“Placing” Space: Exploring the Sociospatial Impacts of Cosmopolitan Place-Marketing Approaches on British Migrants in Spain

Introduction

From the mid-1990s onward across the social sciences, narratives of the “network society” and “knowledge economy,” attempted to describe the significant socioeconomic shifts that the contemporary restructuring of global capital had precipitated (Castells, 1996a; Drucker, 1993). A key feature in the understanding of this shift toward a networked, knowledge-based economy was a renewed emphasis given to cities, positioned as the interconnected loci that global capital flowed between (Castells, 1996b, 2000). As urban centers have attempted to reposition themselves in response to this economic restructuring, they have been forced into increasing competition with one another and as a result, “place-marketing” has become central to both national and regional strategies of urban regeneration and tourism development (Bærenholdt & Haldrup, 2006; Frey, 2009; Richards, 2014).

As place-marketing strategies developed, they soon became amalgamated with ideas of cosmopolitanism—a concept that was also undergoing a resurgence across the social sciences—becoming an idea at the front and center of place-marketing discourses (Maitland, 2007). Initially this was concentrated around an understanding of the cosmopolite as an elite “citizen of the world,” able to move across and between borders freely, unconstrained by structurally prescribed, normatively territorialized identities like nationality or social class (Dixon, 2015; Breckenridge, 2002; Hannerz, 1990; Nussbaum, 1994; Vertovec & Cohen, 2002). In a sense then, the elite cosmopolite offered an archetype and the cosmopolitan places that they moved both within and between, operated in this formula as contingent places that could enable opportunities for exactly the kinds of new and distinct relations between the social and the spatial that the cosmopolite supposedly desired.

As these concepts have evolved within academia and the results of the practical implementation of such ideas within public policy strategies have begun to be identified, critiques and counter critiques have emerged. In particular, it has been forcefully argued that this approach to urban development often emphasizes property-based regeneration, which ultimately ends up becoming a process of gentrification through its concentration in particular parts of a city (usually the centers), to the direct exclusion of others (Atkinson & Easthope, 2009; Vanolo, 2008). This in turn, can create exactly the kinds of social marginalization that such policies had originally set out to resolve (Atkinson & Easthope, 2009; Vanolo, 2008).

On a broader scale, as ideas of cosmopolitanism have become embedded within place-marketing narratives across the world, in a very real sense, this has simultaneously meant losing the very distinction they had set out to create (Richards, 2014). The adoption of the same strategies of (especially tourism) development, threatens to create homogenous “nonplaces” in the process (Abbas, 2000; Augé, 1995). In addition, cosmopolitanism itself has been increasingly challenged, as academics have sought to complicate the concept’s elitist underpinnings, through the explication of examples of “vernacular,” “subaltern,” “already-existing” cosmopolitanisms instead (see Kothari, 2008; Nava, 2002; Werbner, 1999). Yet despite this, there is still little research that has focused on “mapping the process of becoming” cosmopolitan and less still, in relation to the very specific construction of the relationship between space, place, culture, and identity that this process relies on (Kothari, 2008, p. 512; see also Dixon, 2015).

It is to these points that the article speaks, adding to the understanding of both cosmopolitanism and the material impacts of its use within creativity-based place-marketing discourses, through exploring the firsthand experiences of elite British migrants living in the affluent coastal tourist town of Sitges, in Spain. To do so, British migrants’ experiences are investigated through literature that has focused on cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 1998; Kothari, 2008; Nava, 2002; Werbner, 1999), alongside that which has sought to complicate the way that both space and places are theorized, through a particular emphasis on relationality (Lefebvre, 1991; Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003; Massey, 2005). This allows two key questions to be posed; first, it asks what affect cosmopolitan place-marketing discourses can have on people’s everyday lived experiences and second, it considers how such impacts might in turn, provide an insight into the theorization of spatiality that underpins those discourses, and which has to-date, been somewhat overlooked.

