Recoding of an industrial town: bioeconomy hype as a cure from decline?

ABSTRACT

We study placemaking in Äänekoski, a small Finnish industrial town, by analyzing how the local government utilizes a recent large-scale bioeconomy investment in its attempts to reinvent the town, and how components of place conform to the image building ‘script’. We deploy an assemblage concept and study local place as a combination of material and expressive properties, forces of (de-)territorialization, acts of (de-/re-)coding and relations of exteriority. Äänekoski was known as a shrinking mill town before Metsä Group Corporation decided to build a bio-production complex there in 2014. We analyze how the local government attempts to recode the town with the help of bioeconomy-based place branding, town planning and extensive material investments in the townscape. Despite support from the national ‘bioconomy hype’ and political narratives, several material, expressive and deterritorializing elements (e.g. declining population, unemployment, environmental debates) work against this growth-oriented recoding. The results allow us to draw critical conclusions on small and industrial town image building.

KEYWORDS:

• Placemaking
• assemblage
• bioeconomy
• small-town
• Finland

Introduction

The bioeconomy is promoted as a new regional policy area intended to drive sustainable transitions and revitalize declining regions’ economies. Supportive policy measures have been launched by the EU and many of its member states (Patermann and Aguilar 2018). Critical voices, however, claim that bioeconomy policy's ability to generate economic growth and jobs is overestimated (e.g. Birch 2017; Albrecht 2019). Nevertheless, there is an indisputable geographical effect of bioeconomy development because policy hype and investments have started to change materialities and images of many places. This has partly happened as a by-product of policy discourses, economic investments and company branding when the positive images of bioeconomy development have improved the reputations of many struggling localities. In Finland, the forest-based bioeconomy and biorefinery developments have become a policy pillar for economic growth. They have not only been actively employed to transform the struggling forest industry, but have also been promoted as a sustainable regional development tool (TEM 2014). Furthermore, localities have begun to consciously utilize the bioeconomy in their place promotion in order to attract businesses and new residents (see Teräs et al. 2014).

This article studies the attempts to profoundly reinvent a declining single-industry town and recode it as an innovative and attractive bioeconomy hub. This reinvention entails huge challenges because its success depends on a wide range of supportive social, material and symbolic elements. Thus, in addition to local image building activities, we base our analysis on social and material entities that either support or work against the reinvention trajectories. The study focuses on Äänekoski, a small industrial town in Central Finland, during and following a large investment in a forest-industrial ‘ecosystem’, the so-called bioproduct mill (BPM). There are two key actors which are consciously carrying out image building work. First, Metsä Group Corporation, the mill's owner, has affected the town's reinvention by constructing a company image as a global frontrunner in the bioeconomy. Second, the municipality of Äänekoski is striving to change its image and material shape from a declining and unattractive industrial town to a thriving bioeconomy centre and pleasant place to live. Additionally, we analyse influential roles of other relevant social actors as parts of elements that support or challenge these key actors’ reinvention work.

We study this local ‘bioeconomy reinvention’ as a placemaking process in a small town context. Predominantly, bioeconomy investments take place in small towns, affecting their economies, materiality and symbolic references. Small urban settlements have received less academic attention than large cities or rural areas. Internationally, there are important small town research traditions in the US and Canada (e.g. Wuthnow 2013; Halseth 2016; Halseth and Ryser 2016), but in Europe, there is a growing need for small town studies (Steinführer, Vaishar, and Zapletalová 2016; Vonnahme et al. 2018). Shrinking city literature has paid some attention to the specific challenges of small towns (e.g. Martinez-Fernandez et al. 2012; Pallagast et al. 2017), and the bioeconomy represents a ray of hope in many small and shrinking towns.

We approach Äänekoski as a place assemblage, complex compositions of elements with material and expressive roles, forces of territorialization and deterritorialization, acts of coding and decoding through various kinds of expressive media, and relations of exteriority towards other assemblages and places (Cresswell 2015; Woods 2016). In this article, we emphasize coding efforts, which attempt to change the meaning of a place. We aim to show that not even extensive recoding efforts are able to remediate many of the characteristics of a declining industrial town. Instead, various local features continue to work against the reinvention attempts and require scrutiny when addressing placemaking processes.

We start by presenting the theoretical framework followed by brief descriptions of data collection, methods and the local context in Äänekoski. Subsequently, the paper presents the empirical results and evaluates how the municipality aims to construct a new local image and how various spatial processes challenge this. The concluding discussion wraps up the findings and suggests avenues for further research.

Assembling and coding a locality

Local images and cognates, like regional identity, sense of place or genius loci, are among the key concepts of human geographers and other researchers of experiential essence and the symbolic construction of places. A great deal of these studies focus on ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ experiences and perceptions of places, but there is also an extensive multidisciplinary literature focusing on the conscious construction of the symbolic character of localities. Most parts of this research fall under the rubrics of place marketing, place promotion or place branding (Vuignier 2017). Especially place branding has become an extensively studied topic and part of contemporary regional development vocabulary all over the world. Due to globalization, growing regional competition and the neoliberalisation of governance, municipalities of different sizes have put efforts into generating a brand that makes a difference (e.g. Kavaratzis 2005; Muñiz Martinez 2012; Andersson 2014; Cleave et al. 2017). Äänekoski has also invested in a new brand which relies heavily on the BPM and expected bioeconomy growth.

