Abstract
The deliberate leveraging of vice as a tourism asset represents one of the most consequential and least theorized dimensions of contemporary urban economic development strategy. Cities across the United States and the world have, with varying degrees of explicitness, incorporated vice-adjacent activities — gambling, nightlife, adult entertainment, liberal alcohol culture, and the general promise of transgressive experience — into their place branding strategies, their convention and visitors bureau marketing, and their economic development frameworks. This paper analyzes the structural dynamics through which vice becomes a tourism selling point, examining two primary demand mechanisms — convention traffic generation and nightlife tourism — and the distinctive branding tensions that vice-based tourism strategies create between the competing imperatives of edgy distinctiveness and respectable civic identity. The paper develops the concept of reputational lock-in as the central analytical contribution: the condition in which a city’s association with vice as a place brand becomes so deeply embedded in the cultural geography of tourism consumption that repositioning toward a less vice-identified brand identity is practically foreclosed by the accumulated institutional, economic, and cultural investments in the existing brand. Drawing on urban political economy, place branding theory, tourism studies, and the sociology of consumption, the paper argues that reputational lock-in is not merely a marketing inconvenience but a structural feature of vice-based tourism economies that shapes governance capacity, constrains development strategy, and reproduces vice infrastructure across political administrations and economic cycles. Understanding reputational lock-in is essential for any assessment of the long-term consequences of vice-based tourism development strategies — consequences that are rarely considered in the short-term fiscal calculus through which these strategies are typically adopted.
1. Introduction
The relationship between tourism and vice is among the oldest in urban economic history. Cities have been destinations for the consumption of experiences unavailable or proscribed in travelers’ home communities since the earliest development of long-distance travel — pilgrimage sites generated markets for alcohol, prostitution, and gambling alongside their spiritual offerings; resort towns have historically organized their economies around the provision of transgressive pleasures to visitors temporarily released from the social controls of their home communities; and the development of destination cities organized primarily around vice consumption — from the antebellum spa towns of the American South to the gambling resort cities of the twentieth century — represents a recurrent form of urban economic development whose institutional logic has proven remarkably durable (Findlay, 1986; Rothman, 2002).
What is distinctive about the contemporary relationship between tourism and vice is not its existence — which is ancient — but its explicitness, its institutional formalization, and its integration into the mainstream apparatus of urban economic development strategy. Cities that a generation ago would have acknowledged their vice economies only reluctantly, if at all, now actively market vice-adjacent experiences through official tourism promotion, convention and visitors bureau campaigns, and civic branding initiatives that celebrate transgression, nightlife, and the culture of excess as markers of urban vitality and cosmopolitan desirability. This shift from reluctant acknowledgment to active promotion represents a significant transformation in the political economy of vice governance whose structural implications have not been adequately analyzed.
This paper undertakes that analysis, developing three primary lines of argument. First, the paper examines the structural dynamics through which vice becomes incorporated into urban tourism and convention economies — the mechanisms through which the potential transgressive appeal of vice is transformed into a reliable, institutionally managed, commercially scaled tourism asset. Second, the paper analyzes the branding tensions that vice-based tourism strategies create, focusing on the fundamental conflict between the edginess that makes vice attractive as a tourism differentiator and the respectability that makes cities attractive to the convention traffic, corporate investment, and middle-class residential base that they simultaneously seek. Third, the paper develops the concept of reputational lock-in — the structural condition in which vice-based place branding becomes self-perpetuating and resistant to strategic repositioning — as the central analytical contribution of the study.
The paper draws on place branding theory (Anholt, 2007; Kavaratzis, 2004), urban political economy (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Harvey, 1989), tourism studies (Urry, 1990; Judd & Fainstein, 1999), and the sociology of consumption (Bourdieu, 1984; Featherstone, 1991) to develop an integrated account of why vice becomes a selling point, what institutional dynamics sustain and complicate its role as a tourism asset, and why the reputational consequences of vice-based tourism development are so difficult to reverse once they are established.
2. Theoretical Framework: Place Branding, Tourism Economies, and Vice
2.1 Place Branding as Urban Strategy
Place branding — the application of commercial marketing and brand management concepts to the promotion of cities, regions, and nations as destinations for tourism, investment, and talent — has become a central preoccupation of urban governance since the 1980s, when the combination of deindustrialization, fiscal stress, and intensifying inter-urban competition for mobile economic resources drove cities to develop more systematic approaches to managing their reputations and identities (Harvey, 1989; Lash & Urry, 1994; Paddison, 1993). The theoretical foundations of place branding draw primarily on commercial brand management literature (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993) and on the related concept of the city as a product competing in a market for residents, visitors, businesses, and investment — a conception that has been influential in urban policy circles despite significant theoretical criticism of its implicit assumptions (Boyle & Hughes, 1994; Philo & Kearns, 1993).