The Context of Research

Sitges is one of the most popular tourist resorts on the northeastern coast of Spain, in the region known as the Costa Dorada. Around 30 kilometers South of Barcelona, Sitges is renowned for being an affluent town that has maintained a sense of artistic and cultural tradition, and having thereby avoided the kinds of mass-market tourist development common in other parts of Spain (Boone, 2007). It has been able to do so, by both drawing explicitly on its proximity to Barcelona, a city having undergone its own “cosmopolitan” renaissance and by emphasizing its heritage, through its position as a key location within the 19th-century Catalan Modernism movement (Binkhorst, 2007; Boone, 2007). During this time, Sitges attracted a large contingent of famous artists ranging from Lorca and Santiago Rusiñol to G.K. Chesterton and Salvador Dali. Their presence there during this period is seen to have created a legacy of “authentic” bohemianism, which lies at the heart of Sitges’ contemporary cosmopolitan place-marketing discourse (Binkhorst, 2007, p. 132; Boone, 2007, p. 176). It is a discourse that is enhanced further, by the fact that out of the approximately 28,000 people who live there, almost 21% are made up of migrants who have moved to Sitges from other countries, making the overall population markedly diverse in terms of nationality (IDESCAT, 2019). Within this group of migrants, there are around 700 British people among whom over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken, on which this article is based.

The fieldwork included participation in a wide variety of aspects of British migrants’ lives including informal socialization in bars, restaurants, and cafes, joining social activities such as tennis, poker, and sailing, and attending the town’s many cultural events. It also included slightly more formal participation, such as working in a bar during the town’s first ever Gay Pride event, and helping backstage at a multilingual pantomime. This participant observation was recorded in extensive daily field-notes and supplemented by just over 100 unstructured interviews with Brits met individually and those I was introduced to via word-of-mouth. In the course of the year, I had some form of contact with approximately 200 British people out of whom all, apart from one family (who described themselves as “British–Asian”), were White British. As these demographic statistics suggest, Sitges is an extremely popular destination for migrants from a wide range of countries across the world and particularly for Brits, who represent the largest national contingent within the migrant population in the town (IDESCAT, 2019). There is little doubt that the town’s cosmopolitan reputation plays a key role in its enduring popularity, and it is a vital part of the way that Sitges is marketed, as the following holiday websites demonstrate:

Sitges has been, for many years, one of the most exciting and dynamic towns on the Mediterranean coast. Because of its cosmopolitan character, its extraordinary leisure, dining and cultural offer and its lively night life, Sitges has become one of the most popular destinations on the Catalan coast. Sitges is 35 km South of Barcelona with excellent access either by rail or road. (BlauSitges, 2019)

A former fishing village, its geographical situation—35 km (22 miles) from Barcelona . . . and its natural beauty make Sitges a wonderful spot to enjoy a vacation by the sea. . . . Cosy, cosmopolitan and with an open-minded population, Sitges is an idyllic town for visitors . . . (Sitges-Rentals, 2019)

But the positioning of cosmopolitanism as a key aspect of Sitges’ locational identity is one that has also been explicitly and highly successfully constructed publicly, not least through the efforts of the town’s local council, as Sitges’ tourist office website explains

Sitges has always been a place which has enchanted artists, tourists and visitors from all over the world . . . it is a cosmopolitan town which (sic) has attracted residents from more than 70 nations . . . Sitges is easy to access in all aspects, since it is just 35km south of Barcelona, to which it is connected by excellent road . . . and railway links. (Sitgestur, 2019)