Typically, place branding and image building studies have focused on metropolises, and there is much less research on small towns (Richards and Duif 2019). However, case studies exist which investigate, for instance, the downtown branding of small communities (Ryu and Swinney 2013), participatory place branding processes in small towns (Ntounis and Kavaratzis 2017), and sustainability and climate change mitigation as a potential place brand for small towns (Gustavsson and Elander 2012; Andersson 2016). Another relevant topic for us is how industrial localities portray themselves in the post-industrial world. Deindustrialization hit many small towns especially hard, and they had to be reinvented in economic, social and cultural terms (Conolly 2010). This forced traditional industrial places to rethink their relationships with non-human and built environments (Short et al. 1993), and deal with contradictory interpretations of the industrial past in place-based identity work (Rhodes 2013). As Cleave et al. (2017) notice, most municipalities want to generate a post-industrial image while those continuing to brand themselves as industrial communities are exceptions. Green city branding has been a popular approach to get rid of an industrial image and boost green policy credentials (McCann 2013; Andersson 2016). Bioeconomy branding borrows some green branding rhetoric but operates through a different framing as it provides localities with an opportunity to renew their image and keep their industrial status (Teräs et al. 2014).

Cleave et al. (2016) have studied small towns and divide their place branding policies into ‘low-road’ and ‘high-road’ approaches. ‘Low-road’ approaches apply narrow and superficial measures, like designing a logo and slogan. More ambitious ‘high-road’ approaches are grounded on comprehensive place-based strategies to attract mobile resources through more profound improvements in local physical, social and cultural conditions. Studies have shown that ‘high-road’ policies are more likely to improve opportunities for economic success (Cleave et al. 2016). Small and shrinking towns usually have limited financial resources and must content themselves with ‘low-road’ solutions. Äänekoski received generous tax revenues and state support during the construction of the BPM, which gave the municipality an opportunity to develop an extensive image building policy as part of its attempts to guide local transformation towards a desired track.

Accordingly, our main focus is not on branding as such but on placemaking process. We study ways how image building contributes to this process by utilizing and constructing the symbolic and material elements of a place. Placemaking is always a political process involving numerous stakeholders. The reinvention of a place requires support from authorities, inhabitants, businesses and other actors who are relationally connected to the locality. Thus, there are politics of placemaking imbued with power relations, conflicts and negotiations. In relational placemaking literature this is often approached with the concept of place framing which refers to individually felt and collectively shared understandings of places and placemaking that motivates collective action. Most of the time they are latent but become visible as competing visions in conflicts over places (Martin 2003; Pierce, Martin, and Murphy 2011). Our dense ethnographic data (see below) did not provide us with evidence of any such broader conflict present in Äänekoski. Given the typical power relations and cultural characteristics of a single-industry town, it is evident that the ‘industry-positive’ place frame connected with bioeconomy-based placemaking is largely shared among various local actor groups. We are aware that various place frames exist which might become visible connected to many other issues. In this article, the focus is not on the negotiations or conflicts, which would require an article of its own. We analyse, the placemaking policy's materialization, and especially the ways that it reflects with the social, material and symbolic features of the place. The assemblage approach provides a useful conceptual means for this and enables us to study a place relationally through analysis of the interrelated particles that comprise it (DeLanda 2006; Woods 2016). Assemblage concept has been broadly used in human geography, especially in research on relationships between broad processes and local contexts (McFarlane 2011; Woods 2016; Kortelainen and Koeppen 2018; Albrecht 2019). Michael Woods (2016) has operationalized an assemblage framework in his research on rural places (also Cresswell 2015; Jones, Heley, and Woods 2019). Firstly, there are elements that have material and expressive roles in the formation of a place. Tangible material features of place are embedded in the natural and built environments, infrastructure, technologies and living beings. Expressive components refer to properties which affect how each place is observed and what kinds of images it generates. Examples of typical expressive elements in a mill town include a strong local identity, leftist political culture, and iconic silhouettes of high smokestacks with clouds of exhaust.

Secondly, territorializing and deterritorializing forces refer to dynamics that hold an assemblage together or split components apart dissolving the established relations. Territorialization does not necessarily imply a bounded space but localities are tied to a fixed location, and their material as well as expressive features occupy more or less identifiable geographic areas (Woods 2016). In a mill town, territorializing forces can include a strong local identity, an operating mill or a remote positionality hindering commuting to jobs elsewhere. Deterritorializing forces alter the established relations between elements which undermine an assemblage's stability and dismantle its shape (Cresswell 2015). These can include mill closures, economic diversification or outmigration.

