Copper Square bites the dust, but has anyone learned anything?
News item: A Phoenix business group plans to stop using the name Copper Square
that has branded a 90-block downtown retail-and-office district for
eight years. The Downtown Phoenix Partnership is working with Scottsdale’s SHR
Perceptual Management on a name that will highlight downtown Phoenix as
"Arizona’s cosmopolitan heart…"
Where to begin? Perhaps it’s most telling that the Downtown Phoenix Partnership is paying a Scottsdale company to come up with a name for downtown Phoenix. Such is the fecklessness, confusion and drift that characterized the whole "Copper Square" debacle.
You know where I stand. I wrote against the silly name even before they rolled it out, saying, among other things, that the name of the "district" is already established by decades of custom: Downtown Phoenix. In a city hostile to public spaces, there is no square, and downtown has no historic link with the copper industry. And who wants to live in a city that doesn’t have a downtown? Yet millions of dollars that might have been spent on, say, recruiting private employers to downtown, went to banners and assorted crap saying "Copper Square."
So what will these marketing gods from Scottsdale — apparently there were no companies available in downtown Phoenix (which ought to tell you something of the real problem) say?
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