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To promote a place, you need a story. To get a story, the place needs a voice.
That voice can be so elusive--particularly in those places beaten down by a narrative of hardship, neglect, and decline. Where can that voice come from, if there is insufficient inspiration--no beauty, hope, progress--to encourage it? Finding a way to change the conversation about a place is a huge battle, and one that seems extremely hard to win. Even then, the story-telling needs to work extra hard to be convincing.
Here's a compelling little essay from Rustwire about branding the city of Cleveland, wherein the city's story coalesces in a succinct way. In short order, the ceaseless drumbeat of negativity is reconciled with the quieter, more subtle pleasures of living in a place that is more than okay with not being the next big thing.
Cleveland—it is a lot. It’s part Napoleon Dynamite: alienated, quirky, but with a spine of cut-through-the-bullshit intrigue. It is lunch pails and bridges, iron and stone, yet a place of poetics formed from a pensiveness borne from its afterthought status. Cleveland is hard and soft, then: knuckles and tits—and this is perhaps most embodied in its music as hybrid polka-rock DJs share the same city air that catches the sounds of the Cleveland Orchestra. Cleveland is wandering. Cleveland is finding when it’s not blinded by what it’s looking for. Cleveland is the nostalgic comfort that is hearing the night train. Cleveland is Joan Jett in the Light of Day.
Embedded in that prose, I can detect an argument for an messier, more textured alternative to the streamlined condos, wine bars, and yoga studios that seem to describe the current limits of our collective imaginations as regards urban living. That is an argument worth hearing, and a story worth telling.
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