Thirdly, the perceived characteristics of places are also affected by coding through expressive media, like texts, art or town planning, that contribute to the construction of distinct meanings attached to places. Coding implies representations that construct meaning and identity for an assemblage, while decoding refers to representations which challenge and strip off existing meanings (Woods 2016). Local images are deliberately or unconsciously coded by place branding, storytelling, photographing and otherwise producing representations of a place. Occasionally, decoding challenges established meanings in media or other means of communication. A couple of decades ago environmental criticism challenged the traditional positive images attached to mill towns as frontrunners of progress. Simultaneously with decoding, recoding takes place as new images of place components are constructed. The local bioeconomy turn and accompanied image building in Äänekoski provide illuminating examples of this.

As place theorists (e.g. Massey 2005; Agnew 2011; Cresswell 2015) remind us, local place is never an outcome of internal features but always achieves its form through relationships with actors, processes and communities located elsewhere. The assemblage approach emphasizes this with the fourth element called relations of exteriority (DeLanda 2006; Woods 2016). As with all assemblages, places are nodes of complex nets of relations which associate fates and shapes with innumerable links outwards. Typically, industrial localities possess strong dependence on relations of exteriority to large corporations, and the image building of a specific locality relies heavily on the larger branding activities of the entire corporation.

We approach Äänekoski as a place assemblage with emphasis on local coding efforts and analyse how the municipality has utilized the positive publicity of the new BPM in its image building. Furthermore, we scrutinize the ways that different elements of place assemblage conform to the roles given in the municipality's coding ‘script’, yet others work against recoding attempts and mess up the roseate picture of the future town.

Data & methods

The article presents an intensive case study which evaluates re-/decoding processes within a place assemblage. Baker and McGuirk (2017) suggest three practices to help operationalize assemblage methodologies: (1) Ethnographic sensibility (how to look?): Research must be based on in-depth qualitative understanding of and ‘immersion’ in situated contexts. (2) Tracing sites and situations (where to look?): Places are not taken as given delineated spatial units but as locally anchored and evolving knots of multi-scalar relations which have to be traced. (3) Revealing labours of assembling (what to look for?): Focus should be on the agencies that generate and change places. Special emphasis in our data generation was on the socio-material practices (planning, policies, investments, mobilities etc.) that reinvent the material and expressive properties of Äänekoski. The assemblage approach, with its qualitative framing, helps to understand ongoing local transformation processes from an explanatory perspective rather than a descriptive analysis (Yin 2009). Nevertheless, due to the multiplicity of place producing components, the study rests on a heterogeneous mix of qualitative and quantitative data consisting of face-to-face interviews, questionnaire surveys, documents, socio-economic statistics and ethnographic observations generated between April 2017 and May 2019.

Our key primary and qualitative data stems from 14 interviews conducted with national, regional and local experts from industry, regional and local administration, local companies, and NGOs. Ten of the interviewees were regional and local stakeholders directly affected by the BPM development. Additionally, data on the role of the BPM in EU policy networks was gathered through five interviews at EU institutions and lobby organizations in Brussels. The study also included repeated visits to Äänekoski with participant observation at the BPM site, townscape and local bioeconomy events. Additionally, participation in bioeconomy related seminars in Finland and Brussels provided data. Local interview data was supplemented with three surveys in Äänekoski. First, a mini survey with local entrepreneurs received 11 replies; second, a survey on high school students’ perspectives about bioeconomy development and Äänekoski as a place to live received 83 replies and, third, a similar survey with students from a local professional education college received 50 replies. The qualitative open-ended parts of the surveys provide a particularly rich pool of information on the perceived characteristics of the place.

Socio-economic statistics are important secondary data because they provide indicators of material change and (de-)territorializing forces, like population and job development, migration, commuting and other characteristics. Moreover, development plans, town marketing brochures, company bulletins, newspapers, history books, etc. support our analysis of the expressive characteristics and narratives used to promote various re-/decoding efforts.

Ethnographic sensibility (see above) requires collection and analysis of a wide array of qualitative and quantitative data. Due to the length restrictions of the article, it is not possible to present explicitly every step of the analysis. Nevertheless, the data has guided the analysis and helped us to develop a deeper understanding of local placemaking processes although we do not always mention it in the analysis.

Äänekoski: a shrinking industrial town

Äänekoski is a small municipality, 40 kilometres north of Jyväskylä, the regional capital of Central Finland (see Table 1). The focus of this study is on the town centre, which has been closely tied to the forest-based industry since 1899 when its first groundwood and board mill was established. Dozens of similar single-industry towns grew around pulp and paper mills or sawmills in Finland beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Mill towns grew with expanding export markets and resulted in the enlargement of the industrial forest sector until the second half of the twentieth century (Tykkyläinen, Vatanen, and Halonen 2016).

Table 1. Äänekoski municipality and BPM in a nutshell.

