"My Houston" shows another way for city marketing

Bell Clement, former director of the Historical Society, and I have talked over the years about what she calls the historical perspective, that I refer to as the mosaic of history, about history as linear in terms of time, but created out of multitudes of people and experiences and perspectives.

Public history, narratives, oral history, ethnography and so forth are disciplines that acknowledge and record multiple perspectives.

"My Houston," the campaign from the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau (see "No Need to Apologize: City Tries a Little Boasting," from the New York Times, "features celebrities extolling aspects of their native or adopted city."

I like it.

It would have been a better direction for the new Destination DC campaign, which instead, is "Create Your Own Power Trip," focusing on the monuments, halls of power--shades of "West Wing," etc. It's not terrible, there are sub-campaigns called: Seat of Power; Power Play; Fire Power; and Soul Power; but I'm not sure yet...

At the APA conference in DC in 2004, I saw a great presentation about the San Francisco industrial areas. They started the presentation with videos from various movies and television shows about San Francisco, and countered about the area they were discussing "The San Francisco you don't see."

I have thought a lot about that in terms of DC ever since, neighborhoods like Ivy City vs. television shows like West Wing, or the movie Suspect with Cher, which included a scene shot in the old REA building (800 2nd Street NE) before it was renovated, or even In the Line of Fire, which included the exterior of 402 H Street NE.

The idea of My Washington or My DC, using real people, not just celebrities, telling their stories, encompassing both the national-federal experience as well as the local story, would have been a much stronger, more embracive campaign better able to bridge the seeming divide between the national and the local (hi)story, and leverage the tourism and destination development possibilities in ways that more directly benefit local communities*.

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* One way is by better harvesting local tourism tax revenue streams (i.e., restaurant, hotel, and car rental taxes) to also support "local" cultural resources assets, ranging from venues like the Lincoln Theatre to the development of neighborhood commercial district wayfinding systems and shopping guides, to the support of farmers and public markets in the city. (See " are funded and managed. (See "Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" for an old memo I wrote about this.)