ABSTRACT
The Øresund area surrounds the Strait of Øresund that lies between Denmark and Sweden, and encompasses the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö. The Øresund area has been branded as one region in order to connect the Danish and the Swedish communities, and present the region in a more coherent way to investors and tourists (see also Chapters 2 and 4). The idea is to reconstruct the existing image of the region as a peripheral area, and brand it as a modern, competitive region and a creative hub (Hospers 2006). An important player in the development and branding of the region is the Øresund committee, which provides a platform for political representatives from regional and local authorities in the region (Hospers 2006; Stenberg 1998). The committee carries out projects, thereby often partnering with several public and private parties. The committee has also been involved in policy development, mainly on public transportation, environmental policies, and the labor market (Stenberg 1998). According to several commentators, the development of the Øresund region can be considered a success; the region has done positively in economic terms (especially production and employment rates), and a defensive and non-cooperative attitude between the parties on both sides of the Danish–Swedish border has diminished (see e.g. Hospers 2006; OECD 2003). However, the extent to which the branding campaign has been a success is debatable. Stenberg, a project coordinator of the Øresund committee, argues that there is a commitment among regional opinion makers to raise public awareness about the region’s strong points and the benefits of regional cooperation (Stenberg 1998). There have been several efforts to involve stakeholders in the creation of the brand; for example, a workshop was held in London in which a group of participants arrived at consensus about making the concept of “The Human Capital” central to the Øresund brand (Pedersen 2004). However, despite all good intentions, the broader public has never really engaged in the branding of Øresund. Participation in the branding process mainly involved a selected group of stakeholders in focus groups. Many voices of the people were excluded during the development of the campaign, because the main stakeholders had the inclination to accommodate the global market rather than the public within the region (Pedersen 2004). Although the branding campaign was also partly targeted at the inhabitants of the region, the people in the area do not feel part of the Øresund community, and they do not feel an Øresund identity (Hamers 2005). The Øresund region is something projected and imagined by a political and business elite, rather than a broadly shared identity (Hamers 2005; Hospers 2006). Further, cooperation between the countries may have increased significantly, but several cross-border issues have continued. Notwithstanding the wish to brand the region as a unity, there has been an ongoing discussion about where the Øresund committee should be physically located. Cross-border cooperation sometimes remains difficult, as tellingly illustrated by Hamers (2005) who mentions a difficulty for the bureaucracy: there is a different distance between the holes made in sheets of paper by the perforators on each side of the border.