Äänekoski municipality	Äänekoski BPM
Key figures: 18,767 inhabitants (2019) 13.8% unemployment (2019) −4.5%/−879 population change (2015–2019) 0.72 age dependency ratio (2018) −214 net. commuting (2017)	Key figures: • 1.2 B€ for new construction (2015–2017) • 172 M€ related infrastructure investments (2015–2019) • 1500 new jobs promised (largely in supply chain and transport/outside Äänekoski) • Current jobs in the BPM site: approx. 600
Main settlements (inhabitants 2019): Äänekoski town centre (8780) Suolahti (4346) Sumiainen (1115) Konginkangas (1314)	Bioeconomy ‘Ecosystem’ producers: • Metsä Group: (Metsä -Fibre, -Board, -Spring, -Wood, -Forest) • 5 other companies on site (3 co-owned by Metsä Group) • 3 companies site external (2 one way integration, 1 no integration)
Key ‘Green/bio’ activities: ‘Plänet B’; B2B bioeconomy business hub development project ‘Green Renewable Äänekoski’; project for a low carbon, resource wise and sustainable town administration and infrastructure ‘HINKU’ member; national network of low carbon communities: www.hinku-foorumi.fi Annual ‘Bioeconomy & Cheese Days’	BPM promotion: Pro Nemus visitor centre: over 15,000 visitors since June 2018 Presentation of BPM in several national & EU level strategy-, best practice- & policy documents/events. Strong presence in national & regional media

Source: Keski-Suomen Liitto (2020); Äänekoski (2019a); Metsä Fibre (2019).

Mill towns have experienced profound restructuring phases in Finland during the past decades as automation replaced manual work despite large-scale investments and increasing production volumes. Consequently, the growth of jobs and population halted in many single-industry towns during the last decades of the twentieth century. Äänekoski managed to avoid this fate temporarily as it became one of the mobile phone producer Nokia's factory sites in the early 1990s. That decade was the town's heyday. The local forest industry was still a major local employer (over 1000 jobs), and the electronics industry was booming. Nokia and its subcontractors provided over 900 jobs in Äänekoski in the late 1990s. The local government initiated to recode the town as an information technology hub. However, the ICT boom – or its end – turned out to be a disaster for Äänekoski.

When Nokia reorganized its production most ICT jobs disappeared from the locality in the early 2000s. Hence, following a short period of expressive optimism, the image of Äänekoski quickly shifted from an information age growth centre to a problem region. A few years later the situation worsened due to the dramatic period of structural change in the transnational forest industry. Declining printing paper markets in Europe led to mill closures, massive lay-offs, and shrinking local economies in many Finnish localities. Metsä Group closed the Äänekoski paper mill in 2011, shedding over 200 local jobs (Felin and Mella 2013).

Within a few years Äänekoski became a shrinking town with the adjunct material and expressive attributes. Unemployment was high, peaking at 23% in 2015 (Tilastokeskus 2020), outmigration increased and empty commercial spaces were a common sight in the town centre. The general atmosphere was often characterized as depressing until the investment decision for the BPM was made public in spring 2014. As one local entrepreneur put it, ‘ … we had really hard years here in Äänekoski before the investment … ’ (Interviewee I). Hence, the 1.2 billion € investment in the BPM has been a game changer for the town (see also Albrecht 2019).

Building and supporting the new image

The investment decision by Metsä Group not only started a bioeconomy driven recoding process in Äänekoski, but it quickly became the flagship of bioeconomy development in Finland, referred to as the ‘new pride’ of the Finnish forest industries (Helsingin Sanomat 2017). The (forest-based) bioeconomy had just been chosen by the government and industrialists to rejuvenate the struggling Finnish economy, and then prime minister Juha Sipilä grandiosely called it ‘a new Nokia’ (Keskisuomalainen 2015). This political strategy and related supporting schemes spurred a wide array of new investment plans, particularly large biorefineries/pulp mills, similar to the Äänekoski BPM, which is the only big investment that has materialized until 2020. It has gained a lot of national publicity and acts as a benchmark for other declining mill towns in Finland. Yet, to understand the implications for Äänekoski, and the potentials for other localities in similar situations, a closer look at the re-/decoding efforts of the place, is required.

In the early 2010s, Äänekoski possessed a multiplicity of material and expressive properties of a declining and unattractive mill town with the negative image of a polluted, smelly place. As a shrinking town, it was recoded ‘at a distance’ with representations that strengthened the existing negative impression. Following the closure of the paper mill in 2011, the national government decided to add Äänekoski to the list of areas of abrupt structural change (Felin and Mella 2013). This status provided the town with financial support but simultaneously it was officially denominated as a declining area. This recoding was further strengthened by the media which frequently mentioned Äänekoski as one of the worst performing municipalities in Central Finland and beyond in terms of unemployment (e.g. Keskisuomalainen 2014) as well as its deteriorating public infrastructure and housing (Äänekoski 2015). The local government was struggling economically and did not have the resources to influence its negative reputation. The publicly hailed decision of the BPM investment, however, opened a window of opportunity to change things and to ‘ … seize the moment and do something on your own … ’ as a representative of the local government put it (Interviewee II).

The municipal administration of Äänekoski quickly began to utilize the growing publicity and optimistic atmosphere by setting the bioeconomy at the core of its image building (Äänekoski 2015; Albrecht 2019). While the BPM and its bioeconomy system play key roles in various planning documents addressing material elements such as road infrastructure (e.g. Äänekoski 2015, 2017a), the focus is on place branding with a bioeconomy and environmental framing. The spatially entwined expressive efforts of recoding can be divided in two: first, there are narratives that directly concern the BPM as a benchmark for local bioeconomy development and innovation, and second, there is purposeful image building carried out by Äänekoski municipality. The former largely aims at boosting selective expressive characteristics of the BPM into national and EU bioeconomy policy narratives as well as towards transnational biobased industry and innovation environments (e.g. Albrecht 2019).

