3. La innovación social
3.3. El futuro del turismo en clave de innovación social
Upon examining stories that have been produced locally over the years, it became evident that a positive collective story emerged as a reaction to the long-established and continually reinforced negative and reductive story of Bradford.
a – Tourism
Over the years, the council’s tourism campaigns have been one of the most systematic and sustained initiatives which has created and promoted a positive collective story of Bradford. With the decline in manufacturing in the 1970s,
promoting Bradford as a tourist destination was first seen as a regeneration project.
In the early 1980s, the council launched its “Bradford. A Surprising place” campaign and started offering themed short breaks to the city (e.g. “In the Footsteps of the Brontës;” “Industrial Heritage;” and later “Flavours of India” (See Russell, 2003).), for which it won a number of tourism awards in the early 1980s. Beyond regeneration, the idea was also to promote the city as a place of culture and heritage to counter the widespread image associated with the North of England of grim and industrial cities (Trueman et al., 2004) and to celebrate the cultural richness brought by the diverse communities who lived in the city.
The next council-led campaign, “Bradford Bouncing Back,” was especially commissioned to tackle the “image crisis” of Bradford in the 1980s, as recalled by Tom Clinton who headed up the campaign. In an interview for the local radio (Archer, 2011), he explains that the campaign came on the back of the fire at Bradford City Football Club and the debate around Ray Honeyford’s remarks. He assesses the situation as follows:
I think Bradford... At the time we did Bradford Bouncing Back it was an image problem. At the time I set up this campaign and got it organised, there were people who were ashamed to say they were from Bradford. There were more criticisms of the campaign in the T&A when it launched than anybody saying ‘yeah go for it.’
[...] That image is all over the UK. Bradford had this connotation, of the most negative things in many, many ways.
For the council, Bradford needed a different image and this new image would come from the locality but it would be addressed to both a local and national audience.
The campaign was launched in 1986 in an attempt to both regenerate the economy of the District and produce a different story of Bradford. The emphasis was again on culture and heritage, and a bear was chosen as the symbol of the campaign, specifically because it had nothing to do with Bradford (Archer, 2011), implying an attempt at breaking away from the old stereotypes of the city. But the campaign was put to an end in 1988 due to funding cuts. It was followed by a range of other
initiatives in the 1990s, including “Shout for Bradford” and “Bradford Breakthrough,” which was backed by the Chamber of Commerce (Greenhalf, 2003).
They were all trying to deal with the negative image of the city and to attract investment to the city. It is difficult to judge how successful they were in terms of changing people’s attitude towards Bradford. Despite facing much cynicism, Bradford Bouncing Back was deemed to have had a positive impact on the city and it was estimated that it generated over £1 million worth of publicity having spent
£142.000 (Clinton, 1991). In terms of stories, they contributed to limiting the negative press about Bradford. For example,
During the ‘Bouncing back’ programme, the National Bus Company was persuaded to drop an item in a brochure that read
‘from the surrounding hills one can look out over the rooftops of hundreds of Victorian slum dwellings’, and a leading charity to remove the caption ‘Bradford, 10thMarch 1985’ from a full page newspaper poster highlighting child poverty via a haunting picture of chronically deprived two year old. (Russell, 2003: 55)
There were certainly some “victories” in terms of promoting the rich industrial past of the city, with the classification of Saltaire as a World Heritage Site in 2001 and the cultural heritage of the area, with Brontë-related tourism being particularly successful (Russell, 2003). Such a systematic approach allowed the council to contribute to articulating a positive collective story of Bradford centred on the city’s rich industrial heritage and cultural landscape. However, how far-reaching the positive counter-story has been is uncertain.
b –Dispelling myths and creating alternative stories
Along with the sustained effort from the council to put together a tourism strategy to attract investment and change the image of the city, there have been a number of disparate efforts, or specific campaigns and work which can be seen as a reaction to the national negative story and/or the articulation of a more complex story than the reductive dominant story, whether consciously or unconsciously. Here, I look at
a range of cases relating to different domains: community work; arts and culture;
and business.
A first example of an alternative story being created in terms of community relations, and with a local audience in mind, is paradoxically linked to the 1995 riots. Researcher Kirsten Sparre (1998) argues that contrary to the expected position taken in the press in relation notably to news values, the Telegraph and Argus can be seen to have contributed to a peacemaking effort through its coverage of the events of June 1995, and then, I argue, to the production of a different story about Bradfordians. Amidst the national and regional coverage focused on the “simple formula of police against youths,” (12) Sparre argues that the Telegraph and Argus took the view of calling for peace through its headlines rather than subjectively fuel the conflict with polarising articles (Sparre, 1998). In particular, there was a conscious effort from the editor to “avoid reporting in a manner that could set White people and people of Asian-heritage against one another.” (1998: 13) In addition, rather than repeating and disseminating a narrative similar to the regional and national newspapers of devastation in the city and loss of trade, the Telegraph and Argus developed a story of “overcoming the riots.” (16) This meant that locally, an alternative story emerged – one of a city pulling through despite the damaging events, which was different to the doom-laden story as told in the national newspapers.
