Neighbourhood rebranding: wanna meet in LoHo, CanDo or GoCaGa?

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/15/neighbourhood-rebranding-loho-cando-or-gocaga

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“Let’s meet in Midtown!” said no one in London, ever. Equally, there are few Londoners who regularly take tea in Tyburnia or have any knowledge of the Knowledge Quarter. And yet, if property developers and Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) had their way, these, along with a number of other newly imagined neighbourhoods, would become familiar fixtures of the London landscape. Indeed, corporate cartography has become so common that the Londonist has recently created a handy map visualising the attempted rebranding of the city.

Midtown, in case you’re still feeling lost, refers to the moniker bestowed by marketers upon Bloomsbury, Holborn and St Giles. One might have thought that these were already pretty good names but, according to the powers that BID, they’re not good enough. Rather, Midtown, an anodyne descriptor that evokes chain restaurants and cheap suits, has been deemed a more alluring proposition for investors by Inmidtown, a collection of local businesses working together to help the area “realise its full economic potential”. For years the BID, backed by the Mayor of London, has been trying to make Midtown happen, even though it has become clear that Midtown is never going to happen.

Similar semantic shifts are being attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of London. Intrepid developers have discovered “Tyburnia”, an undervalued stretch of real estate between Paddington Station and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, the “Knowledge Quarter” is an attempt to rid King’s Cross of its association with prostitution by emphasising the new preponderance of cerebral institutions there. You could call it “brain-washing”. The Knowledge Quarter, incidentally, is one of 21 “Quarters” in London; there are also a dozen or so new “Villages”. Neighbourhood rebranding is often the linguistic leg of gentrification and, as such, follows a predictable pattern: “Villages” assert their legitimacy by emphasising community, while “Quarters” lend a gravitas to whatever noun they follow. Both have a cleansing effect on the associations that came before them.

Build it and they will come, but brand it and the right sort of 'they' will come

London is a dynamic city that refuses to be pinned down. Nevertheless, its constantly changing character can, to some degree, be unearthed via an archaeology of its place names. Anglo-Saxon chiefs maintain a linguistic legacy in Paddington, Kensington and Tottenham. Cornhill, Bread Street, and Poultry provide a mercantile map of medieval London. And Fitzrovia, coined in the 1930s to describe a formerly nondescript section of the West End, speaks to the influence of the arts on London’s culture. The area was named after a pub, the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, where writers and artists, including Dylan Thomas and George Orwell, used to gather. What’s clear from all this is that, historically, there is nothing clear at all about London’s neighbourhoods. There was never really any marketing plan behind the city’s place names, just century upon century of tangled history.

But the past is a foreign country: they name things differently there. Neighbourhoods are no longer geographical areas languorously defined and populated by communities, but brands methodically built and monetised by corporations. As such, names become an important way to define the brand identity. Build it and they will come, but brand it and the right sort of “they” will come. Or so the theory goes. The theory didn’t work out so well, however, when developers intent on squeezing as much money out of Fitzrovia as possible, attempted to rebrand the area “NoHo”. Local residents were vocally opposed to “that horrible NoHo name” and it met a speedy finish.

Because London is so ancient, because it has evolved organically over 2,000 years, it’s hard to impose names on it. History speaks louder than made-up words. The same isn’t true of newer cities, and many of New York City’s neighbourhoods, by contrast, are successful exercises in branding. Times Square, for example, was once known as Long Acre Square but changed its name when, in 1904, the New York Times began building its headquarters there. Reports are divided as to whether the rebrand was at the behest of the newspaper, or whether the city simply felt like honouring an influential newspaper (the Times argues the latter). In any case, the newspaper now has the dubious honour of having the most awful intersection of Manhattan carry its name.

Manhattan’s SoHo is another example. The now fashionable area was once known as “Hell’s Hundred Acres” because of its sweatshops and succession of terrible fires. In 1962, a “South Houston Street survey”, commissioned by the City Planning Commission, showed the area to have economic potential despite its run-down reputation. And so, Hell’s Hundred Acres was gradually rebranded SoHo: an artsy abbreviation of South Houston that also played on associations with London’s Soho.