The negative expressive elements of a declining industry town are pointed out as crucial to tackle in current strategic documents (Äänekoski 2015, 2017b). The municipal marketing strategy suggests focusing image transformation on Äänekoski's new role as ‘the most significant core/complex of bioeconomy in Finland’ (Äänekoski 2017b, 1) and the town has actively followed up on that plan. Aside from integrating the bioeconomy in new town planning and strategy documents, two key efforts support these recoding aims.

First, following its marketing strategy, the municipality has created a new image describing the town as a ‘bioeconomy frontrunner’. This coding emphasizes Äänekoski's role as a green industry town, home for world leading products (e.g. high-grade pulp, Valtra tractors, carboxymethyl cellulose/CMC polymer), and open to many housing and business opportunities (Äänekoski 2018a). Simultaneously, it highlights a small-town image of just the right size surrounded by nature with diverse cultural and leisure possibilities (Äänekoski 2018b). These expressive efforts include a new town logo with the slogan ‘The future lives here’. Branding targets several audiences and includes four key aims: improve the town's image, increase population (particularly young/families), improve the business environment, and boost tourism (Äänekoski 2017b). In addition to basic branding materials such as media appearances, leaflets, information stands at various events and information points in the town centre, the municipality has engaged in additional activities to publicly recode its expressive image. Notable examples include the new ‘Green renewable Äänekoski’ project, aiming for solutions to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, and participation in the Finnish carbon neutral municipality network (HINKU) (see Table 1). These projects add an expressive element to the recoding as a green and clean community (Äänekoski 2019b).

Second, the town has established, in collaboration with Metsä Group and local companies, a project called ‘Plänet B’ which is supported by national ministries and the Regional Council. It is a very ambitious branding effort aimed at attracting bioeconomy business and companies (Vision Hunters 2018). The goal of the project is to develop Äänekoski ‘ … to become the world's largest B2B meeting point for businesses active or interested in the bioeconomy – and thus the number one bioeconomy ecosystem in the world’ (Plänet B 2019). Plänet B incorporates active recoding efforts by enforcing a strong narrative around Äänekoski as a bioeconomy based innovation hub and production centre to attract new business. It presents an idealized picture of the current ‘bioeconomy ecosystem’ and combines its material components (e.g. industrial infrastructure, side streams) with the expressive characteristics of a collaborative business complex. This local system is claimed to provide huge potentials for newcomers based on the availability of expertise, institutional support and innovation potentials with aims to enlarge and diversify bioproduction (Plänet B 2019). The target audience of Plänet B is primarily startups and SMEs but also includes sectors beyond BPM linkages, such as tourism. Jointly these two activities display the main efforts of recoding the expressive elements and creation of a new image for the town. Nevertheless, there are also material components that take part in the recoding efforts of the municipal administration.

The ‘high-road’ versions of place branding are typically associated with strategic outline, urban planning as well as reconstruction and material change in built environments in order to support and materialize the novel image (Cleave et al. 2016). In Äänekoski, the BPM and especially its construction phase from 2015 to 2017 brought much needed financial resources for physical placemaking through increased local tax revenue and government investments in transport infrastructure (see Albrecht 2019 for details). The local government invested in a wide array of material changes to improve the expressive outlook, attractiveness and functionality of Äänekoski's centre. It drastically revised the land-use plans of the town centre immediately after the BPM decision, and especially traffic infrastructure was renovated and modified according to the needs of BPM's truck-based wood supply. The deteriorated street network was improved and new cycling and pedestrian paths built. Development activities included the demolition of outdated communal housing, planning high-quality housing areas close to the centre and a new motor way (Äänekoski 2017a, 2017c). Additionally, the market square is under construction in 2020 and moving southwards closer to the BPM (Äänekoski 2010, 2017d; Kaupunginhallitus 2015). Finally, generous municipal tax revenues allowed the local government to materialize pending leisure infrastructures projects such as the construction of modern sports facilities and significant investments in parks (Äänekoski 2017c).

Jointly, the material and expressive elements employed by the municipality are supposed to overcome its negative industrial town credentials and successfully recode Äänekoski as an attractive and sustainable place of bioeconomy progress. This combination of sustainable living environment and industrial bioeconomy production focus clearly differs from the typical green branding narrative (e.g. Andersson 2016). The local government has assembled a complex recoding script which gives the elements of place assemblage certain roles that would support the desired local image. Many of the components act faithfully according to the supposed roles and many others can be converted to do so with urban planning, physical place-building or media campaigns. Yet, as pointed out by Woods (2016) (re/de)coding is never a linear process but a relational and contested patchwork. It is part of wider assembling of place and includes not only a variety of perspectives but also unmanageable expressive and material elements or deterritorializing forces which might work against the coding efforts.

