Work hard, play hard: selling Kelowna, BC, as year-round playground

Landscapes can be deceptive, Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal. (Berger 1997) But all cities are ideas, ultimately. (Franzen 1988) Introduction The shift to post-Fordism over the last decades has transformed place and space, and the experiences of place and urbanity (Harvey 1989). As employment is being redefined and work re-organised, the easy divisions of urban, suburban and rural areas of the sixties and seventies have given way to more fluid and 'flexible' manners of apprehending place. The effects of the new forms of capital accumulation in this most recent era have been uneven at economic, social and urban levels. As a result, local bourgeoisies and civic boosters display discursive strategies of 'spatial revalorisations' to attract capital and new businesses into their localities, trying, in the process, to stymie the further de-industrialisation and social erosion of places once highly reliant on Fordist industries and Keynesian labour market policies (Harvey 1989; Davis 1992). In Goodwin's (1993) words, 'urban images or "city myths" are produced in order to promote investment potential more generally'. The rise of time-space compression technologies (Harvey 1989) and the repositioning of places in a new international division of consumption are making these campaigns even more pressing. Not surprisingly, different places are reinvented differently (Sassen 1990; Urry 2002; Judd 2003). While the bulk of academic research has focused on studying the restructuring of large urban conglomerates, from the redefinition of the ghetto to the emergence of the global city apparatus (Sassen 1990; Marcuse 2002), places beyond the exploding metropolis and intensifying edge cities, by comparison, have gotten little attention, especially when it concerns Canadian landscapes. (1) In this work, we examine the city of Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada, during the last two decades, as we identify this non-metropolitan hinterland city of one hundred thousand inhabitants as exhibiting a particular type of the phenomenon of making and selling place. Specifically, we do this by examining four overlapping discourses, which together set up an overarching discourse for post-Fordist Kelowna. These construct Kelowna as an ideal retirement location; as a playground; as a place of 'whiteness'; and, finally, as a site for advanced technology. We argue that the reinvention of Kelowna has been organised in time through discourses that are, in part, clever marketing gimmicks that emphasise place, play and fun. Furthermore, the post-Fordist reinvention of the city and its surroundings contains a discourse of 'whiteness' (Frankenberg 1993; Dyer 1997). Thus, Kelowna is systematically presented in terms of 'sameness' and 'familiarity' to normalise its landscape and to draw particular types of people and businesses into the community; people and businesses sharing a 'white' identity, from high-tech specialists, to 'family-oriented' people, to retirees. We claim that this particular hinterland city is invented, sought and lived as a 'safe' landscape, a landscape without the 'elements' that make cities 'unsafe' (Kobayashi and Peake 2000). Hinterlands outside metropolitan areas such as Kelowna have been historically formed in such a way that today they constitute a place with a unique character, a unique 'quality', a unique attraction; one that offers safety, familiarity and sameness. Here, then, lays the value of our analysis; its possibilities in shedding light on the specific character of making place in hinterland-type cities. We approach this case study of Kelowna through a discourse analysis of government documents, local newspapers, brochures, guidebooks, pamphlets, advertisements and interviews with developers, city planners, local politicians and journalists. …