As the above examples highlight, cosmopolitanism within Sitges’ place-marketing, both private and public, draws on the same themes referred to above—its enduring tradition, its artistic/cultural heritage and notably, its proximity to Barcelona. The recognizable shift toward marketing urban locations through the explicit integration of ideas of “cosmopolitanism” has become particularly important to places like Barcelona, those not previously recognized as being centers of international trade and globalized finance (Binnie, Holloway, Millington, & Young, 2006, p. 3; Russo & Scarnato, 2018; Shaw, 2007). Key to their success was creating a perception of being cities in which diversity prospered. Staking a claim of cosmopolitanism has as a result, become a shorthand way to represent a place as being one in which tolerance toward ethnic and cultural difference is explicitly fostered, in order to attract “‘global talent,’ financial capital and tourism” (Glick Schiller, Darieva, & Gruner-Domic, 2011, p. 402; see also Binnie et al., 2006, p. 28; Rushbrook, 2002, p. 183; Szerszynski & Urry, 2002; Young, Diep, & Drabble, 2006, p. 1687).

This created an expectation that the ideal–typical cosmopolites would openly desire to experience “difference,” would want to live among (but crucially within this formula not explicitly constitute) ethnic and cultural diversity. This was itself underpinned by a sense of reciprocity, so that the cosmopolitan “ability to adapt, to be open to innovation and novelty operated not only at the level of . . . relating-individuals, but subsequently therefore, at the level of (socio)economic production too” (Dixon, 2015; see also Binnie et al., 2006, p. 2). Competition between cities became fought on the basis of which location could promote itself as best able to facilitate “exciting encounters with difference” that such cosmopolites supposedly actively sought (Binnie et al., 2006, p. 3, 24; Young et al., 2006, p. 1687, 1689). The idea of the “cosmopolitan city” has subsequently entered mainstream parlance, as cosmopolitanism itself has become both a mode and a means of identity-based consumption (Beck, 2004, p. 150).

Yet as cosmopolitanism has become embedded within place-marketing discourses, the concept of cosmopolitanism itself has been increasingly challenged, become filled with distinct “nuances and meanings” (Harvey, 2000, p. 529). Broadly speaking, these discussions have tended to fall into two camps; those who see cosmopolitanism as an intellectual pursuit and/or an “aesthetic way of being” (Hannerz, 1990, p. 239; see also Beck, 2004; Vertovec & Cohen, 2002), and those who argue instead that this articulation of cosmopolitanism is an elitist concept, one that is both Eurocentric and androcentric, as well as being underpinned by specific understandings of social class, which obscure what have been defined as “vernacula,” “subaltern,” or already-existing “cosmopolitanisms” (see Appiah, 1998; Kothari, 2008; Nava, 2002; Werbner, 1999, p. 497). ¹

The latter authors, those who have sought to challenge the idea of cosmopolitanism as the (inherently privileged) individual’s ability (and desire) to negotiate cultural difference, have done so in two main ways. First, it has been argued that elitist articulations of cosmopolitanism contain assumptions about who has “the potential to be cosmopolitan and the characteristics that constitute a cosmopolitan sensibility” (Kothari, 2008, p. 500; see also Binnie et al., 2006). They rely, in other words, on markers of difference, “both for those that embody them and those who are marked as different” (Binnie et al., 2006, p. 6), which are rooted in the construction of an opposition between (cosmopolitan) “self” and (noncosmopolitan) “other” that reproduces hierarchical relationships between “First” and “Third” world/colonizer and colonized (Kothari, 2008, p. 502). Second, it has been suggested that cosmopolitanism is more than a “perspective, a state of mind or . . . a mode of managing meaning” (Hannerz, 1990, p. 238), but is often equally also “pragmatic, strategic” and driven by “daily necessity” (Kothari, 2008, p. 512; see also Pécoud, 2004, p. 14).

These are of course, vital interventions that have helped highlight some of the complexities involved in the way that the concept has been used both within and outside of academia. Yet the growing recognition of these two points has meant that pragmatic or practice-based cosmopolitanism has subsequently been overwhelmingly explored in relation to the perspective of people described as inhabiting subaltern positions already, those defined as “vulnerable individuals and groups struggling to make a living in an environment characterised by discrimination and insecurity” (Kothari, 2008, p. 502). In some senses this ultimately reinforces the very distinction that it sets out to challenge, not least because it implies through contradistinction that elitist cosmopolitanism, based on openness toward difference and/or aesthetic ways of being embodied in the “Western educated traveler” exists, ipso facto. Yet this tells us little about “the kinds of agency required, and the sorts of spaces and activities that can nurture the development of a cosmopolitan identity” generally, and less in relation to that elite conceptualization more specifically (Kothari, 2008, p. 512).

