By Damian Hondares, ’17
“Today could be a huge day for Richmond,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch predicted in September 2011. “Mayor Dwight C. Jones is overseas in Copenhagen, Denmark, awaiting an announcement of the winning bid for the 2015 World Road Cycling Championships.” Hours later, it was official: Richmond would host the championships, “cycling’s pinnacle event.” Three hundred million eyes would be on Richmond, from all across the globe. The city’s UCI planning committee — consisting of local politicians and entrepreneurs — estimated the event, which ran from September 19-27, would draw 450,000 visitors. Richmond was “one step closer to being one of the world’s great bicycling cities,” Mayor Jones declared.
Expectations were high, but Richmond still needed to market itself and the event. That marketing was predicated on three central tropes. It relied on “New South” boosterism to highlight a burgeoning Southern economy. It used capitalist realism and social tableau, contemporary advertising techniques that envision an unrealistically optimistic “reality” and focus on social roles rather than individuals. And it appealed to transnational discourses of the “global city,” using sports to convey an aestheticized, apolitical vision of “progress.”
“5 Minutes with Richmond, VA,” a promotional video released by Specialized Bikes in September 2015, serves as a case in point. It is a montage of scenes of cycling and recreation in Richmond, coupled with shots of local businesses and interviews with local entrepreneurs. “A city steeped in history, Richmond, Virginia is now one of the most vibrant, eclectic, and livable cities in the world,” the narrator tells us in the video’s opening moments, amidst beautiful overhead shots of the city, and a shot of the train station and the Capitol. Cutting between imagery of storefronts and bikers on cobblestone paths, the narrator calls Richmond the perfect host city for UCI while announcing the imminent arrival of the world’s best bikers.
“Richmond is progressing,” Tim Mullins, the owner of Carytown Bicycle Co., says.
“It’s a good link between the South and the North,” Tag Christof, the owner of Need Supply Co., a clothing store, says.
“We’re a great place to live, work, play, and also conduct business,” Wilson Flohr, the chair of the UCI planning committee, says, over shots of local storefronts and kayakers on the James River.
Lee Gregory, executive chef and co-owner of The Roosevelt, claims that the UCI Championships prove that Richmond is growing. Christof insists that they indicate that Richmond has ascended to the “world stage.”
The video concludes with Anousheh, a local musician, performing amidst an artsy, graffitied backdrop, while local business owners praise the city’s art scene. Monica Callahan, a member of the UCI planning committee, closes the video. “People are truly getting excited that Richmond has this chance to literally host the world,” she says over shots of cyclists disappearing into the sunset. “We’re really excited to see what it’s going to mean for the city. I think it’s going to mean a lot of great things.”
It’s a romantic account of the city, but not necessarily new, when placed in consideration with how Richmond has presented itself in the past centuries. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Richmond needed to reinvigorate its economy. It did so by calling itself an economic link between the North and the South, as well as a historical one, a site of the founding of the nation. At the same time, Richmond was also represented as a city of leisure, where visitors from across the nation were just as welcome to shop and relax by the James River as they were to invest or open a business. Richmond was a great place to “live, work, play, and also conduct business,” as UCI planning chairman Flohr says, even in the late nineteenth century. The city’s leaders effectively sidestepped stereotypes and stigmas placed on southern identity and instead presented Richmond as a city that was historical, but also “progressive and liberal,” an incipient metropolis.
And if Richmond’s leadership was attempting to cast aside northerners’ — and “outsiders” generally — preconceived notions in the late nineteenth century, it is doing the same today. When the New York Times featured Richmond in its travel section in 1987, it focused heavily on the city as a quaint historical town. Richmond was many things, but seemingly not progressive. Even in New York Times travel writer Lindsay Moran’s more recent piece, from 2007, the emphasis remains on the city as a sleepy southern town with deep historical roots. When Moran acknowledges a more progressive edge, she qualifies the statement by adding, “notwithstanding its ties and testimonies to Robert E. Lee and other heroes of a long-lost world.” Sectional divide and less-than-flattering assumptions about Richmond and the South abound. In this context, the city’s leadership was pushed once again to defy such assumptions and to represent Richmond differently, as a metropolis teeming with economic potential, ready to welcome visitors from across the globe.
The Richmond UCI campaign uses techniques indicative of what Michael Schudson calls “capitalist realism,” so as to highlight a city that is progressing and on the verge of becoming “global.” As Schudson explains, capitalist realism, a cornerstone of advertising campaigns, is so optimistic as to depict an alternate reality, peopled by vague characters who serve only to represent larger social categories.
