Marketing the unmarketable: Place branding in a postindustrial medium-sized town

This paper analyzes place branding as a policy intervention in postindustrial small and medium sized towns. We broaden the current and primarily large city focused discussion of place branding in postindustrial locales by examining the re-branding of the former mining town of Heerlen, the Netherlands. The concept of urban imaginaries, or the collection of (historical) representations and narrations of urban space, is used to analyze how place branding strategies are (un)successfully received by target audiences, in particular by different resident groups. While the campaign ‘Urban Heerlen’ has contributed to a successful cultural regeneration, its contested definition of ‘urban’ and the application of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy for regeneration limits its effectiveness in terms of authenticity and inclusivity. We argue that place branding in smaller postindustrial cities might benefit from an explicit recognition of and engagement with the urban imaginaries of residents.