This was one of the key points that I aimed to explore when beginning my research in Sitges, that is, what exactly did “elite” cosmopolitanism look like in practice? How did it play out among people who had moved countries to enable them to perform a particular way of living, one that specifically sought to highlight their practical negotiation of cultural difference and to incorporate it into their everyday lives more fully? In fact, British migrants found it almost impossible to do so successfully and as outlined below, they were unsuccessful despite having been drawn to Sitges on the basis of cosmopolitan place-marketing discourses that promised otherwise. In fact, their attempts to live what they understood to be cosmopolitan lifestyles ultimately resulted in the opposite and instead as will be shown below, they became seen to represent the very stereotypes of British people living abroad, that they simultaneously held in such disdain.

“It’s Not Benidorm!”—Cosmopolitanism, Stereotypes, and “Brits Abroad”

It is perhaps unsurprising in light of Sitges’ place-marketing narrative described above, that cosmopolitanism and the specific “lifestyle” this suggested, was key to British migrants perspectives of the town:

What I like about Sitges is the culture. Here they try really hard to pass on their traditions and their culture, it’s part of their identity. . . . You get people from all over, it’s very cosmopolitan like that, I think, very mixed. It’s not somewhere like, I don’t know, like Benidorm or wherever, it’s definitely not like that. (Susan, teacher)

Sitges has always been a place where the rich and famous of Barcelona have come to spend their summers and weekends, it’s why there aren’t any big hotels . . . the rich Barcelona people aren’t going to allow it to happen, they won’t let anyone invade! Sitges hasn’t been allowed to become somewhere like Benidorm. (Isabelle, housewife)

As both Susan and Isabelle suggested, cosmopolitanism was clearly a key aspect of Sitges’ locational identity, one that both defined and enabled the kind of culture-filled “lifestyle” that British migrants living there sought. But as the quotes above also highlight, for British migrants it was also an undeniably elitist, class-inflected understanding of the term. One of the key tropes through which Brits articulated the cosmopolitanism of Sitges and through it, of themselves, was to define the town in direct opposition to heavily stereotyped discourses and conceptualizations of “Benidorm.” Among the people with whom I worked, Benidorm and the Brits who would choose live there were used to evoke defiantly noncosmopolitan people, living in a distinctly noncosmopolitan place:

Sitges hasn’t been allowed to become somewhere like Benidorm. You just don’t get the same kind of people here, the kind of lower class people who drink lots and eat bacon and eggs and spend a fortune on Heinz beans! They go there and just go for the sun and to, you know, have a good time. They don’t want to learn about the culture, they’re not that type, not like here. All of the people who live here are open to learning about new cultures, to meeting new people, accepting different people. It’s a real melting pot, all types of people live here, it’s very cosmopolitan. (Helena, independently wealthy)

This specific conceptualization of “Benidorm” was as Helena remarked, explicitly classist—Benidorm was for the “lower class” who sought out warm weather and a “good time” (O’Reilly, 2000, p. 21; see also Oliver & O’Reilly, 2010). This understanding is one that was intrinsic both to the way that participants described Sitges and subsequently, to who they saw themselves as being. As Geoff, a small-business owner, put it:

In places like Benidorm, people retire into the sun. They’ve maybe had a holiday there for years, they move there, they don’t want the locals at all, they’ve totally taken over. They say things like, “If it wasn’t for the sun, you wouldn’t even know that you were abroad!” like that’s a benefit! It doesn’t happen here and I think it’s because we’re a different type of person in Sitges, the type who wants to enjoy Spain and the Spanish, and Catalan culture. I wouldn’t dream of living in Benidorm!