A second example in the domain of community relations can be found in the body of work produced by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). Since 2004, it has pledged millions of pounds to development work in Bradford to improve communities across the District (JRF, n.d.). From the onset, the JRF has not had the improvement of Bradford’s story in its objectives, nor the intention to counter the dominant narratives. Rather, the Foundation’s work tends to be more concerned with understanding and dealing with material factors linked with poverty. However, I argue that a by-product of their work has been the creation, conscious or not, of a more complex story of Bradford than the one found in the pre-existing dominant
narratives. With the projects they carried out in the District, they state they have had a range of outcomes, two of which particularly interest me. First they have
“highlighted the common hopes and experiences of people with different ethnicities, religions and cultures living in Bradford.” And second, they have
“showcased the voices of people who are not usually heard, including Muslim women, young Muslim men, people from different backgrounds living on traditionally white working class estates.”(JRF, n.d.) I suggest that in the process of reaching those outcomes, the JRF has contributed to putting forward an alternative narrative to the dominant story, especially because it has surfaced stories of hope and stories of groups that tend to escape the public and academic gaze. I will illustrate this point through looking at some of the films they have produced over the nine years they have been involved in Bradford. First, I consider the “Women working towards excellence: OurLives” project, which “used digital media to explore the views and experiences of Muslim women in Bradford.” (JRF, 2009) A series of films came out of this (as well as a book and a website), which explore the women’s identities, work, education relationship and seeks out their experiences and opinions. Through the project, the women had a space to express themselves and talk about what is meaningful to them. Bearing in mind the context of the filmed interviews they took part in which was necessarily influenced by the agenda of the JRF project, subjects such as families, work, faith, connection to Britain and media representation appeared to be relevant to them. In particular, the women expressed a deep attachment to Bradford despite its challenges (JRF, 2009). In terms of a local story of Bradford, the films put forward the voices of a group seldom heard both locally and nationally – Muslim women. In particular, they are represented as articulate, educated, entrepreneurial and successful women, a portrayal that does not match the stereotypical media representation of Muslim women as weak, stay-at-home, and under the control of the men in the family.
Although in the films, the women do not talk about Bradford itself, the films still contribute to developing a different story of the city – one in which women have a part to play. Another JRF film worked on the same premises, collecting this time Muslim men’s voices (2009). In the film, a handful of Bradfordian Muslim men are
interviewed and discuss their (Muslim) identity, hopes and concerns, but discuss life in Bradford much more than what was shown in the film about the women’s voices.
Their testimonies reflect a strong connection to the city, as a home that cannot be replaced, as a place that has given them opportunities, a safe place to bring up children. One of the interviewees tells us that “There’s a lot of positive things in Bradford. I believe that Bradford truly is a model for a lot of places to look at and see how communities live here, and how communities get on here, and how communities interact here. I’m proud to say I am from Bradford and that is my home.” (2009) The idea of Bradford as a model of success is particularly interesting as both in the culturally dominant story and in the academic tales, the city is associated with and studied for its problems. Although there is mention of “Paki-bashing,” and “gang culture,” the overall story told by the men is a positive one, with narratives of Bradford as a home and a land of opportunity that are otherwise seldom heard. Although there are other films produced by the JRF, I will look here at just one more, Voices from Holmewood. It is particularly interesting because it presents the views of the residents on a local estate as they are asked about the ethnic changes in the area, generational differences, feeling connected and the future. There, the residents seem to negotiate both the difficult realities of life on the estate (people not mixing, youth gangs, fear of crime) with its more positive sides (with a range of neighbourliness anecdotes for example and for some a new-found feeling of safety), which reminds us of the complexities of life in the urban space, beyond the negative and reductive storyline. Overall, these three films are important in creating a local story of Bradford as they showcase the voices of a range of communities that are not often heard in the popular and academic discourses.