Äänekoski's place branding rests on a complex set of reciprocal relations that embed the locality in broader political discourses and business strategies. These relations of exteriority provide local image builders with supportive elements wherein the BPM is deployed as a flagship of the bioeconomy by politicians and industrialists. National economic policy has been recoded with the help of the positive image of the bioeconomy as described above (e.g. TEM 2014, 2017). This was accompanied by a preferential environment for financial aid for projects that venture into bioeconomy development which directly supports recoding activities. Political and economic elites employed Äänekoski BPM and its socio-economic benefit calculations (e.g. new jobs and export value) as a key example for these positive developments (Albrecht 2019; Kortelainen and Albrecht 2019). Metsä Group's branding has used a reduced set of numeric indicators and expressive assumptions to highlight the benefits of bioeconomy development ‘à la Äänekoski’ for its localities and for Finland in general. Local governments have continuously and somewhat narrowly underlined the positive role of the bioeconomy in places where similar investments are planned to take place. The Finnish media has, until recently, rather obediently disseminated these messages to the public (e.g. Peltomaa 2018).

Various regional scale actors also contribute to the recoding of Äänekoski as a ‘bioeconomy frontrunner’. Even prior to the BPM decision, the bioeconomy was integrated as a core pull factor of regional development in Central Finland's strategy (Keski-Suomi Liitto 2014), and the Regional Council continues to portray itself as a leading bioeconomy region (Keski-Suomen Liitto 2019). Strategic documents characterize the Äänekoski BPM as an innovative ecosystem and development ‘engine’ for the whole area (Keski-Suomen liitto 2017a, 2017b, 2018). The strategic outlines are supplemented by more concrete regional programmes supporting bioeconomy education and business. For instance, Bioeconomy Institute of Jyväskylä University of Applied Science (JAMK) and POKE vocational college have jointly established a bioeconomy campus in Saarijärvi (c. 30 km from Äänekoski). Furthermore, the Äänekoski branch of POKE has increased student intake in educational programmes such as logistics (incl. forest machine drivers), industrial automation and forestry in recent years. Äänekoski also hosts the bioeconomy branch of the nationwide KasvuOpen (Growth Open) start-up competition (ÄKS 2019a), in which experts from the region mentor and choose the most promising bioeconomy newcomers. All these regional actors and activities take part in the image building of Äänekoski as they emphasize the bioeconomy in terms of business development, innovation, professional education and research in the region. Simultaneously, they generate and maintain the expressive image of Äänekoski as the main hub and flagship of the regional bioeconomy.

Another set of expressive and material elements contributing to the local image building stems from Finnish forest industry's efforts to get rid of the old image as a polluting and exploitative sector. While the forest industry in general is forcefully recoding itself as the core element of sustainable bioeconomy development, the branding activities of Metsä Group and its BPM have taken part in recoding of Äänekoski. The BPM development and accompanying narrative have been widely displayed as a best practice in various policy reports and media sources on the EU, national and regional levels (Peltomaa 2018; Albrecht 2019). Additionally, Metsä Group opened the Pro Nemus (‘for forests’) visitor centre at the BPM site in 2018. The centre combines wood architecture, artwork, virtual media and guided presentations, and targets various stakeholder groups, including the local population. It has no role in material production but acts as an important expressive media for the whole company. It provides a mix of selective material and expressive features that represent the BPM approach as a frontrunner of bioeconomy development. Although Pro Nemus displays the entire operations of Metsä Group through a company-based perspective, its material presence in Äänekoski lends itself as an expressive element that denominates the locality in the same positive bioeconomy rhetoric. These expressive elements are further affected by the development and promotion of new product innovations and investments at the BPM site, the most recent being a 40 M € pilot plant for cellulose based textile production established jointly with the Japanese company Itochu (Metsä Fibre 2019). Additionally, features like the relocation of veneer production to the BPM site directly strengthen the ‘ecosystem’ image of the BPM taken up in the municipality's recoding efforts.

Finally, recoding Äänekoski as a success story greatly benefitted from the improved local economic situation linked to the BPM construction period. This enabled the town to generate a financial surplus and provided an optimistic future perspective which was transformed into various material components in the built environment described above. A town council member characterized the development as follows: ‘ … if you have a clear future so that this factory will be there, then it gives a good sign, so the town can take some [financial] risks … ’ (Interviewee III). Consequently, the developments were accompanied by positive accounts in local and regional media following the BPM building process. Such locally experienced features like improved infrastructure also have an effect on the positionalities of residents and their perceptions of Äänekoski as a positively developing place.

These features have provided strong expressive and material resources for the municipality's recoding efforts. They are heavily employed within the knowledge networks that disseminate these ‘narratives of success’ (McCann 2013, 10) as well as enforce the recoding and its stabilizing territorialization dynamics. Yet there are various deterritorializing forces as well as expressive and material features that contest the stabilization efforts and challenge the municipal recoding.

Challenging the new image

Boosted policy narratives and place branding, are predominantly based on success stories or positive imagery (McCann 2013; Cleave et al. 2017). These images are consequently subject to contestation by actors and elements that contrast with expressive and material features of positive imageries. In Äänekoski these elements are linked to the continuous coding as a struggling industrial town but also to opposing recoding attempts and forces that derive from the BPM development. Yet again, this is not merely rooted in place-based processes in Äänekoski but closely linked to the relations of exteriority that (co-)produce assembling processes (Woods 2016). There are at least four such socio-material processes or elements which challenge the recoding efforts of Äänekoski.