As the quotes above suggest, Brits in Sitges defined their identities in contradistinction to a group of people imagined through the classic stereotype of “Brits abroad” (Haynes & Jones, 2012). “Brits abroad” are defined, in a Bourdeusian sense, as being the opposite of cosmopolitan through their refusal to learn Spanish, their adherence to stereotypical British food and by choosing instead to live alcohol-fuelled, life-long holidays that taken together, signify a complete rejection of integration (O’Reilly, 2000, p. 21; see also Oliver & O’Reilly, 2010). Intent instead on recreating a “little England in the sun,” they are deemed “not to have learnt the language and the lessons of multiculturalism,” encoded here as evidence of bearing a “colonial mentality” (O’Reilly, 2000, p. 21). Brits in Benidorm are seen as being “other” to those who have migrated to Sitges, simply by virtue of the fact that they are living in (or would choose to visit) Benidorm in the first place.

As Helena suggested, moving to Sitges is instead an intellectual pursuit, including “learning about culture,” rather than having a—“lower class” version of—a good time. This was at least partly because the historically contingent emergence of the individualized individual (Guignon, 2007; Taylor, 1994, p. 77) within this cosmopolitan discourse overemphasized the self as disembedded from sociality when ultimately, fully embodying a cosmopolitan identity relied on it being validated in and through interactions with other people. As Geoff suggested, the key for Brits in Sitges was (ideally at least) the formation of social relations with locals via the medium of the Spanish language, to externalize and make legible an authentic, “non-Brits abroad,” cosmopolitan self. And yet despite these narratives, the vast majority of participants found that no matter how hard they tried, the formation of social relations with local Sitgetans, remained frustratingly difficult. This was exemplified not only through the difficulty British migrants had in socializing with local people at all, but perhaps most obviously made clear, through the consistent refusal of locals to talk to British people in anything other than English:

I think that the people who come here are the types who want to integrate, but it’s that much harder. It’s the language, it’s not just Spanish is it? There’s the Catalan too. But it can be really hard to find people you can talk Spanish with, they just won’t do it if they think you’re a Brit. I had Colombians working for me in the UK and so when I was at work, I spoke Spanish everyday. It’s weird but my level of Spanish was probably higher then, or at least the same as it is now! I think that people see themselves coming to Sitges and sitting on the terrace drinking sangria with Pedro and Juan and it just doesn’t happen. They end up eventually being just like they would in Benidorm . . . (Luke, graphic designer)

I feel left out, you know? I’m walking the dog back home and I’m not necessarily with people I know, but I still feel part of it. Here I just can’t connect, even though my Spanish is good and I’m learning Catalan. It is actually hard to even get people here to speak Spanish to me, they seem to spot immediately that I speak English and then, I go to the bakery or somewhere and I try to have a conversation, I make one mistake and that’s it! After 8 years, I’m still not accepted! (Jilly, housewife)

As Luke and Jilly both emphasize, despite their best attempts local people simply refused to respond to their efforts to become accepted into the local community. This was in no small part because their (albeit rare) socialization with local people, wherever and whenever it did occur, was forcibly conducted in English. Admittedly, a small minority of people were seen to have integrated into local society. These were mostly women; older women who had married local men many years ago and other younger women who, in taking charge of child care, had opted to put their children into local schools, rather than the two nearby English-medium, international schools that were popular among participants. In common with other migrant mothers, their children offered a level of sociality with locals, but this only lasted as long as their children were attending local schools and did not extend beyond that (Ryan & Mulholland, 2014, p. 260). And yet, even these participants who were considered by other Brits to have had some success in integrating, never really experienced it themselves as being fully part of everyday, Sitgetan life:

It’s impossible to get into Catalan groups, because they’re all about family. You can’t meet them on holidays or at weekends, or anything, because they’re always with their family. There’s just no space for anyone else. It was alright when I was married, you know, we’d be with his family or other couples would invite us over, at least. But since the divorce, they just don’t want to know. (Liz, childminder)

