Mr Merulla and others at Council,
Your stated interest in renaming all public spaces after corporate donors is troubling for several reasons. The most obvious is that such a move signals a dangerous encroachment of corporate advertising into the space in which the identity and politics of both the city and its residents operate. The politics of branding are not benign, and do not simply invovolve changing names. Corporate branding involves the theft of the histories and identities which constitute a given area, as local stories and historical figures are painted over in favour of the corporate image. Corporate branding signals the erasure of history and local specificity in favour of a universal and timeless corporate-sponsored immediacy or “now-ness” which serves to remind people who use that public space that the corporation in question has the solutions they need for the problems of the “now”: if thirsty, Coke is available in every store; if hungry, McDonald’s is always open; WalMart provides the important experience of “playing in the park with one’s children” just as it provides low prices for the consumer goods necessary for participation in modern disposable consumer society. Presently, we name public spaces after important political, historical, or cultural figures, or we use the long-standing tradition of placenames mirroring natural elements of that place: Churchill Park in Westdale, Confederation Park in the north east, Gage Park in the city’s centre. The people and events chosen as namesakes have contributed to building the community, and the history of a place is folded neatly within its name. In other words, we use the naming of public spaces to mark our history but more importantly to mark the values and dreams we have for our communities: peace, freedom, the rule of law and the granting of rights to all people, and the intellectual tradition of cultural development.
Corporate branding is a quick infusion of cash, and for municipalities increasingly under fiscal pressure from provincial downloading of social services, that cash infusion may indeed represent the importance of corporate money for the process of community building. However, that reality of desperation and dependency does not account for the history of North American economic development or the new trend in corporate branding of public spaces, which began during the last major recession of the early 1990s. Why is corporate branding happening now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and not at the beginning of the twentieth, when most of the public spaces with which we presently live were mandated and named? When the economic development of the twentieth century brought middle-class wealth to tens of millions of people and the economic output of nearly all North American communities flourished, we named public spaces in the public interest. Now that such economic activity within communities is in decline (due to globalisation, multinational corporations and investors not tied to specific regions or communities, resource decline, etc.) and has been threatened with recession and depression, municipalities struggling to find funding for public spaces are increasingly turning to corporate naming rights of public spaces. Instead of allowing corporations to insert their will into every aspect of human life, we should be asking questions such as why does the corporate world have the money to pay for “community”, while the community , whose members were ostensibly the recipients of that economic activity, does not, and furthermore, what is the point of using corporations to build community wealth if that wealth is to be used for corporate gain?
While the distribution of wealth in a just socisety is somewhat of a large and complicated topic for municipal councillors to handle, the smaller issue of naming rights is one which should not be entered into lightly by the City. In allowing corporations to name (and in fact to own, in real terms) public spaces, the city hands over political and civic authority to corporate interests. One example: let’s say that a park in the north east of the city is renamed “Home Depot Park”. Now, if that park were mostly used by individuals whom the corporation deems to be undesirable to its corporate image (vagrants and the mentally ill, poor people, etc.), it seems reasonable to assume that the Home Depot Corporation would pressure the city to remove those individuals from the public space which bears its name. Similarly, if a politically controversial organization (such as those which promote religious and sexual equality) were to schedule an activity for a corporate-branded area, it seems naive to assume that such events would not face resistance from the corporate entities whose name adorns the space in which the event is to occur. Corporations do not pay for community spaces out of the goodness of their hearts or out of any sense of compassion or commitment to a community or cause. They pay for naming rights in public spaces because they have calculated economic benefits which serve their own interests, and it seems obvious to most people that when faced with threats of withholding future money, city councillors will do whatever it takes to keep happy the corporations who have paid to name public spaces.
Please consider your decision in this matter wisely. If Merulla’s intentions are taken up by council, it is likely that grassroots organizations in this city will work incessantly to un-name the public corporate spaces, legally or otherwise.
