Beyond “Guggenheiming”: From flagship buildings to flagship space in Sweden

Abstract

Flagship buildings are promoted as a good strategy to stimulate economic development. Pushed by a range of actors, “best practice” examples are being copied from place to place around the globe. Flagship buildings are accompanied by a discourse of place branding that stresses a need for cities to improve their attractiveness. Drawing on this discourse and ongoing discussions on deterritorialization and reterritorialization in urban and economic geography, the author argues that there is an overly deterritorialized approach to flagship buildings in the place-branding literature. Using a conceptual framework inspired by the reterritorialization debate, she introduces the concept of “flagship space,” emphasizing a dualism in place branding encompassing both deterritorialized and territorial processes that in interplay create best-practice examples. The empirical analysis examines the development of five flagship hotels in Sweden. The author concludes that the five hotels have both created and are constantly reproducing their statuses as flagship developments. However, the creation and reproduction of status is not only upheld by the operators of the hotels but is also a joint effort of actors in the local community. Through these processes and practices the understanding of the hotels is broadened from merely being flagship buildings to creators of flagship space.

Keywords:

• flagship buildings
• hotels
• place branding
• reterritorialization
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this article was initiated during the “Hotel Project” (Hotellprojektet) at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, and I am very grateful for the comments made by the projects' members at early stages of the research. I am also grateful for comments from session participants at the International Geographical Congress (ICG) held on 27–30 August 2012 in Cologne, where the research was presented. I am especially grateful for Brita Hermelin's insightful remarks on my text. I addition, thanks are due to Lukas Smas for taking the initiative to form and lead the “Hotel Project” and to Stefan Ene for preparing Fig. 2.