which he launched an attack on what he saw as the 'unreality' of academic discourses and the need for both academics and practitioners to recognise the economic benefits of the leisure industry for the UK.

In the afternoon, Gerry Kearns (Liverpool University) deconstructed some of the political meanings which were to be read in 'The revolutionary bicentennial in Paris', arguing that the Left was able to subvert the dominant meaning of the festival through an emphasis on ' the Rights of Man ' rather than ' Madame Guillotine '. He was followed by Robert Colls (Leicester University) who, in his paper 'The North reborn-why we're proud', explored the ways in which the region has been constructed, and is being re-constructed, through the imaginations and representations of a set of powerful and diverse agents and structures. These, he suggested, fail because they are not produced from within the lived cultures of the North-east. Ed Bergman (Lehman College) then took up the theme of ' History as Genius Loci ' to show how the tourist industry selectively appropriates aspects of a mythical local culture to market places, taking as his

main text, the menu from the Strathclyde Regional Council dinner for the Institute held the night before. Finally, Jane Jacobs (University College London) in her paper ' Serious conser vation or serious money' presented an analysis of the discourses of developers, conservationists and local community groups to reveal how ' heritage ' is produced to serve the political interests of these different groups.

Saturday morning was taken up with six papers. Briavel Holcombe (Rutgers University) in ' Re-Visioning place' discussed the different strategies employed by the industrial cities of

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202 IBG Annual Conference

Pittsburg and Cleveland, arguing that the new package represents little more than a sanitised image which confirms to international aesthetic standards and which is now being reflected in the new built forms of these cities. She was followed by two graduate students from QMW. Gillian Rose discussed the commodification of place in her paper' Imagining the East of London in the 1980s ' and counterposed the discourses of capital with those of local protest groups while Darrel

Crilley presented some of his work in ' The advertiser and the architect ' which focussed on the symbolic production of a docklands identity through place marketing and built form. Greg

Ashworth (Groningen University) asked the audience to consider the ways in which marketing science could be applied to the activities of public sector organisations in his paper ' Can places be sold? ', arguing that ill-thought out market planning will jeopardise the development of a genuinely new approach to the resolution of urban management problems. He was followed by 'Place marketing and competitive places ', given by David Sadler (Durham University). Sadler argued that the nature of place competition and the discourse of place advertising has created a chimera of economic development in the North-East and undermined the development of local political alternatives. Finally, Michelle Lowe (Reading University) presented one important strand of local economic regeneration in her case-study of the Richardson Brothers and the development of Merry Hill. Seizing the opportunities which are available because of the reluctance of inward-investors to look north of Watford, these 'Local Heroes ' draw on local image and local culture to justify their entrepreneurial activities.

The central aim of the programme had been to explore different discourses of the city and particularly, to focus on the ways in which different meanings are produced and consumed. The general interest in these issues was reflected in a reasonably large-and remarkably loyal audience-many of whom stayed right through until Saturday lunchtime.

Jacquie Burgess University College London

The employability of geography graduates The employment and other destinations of graduates is under increasingly intense scrutiny, principally because of the importance which can be attached to destinations as performance measures of courses, departments and institutions. Such indicators may be used by central government and within institutions for the determination of funding, and may also be used by a future financially conscious, fee-paying, loan-repaying 'market' of potential students in deciding what subject to study and in what institution. This conference session, convened by Allan Jones (Polytechnic South West, Plymouth) for the Higher Education Study Group, was a timely opportunity to take stock and look to the future.

The session fell into two parts, the first reviewing graduate performance both at the national and individual course level, making comparisons with other academic areas, and exploring the significance of the empirical information. Rick Ball (Staffordshire Polytechnic) used the results of a survey of Staffordshire geography graduates between 1985 and 1987 to examine some of the methodological issues surrounding the use of first destination statistics, looking at job type, location and salary and, in particular, at the short-term ' infill ' activities undertaken before entry into a main career. The advantageous flexibility of geographers was highlighted.

Mick Healey (Coventry Polytechnic) again drew upon First Destination Statistics to demon strate their application in transbinary inter-subject and inter-departmental comparative studies.

Although Coventry's sandwich degree students tended to move fairly quickly into permanent home employment, the comparison between geography graduates and all other graduates showed after six months a higher proportion of geographers in short term unemployment, unemployed and in what some regard as the traditional stand-by area of teacher training. There was evidence to suggest that the employability gap between polytechnic and university graduates was closing. Ron Johnston (Sheffield University), under the provocative title 'Why are geography graduates dissatisfied? ' used a national survey of 1980 graduates conducted in

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