All of these aspects are clearly applicable to the promotional video in question. Though most of the interviewees who appear in the video are named, seemingly contradicting Schudson’s assertion that ads rarely picture individuals, their social categories are more significant in the context of this advertisement. The owners of Carytown Bikes, for instance, serve only to talk about their role as business owners in a “business-friendly” city. Their message is supplemented by Wilson Flohr’s reminder that the city is a great place to conduct business. Similarly, local musician Anousheh is only introduced by name toward the video’s conclusion, when she begins to sing. She is labeled as “musician,” to introduce viewers to the artistic, “edgy” side of Richmond, thereby defying labels placed on a city normatively considered to be the “dull, conservative, rundown red-brick industrial town” of which Gehman wrote in 1987.
The video is also thoroughly optimistic and assumes there is progress. Mullins tells us directly that the city is progressing, and so does Christof, who says that the bike race is a “turning point” for Richmond. The capitalist realism of the ad reaffirms Richmond’s status. The argument can also be made that the video’s depiction of “reality” is, paradoxically, far from reality. It is reminiscent of “social tableau,” an advertising technique of which historian Roland Marchand writes, which employs “fantasy images of ‘a step up.’” Marchand’s analyses of these “social tableau” ads — romanticized “slices of life” that are stereotypical enough to be familiar to members of a mainstream audience — prove particularly applicable here.
An especially bold and contentious statement made in the video is that Richmond is “one of the most vibrant, eclectic, and livable cities in the world.” Certainly, numbers do not support such a claim. As the New York Times noted in October 2013, the city has an astronomical poverty rate, at least on a national scale. At the time of the publication of that story, the rate hovered around 26.3 percent, which was well above the national average (15.9 percent). But this information is noticeably absent in the Specialized Bikes video. The introduction that is provided to Richmond is not one that genuinely reflects the city and the experiences of its inhabitants, but rather one that reflects a higher slice of life that is available to only select Richmonders. It is capitalist realism so intent on being optimistic as to convey a deceptive and incomplete message.
The messages conveyed in the UCI marketing campaign appeal to notions of the “global city.” As Stephen Ward explains in Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, spectacle, of which sports are an exemplar, enables cities to be advertised as “The Next Great International City.” Certainly, this rhetoric of globalization is prevalent in the promotional video. City boosters use such rhetoric less to truly globalize than to denote newness, opportunity, and progress. In using such rhetoric, Richmond’s boosters were merely advertising the city as superficially, aesthetically “progressive.” The message of globalization, oddly enough, almost entirely disregards the global nature of the city’s population, ignoring foreign-born residents, who constitute 7.1 percent of Richmond’s population, as well as the 13,000 Latinos, none of whom are featured or even mentioned.
To make the argument that Richmond had ascended to the status of a “global city,” boosters looked past the city’s international roots and instead capitalized on the spectacle of sports. Since Los Angeles announced $200 million in profits from the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, cities have competed for the rights to host such major events, in the hopes of generating profits and encouraging economic development. Though the UCI championships were intended to be an economic boon to the city, the story for local business and restaurant owners is murky. Kevin Wilson, the owner of local restaurant Sticky Rice, complained that business had declined 20 to 25 percent during the championships and said there was a “ghost town” atmosphere. Rather than encouraging traffic and business, the races seemed to deter visitors and customers. While the Richmond 2015 campaign board announced that the event had a “$161 million impact” to the city, VCU economics professor Edward Millner concluded that UCI “was not a financial home run.”
The uncertain financial outcome for Richmond seems to be less the exception for host cities than the rule. City planners’ hopes of being “put on the map” by major sporting events are often misplaced and exaggerated. Cities often suffer losses on such major investments while social and economic problems, such as unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, are exacerbated. The dreams of great, profitable sporting events are frequently baseless, which, pushes boosters to exaggerate profits. Whether or not the city boosters’ financial projections have been exaggerated, the mixed results for Richmond constitute a setback for the boosters’ use of the superficial rhetoric of the “progressive” global city.
The definition of progressive, as posited by the ad and the city boosters, notably leaves out the wealth of progressive political movements in Richmond. There is no mention of the thriving community of activism surrounding social issues such as LGBTQ rights. There is no mention of the Black Lives Matter movement, which had been firmly entrenched at VCU since February 2015. The ad presents viewers with an aestheticized vision of progress, of edgy tattoos, graffiti, and independent musicians, but neglects the substantive political roots of progressivism.
In 2011, when Richmond was announced as the host city of the 2015 UCI Championships, city leaders and boosters worked to create a sense of optimism and excitement in the city. Marketing for Richmond and the bike races, including the Specialized Bikes video, was predicated on centuries-old notions of a “New South,” using advertising techniques to propagate images of Richmond as a progressive “global city.” A pattern is evident: To attract tourists, the city’s leadership has represented Richmond in a way that neglects certain populations, such as the poor, immigrants, and non-English speakers, as well as politically progressive communities. Powerful city boosters have neglected experiences, political opinions, and movements they consider less desirable, disenfranchising those communities by depriving them of the right to have a say in Richmond’s self-representations. In the process, they’ve set the city on a course toward an uncertain future.
Further reading
Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Andrew S. Zimbalist, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. Washington: Brookings Institution, 2015.