SoHo became the space that launched a thousand New York City acronyms. Some of these stuck: TriBeCa (TRIangle BElow CAnal Street); FiDi (FInancial DIstrict); NoMad (NOrth of MAdison Square Park); NoLiTa (NOrth of Little ITAly) are all acceptable forms of New York nomenclature. But other abbreviations for new and improved New York neighbourhoods – LoHo, BelDel, SoBro, NoBro, BoCoCa, ProCro, GoCaGa – are having a harder time taking off. Perhaps the most egregious example is “CanDo”, an attempt by the Lower Manhattan Marketing Association to package downtown Manhattan and give it a “pizzazz”. Or, some might say, PiZzAzz.

Acronyms appear to be globally infectious. Hong Kong has its own SoHo (South of Hollywood Road), along with a PoHo (Po Hing Fong). Vancouver has a SoMa and SoLo. Mumbai has a SoBo (south Bombay). Even Paris, which one might imagine to be beyond such Americanisms, is trying to rebrand South Pigalle, its red-light district, SoPi to attract more “bobos” (moneyed bourgeois bohemians).

It’s not just acronyms that are really hot right now. Philadelphia’s gay village is trying to turn into Midtown Village; Detroit’s notorious Cass Corridor is trying to become a Midtown; St Petersburg, a city in Florida associated with race riots, is trying to build a Midtown from scratch. Three districts in Boston may merge together to make a, you guessed it, Midtown. Midtowns have basically become the McDonald’s of urban rebranding.

It goes on: San Francisco has been newly graced with “The Quad”, a microhood populated by Quadsters” – the work of a developer who lumped the intersections of four neighbourhoods into a whole new area. And in Vancouver there have been attempts to rid the East Hasting area of associations with poverty and drug use by renaming it the “East Village”. It even has a tagline: “A vintage neighbourhood with a progressive attitude.” Which, perhaps, might be more accurately translated as: “A vintage attempt to borrow some progressive equity from New York’s East Village.”

But let’s not blame estate agents for everything. Some residents of San Francisco’s Mission district have naturally taken to calling a certain area of it “The Gastro” because of its high density of, you’ve guessed it, gastronomical outlets. Meanwhile, some rebrands are simply the results of jokes that have stuck. “Tendernob” is the poetically named part of San Francisco where Tenderloin meets Nob Hill. Jokes have sticking power: people still call a part of London’s Old Street area Silicon Roundabout (which started off as a joke), rather than the government-invented “Tech City”.

Midtowns have basically become the McDonald's of urban rebranding

Not everyone is a fan of neighbourhood rebranding. Indeed, in New York there has been some pressure to make the practice punishable by law. A few years ago, Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn assemblyman, suggested legislation that would penalise estate agents for inventing neighbourhood names and for falsely stretching their boundaries. As you might image, nothing much came of these suggestions: it’s hard to criminalise acronyms.

Rather than resorting to the law to curb the ever-encroaching tide of gentrification, some New York City residents have tried to use “anti-branding” tactics to thwart developers and protect their neighbourhood identity. Dumbo, a waterside area of Brooklyn, is perhaps the most bittersweet example of this.

In the 1970s the area’s cheap rents attracted a bohemian mix of artists. In a familiar turn of events, this community was then threatened by developers, who wanted to cement an upmarket identity for the neighbourhood under the name “Fulton Landing”. Local residents decided to fight back, and a naming committee was tasked with conceiving a name so stupid that it might actually deter development. After experimenting with the likes of Danya (Down Around the Navy Yard Annex), the committee settled on Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) – the idea being that no yuppie would want to spend a lot of money for a condo in an area named after a floppy-eared elephant.

The median price of homes currently listed in Dumbo is now $1,825,000 (£1.2m): it turns out that Dumbo wasn’t such a stupid name after all. Crane Davis, one of the members of the community naming committee, explains: “What we learned, once again, is that the content of a name is meaningless; its only value is that it’s memorable. Dumbo is that.” The developers, he adds wryly, “fought the name for years, then realised that people were saying that Fulton Landing was in Dumbo. Next morning there were elephants everywhere.”

Dumbo may provide an interesting case study to the executives over at Inmidtown. Rather than persisting in trying to make Midtown happen, they’d probably be better off renaming the area after a semi-anthropomorphic elephant. I suggest Jumbo (JUst a Moniker for By Oxford Street).

Got a better idea for a neighbourhood rebrand, or has your area undergone a bizarre one? Let us know below or @guardiancities