First, there is growing national and international criticism on the resource exploitation focus and market orientation of current bioeconomy development. Specifically, the biomass needs of new large BPMs, such as Äänekoski, have caused lively debate (e.g. Helsingin Sanomat 2017). Involving researchers, political bodies and foresters, the argument is primarily related to the annual cutting potentials and threshold levels that Finnish forests can sustain without biodiversity loss while acting as a carbon sink. These discussions challenge the sustainable image of the BPM and other such bioeconomy production. Additionally, the public debate is paired with NGO's media campaigns with sceptical accounts of the target markets and products of the bioeconomy (SLL 2017; YLE 2019). Hence, the focus on pulp production for Asian markets and the predominant destiny as single-use packaging or hygiene products challenges the sustainable brand of Finnish bioeconomy development. Another critical element is based on the competitive socio-economic environments and EU funding system that places/regions operate in. Äänekoski is not the only place to advertise itself as the leading bioeconomy hub, and competing claims of being the most prominent bioeconomy region challenge the credibility of recoding efforts like those of Plänet B.

Second, more place-based socio-economic processes and indicators are working against the coding efforts. After some years of plenty and optimism, the town's recent budget report indicates poorer financial prospects (Äänekoski 2019a). The image displayed in local media has shifted within a few months from optimistic headlines like ‘Strong growth in Äänekoski’ (ÄKS 2019b) to more cautious reporting like ‘Äänekoski's economy is slightly weakening’ (ÄKS 2019c). In his new year's speech, the mayor warned that ‘Äänekoski has tight economic years ahead … ’ (Sisä-Suomen Lehti 2019). Significant spending on material recoding has left its mark on municipal finances, which is restricting the continuation of investments (Äänekoski 2019a).

Concurrently, unemployment and outmigration, two key socio-economic parameters challenge the new growth image. Although its overall employment situation improved after 2015, Äänekoski continues to lead unemployment statistics in the region (ELY-Keskus 2020). This tells about the general improvement of the Finnish economy rather than the success of the local bioeconomy transformation. There has not been a major increase in local jobs after the construction of the BPM either, and job postings are in fact decreasing (ELY-Keskus 2020). Outmigration continues and is accompanied by an even more challenging ageing process. Recent forecasts estimate that the municipality's population will drop well below 15,000 and the dependency ratio will be over 0.93 by 2040 (Äänekoski 2019a). The city aims to tackle this problem with a special population growth project started in 2018 and decline, while continuous, seems to be slowing down according to the latest statistics (Keski-Suomen liitto 2020).

Third, there are also more concrete behavioural features that challenge the reinvention. According to our two surveys at local educational institutions, the preferences of young people in Äänekoski do not support the attempts to convince local youth to stay (e.g. Äänekoski 2017a), casting dark clouds over the future of local demographics. Almost 50% of respondents in the surveys perceived the recent changes in Äänekoski as positive, but merely 15% of the young respondents planned to stay in town after graduation or return after additional studies. While opinions on Äänekoski as a living place vary and young people appreciate positive changes, it does not generate much place commitment. As one respondent put it, ‘You can see that they want to develop this as a place to live but it feels restrictive for the youth’ (open ended reply in Survey). It also seems that a job at the BPM is not attractive to high school students: ‘ … the bioeconomy is here but our students are not interested’ (Interviewee III). Additionally, from the open-ended questions, there appears an overall perspective among young people that remains locked into the rather unattractive industrial features of the town, particularly odorous disturbances and heavy traffic loads. These are not new features for a forest industry town, but the BPM has revitalized some of these elements. The 200% increase in heavy load truck traffic through town raises negative images concerning safety, noise and particle pollution, countering the image of a green town. However, a more challenging expressive feature stems from the odours of the mill and biogas station. The new BPM was advertised as reducing the unpleasant smell of pulp production yet it continues to be an occasional problem. This is highlighted not only in the survey, local news, online forums and town council meetings, but is indicated by recent growth in certain gaseous pollution in the newest air quality report of Äänekoski (Äänekoski 2020). While the visual industrial image of the BPM is easy to ignore, unpleasant odours, even though only punctual and temporary, entail the capacity to jeopardize much of the effort invested in upgrading the town's environment and image.

Fourth, there are several features that challenge the innovative ‘ecosystem’ narrative provided by Metsä Group and echoed by the local government. Contrary to the startup friendly and open ecosystem rhetoric, almost all local production units have been bought up and are currently controlled by Metsä Group (Kortelainen and Albrecht 2019). While this allows the BPM to operate more efficiently, it counters the ‘ecosystem’ rhetoric. It also questions the expressive features of Äänekoski as a place where innovative bioeconomy startup firms can unfold. Metsä Group has invested in a new cellulose-based textile pilot plant and is likely to push new investments on the BPM site, but investments of bioeconomy newcomers have not yet materialized. Whether the recent acquisition of CP Kelco by Nouryon (Nouryon 2020) will alter the ecosystem power balance remains to be seen, but current BPM development appears more like a Metsä Group controlled ‘one man show’ and this challenges the expressive elements of an open and heterogeneous ‘ecosystem’. Additionally, regarding the Plänet B aims featuring Äänekoski as bioeconomy hub, regional strategies are challenging this trajectory by nominating the whole region of Central Finland as a ‘biovalley’. Thus, while supportive on the one hand, the regional strategy possesses elements that challenge Äänekoski's recoding efforts and displays the complexity of these processes.

