Don't Like - Cities Having A Brand

The idea of a city having a brand is odd because cities are so much more complex than any brand could ever be. But that doesn’t stop it from happening. I’ve witnessed a few brands for Portland in the time since I moved here in 2009. There was the Weird Portland of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fugitives and Refugees with all the tall bikes, strange food carts, the 24-Hour Church of Elvis, the Pepto Bismal flavored donuts at Voodoo Donuts, and the like. Then there was Portlandia, which existed before the show aired but really came into its own with the rise of the show. It was that sort of ridiculous artisanal preciousness borne from a certain unbearable whiteness of the city’s being. But Portlandia could never be taken seriously because it was all predicated on the fact that it was a joke. The name gave it away. But around the same time that Portlandia was becoming the city’s national reputation, PDX emerged. That was a hipper and slicker-branded take on Portland. It coincided with the explosive rise of Nike, the ad industry, and tech all creating a more lucrative professional creative class. It’s when Portland tried to get cool on the internet. PDX is the city on Instagram, where people and businesses added those three letters to the end of their handles as a suffix. PDX also feels tied to new five-over-one apartment complexes and the importing of weird businesses to the city. For now, PDX still rules the day. Though it remains to be seen how long it’ll last. I suspect that eventually it will run out and PDX will go back to just being the airport. I don’t know what’s coming next. But Portland will be underneath whatever gets wheat-pasted on billboards and printed on hats. Cities are too complex and beautiful to be captured by a brand.