In the domain of the arts and culture, I analysed a half-hour long Bradford-made documentary entitled Neighbourhood noise (2010) available online about the Bradford music scene. It is interesting in two respects. First, it tells the story of Bradford’s association with music, which does not resonate with the dominant storyline. In the artists’ opinion, Bradford has a small but vibrant music scene. As it
is small, they explain there is a “community spirit” within it, with a support network between the different acts. Although it may not be famous in the mainstream music industry, they talk of a particular venue28 in Bradford and describe it as nationally famous, even an iconic place, for punk music in the UK. Through their testimonies, the artists establish that there is a tradition of music making in Bradford, and they seem to identify with a certain Bradford music heritage. Second, the artists interviewed appear to negotiate the reductive and negative story of Bradford through showing awareness of it and countering it, notably through their art.
Although they generally recognise that the city is facing some very real social challenges, which provides them with material for their work, they are also very critical of outsiders claiming they know the city. For example, an interviewee explains: “Bradford certainly suffers from awful stereotypes, maybe not the music scene but certainly the white community, led by its constant name-dropping by people like Nick Griffin, which really fucks me off, whenever he says ‘just go over to Bradford, ask the people there’. We are the people of Bradford, and I think we’d all tell him to go fuck himself.” As a response, they are keen to denounce this attitude and share the view that Bradford is a “positive place where people get along,” as in the lyrics of the song “Stay” by the band La La and the Boo Ya interviewed for the documentary:
It’s a beautiful place It’s a beautiful place So don’t believe That it’s a shit hole It know it’s hard
When a nation thinks so What do they know?
They don’t know owt...
28They refer to the 1in12, an anarchist club which functions as a social centre and a music venue.
In the business domain, I look at the Positive Bradford initiative, which started in 2011 and has been working to showcase the city’s positive attributes mainly in terms of business, but also of community life, for the past three years with a yearly celebration called “Positive Bradford Day.” This social enterprise started with a group of Bradford businesses who reacted to a direct experience and “physical”
materialisation of the negative and reductive dominant story of the city. In 2011, they wrote to the Social Enterprise Support Centre:29
Positive Bradford came about when a group of business people who were giving their time for free at a Dragons Den type event were greeted on the morning of this event by a news item on GMTV. They stated that Bradford was one of the worst cities to visit based on a Travel Lodge report.
Sick of being constantly pulled to pieces in the media, these individuals decided to do something to make a difference and kick back!
A steering group was formed in June 2010 with people from all sectors invited to help firstly change the perception of the people of Bradford and to start looking at highlighting all the positive aspects of Bradford versus the negatives. (Vincent and Kader, 2010)
In their letter, it is clear how they intend to construct a counter-story to the negative dominant narrative. Their first initiative was to organise a “Positive Bradford Day” in September 2011 at which Bradford businesses would be represented and the city celebrated through dance, music and “positive messages from Bradford people [...] shown on the big screen in Centenary Square.” (Vincent and Kader, 2010) The day was a success with around 8,000 people attending (The Bradfordian, 2013) and has been attracting more people every year. In terms of the story the Positive Bradford initiative has been creating since its inception, it is interesting to look at the language on its website. On the first page, we read
29A Leeds-based “organisation delivering support services to the social enterprise sector.”
(www.sesc.org.uk)
Positive Bradford are a coalition of people involved with the business, arts, community and education sectors across the district. We think it’s time to stand up and speak up for the Bradford we love. We were born here, grew up here, or chose to make Bradford our home. (Positive Bradford, n.d.)
This view challenges several of the stereotypes that can be found in the reductive dominant narrative. First of all, the idea that Bradford is place that is “loved” is unusual. In the dominant story, it is a place to be left, and as Clinton noted, that its inhabitants tend to be ashamed of. Rather, here, there is a sense of pride in the city that is striking, and also an implicit claim that contrary to common sense, Bradford attracts people and others in the country have made a conscious choice to settle there. The “About” page is telling too. It is divided into four categories: arts and culture; business; community; and education. The first sentence of the business section reads: “Bradford has a history as a city of opportunity.” Again, in terms of Bradford’s economic history, that is not the angle generally chosen to describe Bradford. Rather than focusing on the aspect of “wealth” of the city in the nineteenth century, the Positive Bradford website goes beyond that and writes of the innovation that took place in the city, using positive language to describe the city’s economy. In addition, although it mentions the disappearance of the wool industry (it is worth noting the neutral language that is chosen to describe it:
“Although the wool industry is no longer the city’s economic engine”), it also claims that the city “remains a district characterised by a spirit of opportunity and entrepreneurial innovation.” In the community section, it includes a statistic seldom used to describe Bradford: “a 2010 survey conducted by Lloyds TSB insurance ranked Bradford as the city with the most neighbourly values in the UK.” Others characterise Bradford as a “crap town” (Okolesie, 2013) but Positive Bradford challenges this view by constructing its own story of the city and mobilisation using positive language to talk about the city.