There are plans to develop other bioproduction sites like the Äänekoski BPM, giving new hope and means for image building in some declining towns. In comparison to the hype a few years ago, public discussion around the bioeconomy has gained more negative tones lately, particularly related to the increasing wood consumption and negative effect on CO2 sequestration. In 2019 a greenfield development project called Finnpulp came to a halt as it was not granted an environmental permit due to its impact on surrounding water bodies. Nonetheless, many resource localities continue to employ similar assumptive narratives on the transformative potentials for the places of bioeconomy implementation. As our findings show, these place reinvention efforts must be treated with caution. Additionally, Äänekoski BPM was built during a time of positive publicity and critical voices were less present than they will be for future bioeconomy investments. Aside from endangering many of the investments, it makes the place reinventors’ work more challenging in bioeconomy localities. The current downturn of the economy due to the COVID-19 crisis might provide new fuel for these regional bioeconomy growth narratives. There are inherent risks deriving from reinvention efforts which rely heavily on corporate growth driven development narratives and which rest on a thin foundation of assumptive elements prone to disturbance by the heterogeneous expressive and material features. Many struggling small towns face forces of decoding similar to those portrayed above, which question the long-term suitability of branding and strategies based on naïve growth narratives.

Discussion and conclusions

Our research has shown how difficult it is to carry out the recoding and reinvention of a place with a strong, historically developed identity. In Äänekoski, town branding is based on an industrialist and growth optimistic place frame. It deploys the broadly shared expressive images and positive future expectations linked to Metsä Group corporate narratives portraying the BPM and town as a nationally and internationally important bioeconomy growth centre. This place frame seems to be broadly shared among the local population. Different opinions and latent place frames exist, of course, but no serious attempts to contest the reinvention policy and new image based on bioeconomy has occurred among the Äänekoski residents. However, behind this expressive façade there are several other deterritorializing forces and material changes that challenge the reinvention attempts and reproduce the old expressive characteristics of an unattractive industrial town with a declining population, unemployment, outmigration and environmental problems. These branding efforts of the town administration are like building a Potemkin village by using the supportive expressive elements deriving from the bioeconomy expectations and concealing the elements (expressive and material) that challenge these recoding processes.

However, the placemaking work of Äänekoski does not stop with expressive recoding but also includes physical and social investments in the community. Äänekoski provides a revealing example of a ‘high-road’ approach (Cleave et al. 2016) because its recoding and reinventing policy includes, in addition to typical logo and slogan developments, extensive material investments in infrastructure, housing, recreational environments, public services and leisure activities. Although the ‘high-road’ recoding policies have improved the expressive features of the town, they have not been able to overcome the ‘decoding forces’ stemming from the challenging material and deterritorializing characteristics.

An increasing number of small towns are declining localities with very limited potentials for ‘high-road’ policies, and thus, Potemkin villages have been built through branding activities in many localities (Cleave et al. 2016). This does not imply that place branding in these cases is entirely detached from local identities and collectively shared place frames (e.g Pasquinelli and Teräs 2013), yet local governments rely on optimistic and usually unrealistic growth strategies and recode themselves with emblems resembling each other. Such rebranding is further encouraged by national bioeconomy policy, which is based on Metsä Group's and other companies’ optimistic bioeconomy development narratives. Furthermore, most industrial localities and small towns imitate big cities in their recoding and try to develop an information age or creative city image for themselves (Pasquinelli and Teräs 2013). Recently, the bioeconomy boom and its positive publicity have given many communities an opportunity to recode themselves as green industrial places with prefix ‘bio-’. Linked to the recoding of the Finnish forest industry as frontrunner of bioeconomy transformation, it parallels the attempts of corporations to change their old image to a sustainable processor of renewable resources. Accompanied by economic policy support and largely positive media coverage, this image has given rise to industry as a local brand which combines the traditional progressive connotations with a green emphasis. As the Äänekoski case displays, many of these industrial localities have to deal with industry related and uncontrollable material and expressive disturbances that challenge these overtly optimistic image building efforts and ground them in local realities.

Finally, this mismatch between place branding and placemaking processes raises a number of research challenges. It would be important to critically evaluate the ways how bioeconomy is utilized in placemaking and image-building in different contexts. Furthermore, studies that compare more diverse local economic strategies with those policies supporting large-scale investments would provide regional policy designers with valuable knowledge. Lessons learnt from Äänekoski are not very promising which casts doubts over the suitability of national (bio)economy policy support instruments and large infrastructure projects. Designed largely for Metsä Group's needs, the national policy intervention leaves the town's structural challenges largely unaddressed. Hence, there is an urge for future research which would assess alternatives regarding regional development in a bioeconomy framing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).