I suppose I really did feel integrated in one sense, more than most. I spent time with my husband’s family. . . . But I never really, truly felt part of the community. You were always very aware that you were an outsider. (Mildred, retiree)

Mildred and Liz, had both been married to local men and had as a result, they had both spent time with their husbands’ families and friends. However, as both women make clear, once their relationships had ended (through divorce and death, respectively), so too did their relationships with other local people. In common with the majority of British migrants then, Mildred and Liz shared a fundamental sense that they had been unable to really become part of life in the town in the way that they had envisaged prior to migration, despite their best attempts:

I never wanted to do the whole expat thing, but it ends up being the only option you have. I made sure I lived where the locals lived, I took Spanish classes, I really, I did my best. But you learn pretty quickly that you’ll never fit in. (Pam, teacher)

Similarly to those quoted above, Pam had gone out of her way to try to “fit in” to local society. She had in other words, explicitly tried not to fulfil the stereotype of being a Brit abroad, but ultimately, she felt that she had been unsuccessful and had instead done the “typical expat thing.” As highlighted above, having people living in the town who were demonstrably nonlocal, or “international” was a key part of Sitges’ cosmopolitan place-marketing narrative. For participants, the definitive recognition they received within Sitges’ cosmopolitan discourse—that is, functioning as a visible part of the international diversity—was subsequently based on their Britishness. But it was a Britishness that within this context, had very specific connotations. Participants were stuck with a representation of themselves that ultimately operated to heavily circumscribe and delimit their social interactions, so that they remained stuck in their own subgroups of Brits:

I mainly hang out with the other blokes here, we have our own little group. Ok, so it’s not the greatest bar in the world, but I don’t know, I’ve developed a certain fondness for it over the years! I suppose then, you’ve got the Vinyet set. They’re mainly all from London, they have the big houses and the swanky cocktail parties, they don’t really mix. There’s the ladies who lunch, they basically just spend their days getting their hair done or sleeping with each others’ husbands! There’s a fair number of Brits in the theatre group too, I don’t know if you know it? God, they’re a nightmare! There’s a fair few teachers about, some who work in the school here in town, but they never seem to last long. There are quite a few girls who work at the school in Casteldefells though, most of them live here too. Then, of course, you’ve got the gay blokes, but I think even they hang out in their own bars . . . I don’t think they mix much either, really. (Andrew, small business owner)

In a very tangible sense, this then became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; as a group of people migrating to a Spanish coastal tourist town from the United Kingdom, ostensibly not speaking Spanish (let alone Catalan) and being seen by locals and other international migrants as only ever mixing with other British people, this seemed like typical British behavior:

The British come here and they get stuck. They want to be so different from all the others, but they’re not different really. They only think they are. It’s always the same with the Brits, they make these little ghettos. They only spend time with each other, even though they don’t like each other. They don’t want to spend time with each other, but they do anyway. They can’t speak any languages only English and so they’re stuck. Do they leave? No. Why? I don’t know! I think of them like whales, you know, when all the whales get stuck on a beach! (Pierre, salesman)

I hardly ever see other South Africans and why would I? Just because they’re South African it doesn’t mean we have anything in common and should be friends. But it’s different with Brits, they have this mentality. It’s welcoming, seductive at first, but then they can’t get out of it. They say they want to, but they don’t, not really. They don’t like to mix, they don’t bother. They never learn the language and that’s another barrier to them, to integrating, and then it’s just easier, I think. They might talk the talk, the problem is, they don’t walk the walk! (Julie, administrator)

Even when they sought to integrate and interact with non-Brits, to showcase their openness to other cultures, particularly by attempting to (at least) learn Spanish, participants found themselves instead, seen as being stereotypical “brits abroad.” Crucially, this inability to integrate within the local community or establish relationships with locals, whose subjective desires were of course, overlooked, was completely disregarded in their understanding of what migration would mean. Participants had assumed, in other words, that Sitgetans would automatically want to enter into social relationships with them, when most often in reality, this was simply not the case.

Space, Place, Culture, and Identity

There is, I think, a crucial paradox at work here. On the one hand, this belief clearly chimes with the idea that “the self as a rule is something made in public space” so that migration represents in effect, an attempt to take on a different identity by virtue of being in a different public space (Guignon, 2007, p. 73). Yet in this particular instance, it simultaneously represented migration to a place where locationally determined identity was not supposed to matter, which nonetheless only became meaningless via movement to a different “place”—change the “public space” in other words, change the “self.” But I am suggesting that movement thus conceived, constitutes both a denial and a reassertion that place is inscribed on to an assumed abstract, value-free space, as well as being both a denial and reassertion that this same understanding of “place” contains or thereby allows the articulation of particular subjective identities. It is an idea that also highlights what passes as “common sense” understandings of the relationship between space, place, and identity throughout many Euro-American societies, which sees “place” figured as the cultural elaboration of a thereby abstract and neutralized “space” (Kaplan, 1996; Lefebvre, 1991, p. 4; Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003, p. 13; Malkki, 1992, p. 24; Massey, 2005, p. 6).

One of the most important characteristics of this (definitively Modernist) conception of space is, the assumption of an “isomorphism between space/place on the one hand and society/culture on the other,” which has the effect of “places” being seen as “bounded, with their own internally generated authenticities, and defined by their difference from other places which [lie] outside, beyond their borders” (Massey, 2005, p. 64). In other words, when space itself is conceived of as being semiologically barren, as signifying nothing, it thereby becomes the implicitly homogeneous basis on which a concatenation of different concepts, (and indeed, on which conceptualizations of difference themselves) can be built, as it becomes transformed through the supposed inscription of “culture” into “place.”

It is an understanding of the relationship between identity, culture, space, and place that has, of course, been heavily critiqued, not least in relation to its continued naturalization within social theory that Ulrich Beck (2005) has termed “methodological nationalism”; that is, seeing “the world as a series of discrete, physically discontinuous spatial units where each represents a “nation” with a defined territory,” which then forges an intractable relationship with its population, each metonymically conflated (Malkki, 1992, p. 26). The consequences of metaphorically territorializing identity in this way reiterate the notion that such identity is directly related to literal fixity in space/place, producing an (analytically normalized) sedentarism.

Within a Westernized discourse, this holds certain moral implications wherein those who cannot link their identity to a physical location become pathologized as what Liisa Malkii has termed “categorically aberrant” (Malkki, 1992, p. 26). Inherent within this formula, is the idea that movement represents both metaphorical and literal displacement and as such, a change in subjective identity that can only be offset through a (therefore necessary) process of reterritorialization. This understanding of spatial segmentation not only operates on a macro, “national” (and concomitantly supranational) level but, as Lisa Malkki has also suggested, is implicitly built into understandings of cultural diversity on a subnational level too (Malkki, 1992, p. 28; see also Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1990, p. 9).

For Brits in Sitges, a similar belief seemed to hold. Migration to a cosmopolitan location was understood to automatically precipitate (what they assumed would be) an authentic cosmopolitan identity, emerging directly from the context of Sitges. In one sense then, this suggested a belief that identity was determined by a territorially bound, culturally inscribed place. But this denial of any agency beyond the fact of instigating movement from one place to another in relation to identity-formation was clearly at odds with the project, as Brits lamented time and again:

So many people just come here and whinge! They moan about the food, they moan about the weather, they moan about the language, they moan about the Catalans; there’s definitely a certain type . . . like that. I think they expect El Dorado and they brag about a connection to Spanish culture, but then whinge about everything else! They’re probably the type of people who whinge when they’re at home too, anyway. They think moving will make this big change, they’ll change who they are, but then that’s the thing isn’t it? You realize you have to bring yourself with you! (Stephen, TEFL teacher)

Clearly then, many participants experienced the fact that that their migration to Sitges had not substantially transformed their subjective selves—they had “brought themselves with them” too. But not only do you have to bring yourself with you, of course, you also have to be with other people too, which raises a second point; if “being authentic involves having a personal “take” on reality that is “Other” to the social, a deeper reality that is masked by social customs,” then in effect, this means that at “some level to be authentic is already to be asocial”; all things social get downgraded (Guignon, 2007, p. 40; see also Trilling, 1972, p. 11).

What quickly became apparent for participants postrelocation, however, was the fact that their own identities, their own projects of self-realization, were in fact fundamentally dependent on their interactions—and crucially also here their inability to interact—with particular other people. For Brits in Sitges, it was not migration from one place to another that was key, but instead, it was the undeniable fact that identity—of both people and locations that is—is always, everywhere, ultimately dependent on social relations, which would prove to be the most important factor in the contradiction between their prior expectations of what migration would precipitate, and their subsequent experiences, postrelocation—a gap that was constantly and explicitly articulated.

Conclusion

In conclusion then, British migrants believed that simply moving to Sitges—understood to be a cosmopolitan place—would automatically lead to a transformation in their subjective selves. In moving there, they assumed that they would become cosmopolitan people living cosmopolitan lives, in a way that they felt they could not do within Britain. This belief, that movement to a different place would result in acute self-transformation, was built on a conceptualization of “place” that operated as a kind of geographically bound container of different types of culture, which then allowed the possibility—or more correctly perhaps in this instance, automatically resulted in—the articulation of specific types of subjective identities emerging directly from that place-based culture. This understanding of place held implicit within it a (definitively modernist) concept of space as abstract and empty, on which such culturally defined “place” had been inscribed (Kaplan, 1996; Lefebvre, 1991, p. 4; Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003, p. 13; Malkki, 1992, p. 24; Massey, 2005, p. 6).

In essence, this was to completely overlook the crucial import of sociality; both ignored the role of people, overlooked the necessity of social relationships, in other words, to the formation of personal and locational identity. Participants soon discovered that migration to Sitges was not in and of itself enough to result in the self-transformative embodiment of a cosmopolitan identity that so many, so desired. This was not least, because the transformation participants sought, relied on being able to form relationships with non-British “Others”—in this context, particularly local Sitgetans. These were locals, however, who had their own subjective desires, which for the most part did not include the desire to establish social relationships with British migrants. This was undoubtedly a factor that had been overlooked, taken for granted, or ignored, by participants prior to migration itself.

This oversight also, perhaps, resonates more widely, in relation to the wholesale adoption of “creativity” based, cosmopolitanism within contemporary urban planning (Richards, 2014). As these British migrants show, far from enabling a reflexive, flexible adoption of individualized identities, cosmopolitanism here functioned to proscribe and normatively define identities within reductive, homogenized categories instead. This creates a kind of one-size fits all approach that ultimately undermines precisely the kind of prized diversity that informed cosmopolitanism initially (Abbas, 2000; Richards, 2014, p. 119). There is little doubt that recognizing the sociospatial implications of such cosmopolitan place-marketing discourses can reinform their practical implementation, so that through refining the theorization, this can feed back in to the way that public policy is implemented.

This is particularly important in relation to cosmopolitan place-marketing, where public policy has clearly been influenced by academic theory. In other words, if people’s actual experiences can change the way that the relationship between space, place, culture, and society in conceptualized and understood, then that retheorization can affect the way that place-marketing discourses inform public policy, to benefit both our academic understanding and the way that this impacts people’s everyday lived experiences. The way that the former informs the latter is crucial, because it is only by creating a feedback loop between the theoretical underpinnings and the way that such creativity-based, cosmopolitan policies are practically implemented that will give such policies the best possible chance of achieving the original aims that they set out to.