The key concepts of brand management that have been applied to cities include brand identity — the distinctive set of associations that a brand seeks to create in its target audiences — brand image — the actual associations that audiences hold about a brand — and brand equity — the value that accrues to an entity as a result of its brand identity and image (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993). Applied to cities, these concepts produce the familiar apparatus of place branding: the city logo, the destination marketing campaign, the tagline, the curated set of experiences and attributes that the city wishes to be associated with in the minds of its target audiences. Anholt (2007) has been particularly influential in theorizing the distinctive challenges of place branding, noting that city brands are substantially more complex than commercial product brands because they are collectively produced — the city’s brand is the aggregate of millions of individual actions, communications, and experiences that no single actor controls — and because they carry the full weight of the city’s history, demographics, politics, and physical environment in ways that commercial brands do not.
2.2 Vice as Tourism Asset
The theoretical status of vice as a tourism asset requires some conceptual clarification. Tourism demand is organized, in the foundational theoretical framework of Urry’s (1990) tourist gaze, around the encounter with difference — the experience of activities, environments, and social practices that are unavailable, unusual, or proscribed in the tourist’s home environment. Vice activities are structurally well suited to generate tourist demand precisely because they are differentially available across the regulatory geography of the United States and the world: gambling, prostitution, certain forms of adult entertainment, and liberal alcohol service are legal in some jurisdictions and prohibited or severely restricted in others, creating the demand flows that the companion paper on Cross-Border Arbitrage analyzed in its spatial dimension.
But vice tourism is not merely a matter of differential availability. It also generates demand through the mechanism of licensed transgression — the opportunity to consume vice in a destination context that the tourist perceives as separated from the social controls and reputational consequences of their home community (Turner, 1969; Urry, 1990). The tourist to Las Vegas who would not gamble in a local casino, and the visitor to New Orleans’ French Quarter who would not drink publicly in their home city, are not primarily responding to differences in legal availability — both activities may be legally available in their home communities — but to the distinctive social permission structure of the destination context, which frames vice consumption as appropriate, expected, and consequence-free in ways that the home community does not (Gottdiener, Collins, & Dickens, 1999; Rojek, 1993).
This licensed transgression mechanism gives vice a distinctive advantage as a tourism asset: it generates demand not only from populations in restrictive jurisdictions seeking legal access to prohibited activities, but from populations in permissive jurisdictions who desire the social permission structure of a vice-destination context regardless of their legal access at home. The market for vice tourism is thus substantially larger than the market created by differential legal availability alone — a structural feature of vice tourism demand that has been recognized and exploited by destination marketing organizations in cities across the vice-tourism landscape.
2.3 Urban Political Economy and the Vice Tourism Settlement
The incorporation of vice into urban tourism and economic development strategy is not a politically neutral process; it reflects a specific political settlement among the competing interests that urban political economy identifies as the primary actors in city governance decisions. Logan and Molotch’s (1987) growth machine framework identifies real estate developers, property owners, financial institutions, and their political allies as the dominant actors in urban governance — actors whose primary interest is in the intensification of land use and the maximization of exchange value, and whose political influence is sufficient to shape governance decisions toward these ends.
Vice tourism development is, from a growth machine perspective, a particularly attractive economic development strategy because it generates high-intensity commercial land use, supports premium real estate values in entertainment districts, generates significant tax revenue, and creates the kind of place branding that attracts the mobile, high-spending visitors who maximize the economic returns of the tourism economy. The growth machine actors who benefit from vice tourism development — the hotel and casino corporations, the restaurant and nightlife entrepreneurs, the real estate developers who profit from entertainment district development — are strongly organized politically and financially, and their support for vice-based tourism strategies gives those strategies a political durability that exceeds the political support for the strategies’ explicit policy goals (Von Herrmann, 2002; Eadington, 1999).
This political economy analysis implies that the shift from reluctant acknowledgment to active promotion of vice as a tourism asset is not primarily a change in civic values but a change in the institutional organization of the interests that benefit from vice tourism — a change from diffuse, unorganized benefit to concentrated, politically organized benefit that has the organizational capacity to shape governance decisions toward vice-promotion and to resist governance decisions that would compromise the vice-tourism economy.
3. Convention Traffic: Vice as Meeting Destination Infrastructure
3.1 The Convention Economy and Vice
The convention and meetings industry — the aggregate of corporate meetings, professional association conferences, trade shows, and government meetings that bring groups of travelers to destination cities for multi-day events — is among the largest segments of the business travel economy in the United States, generating hundreds of billions of dollars in direct spending annually and representing the primary economic rationale for the large-format hotel, convention center, and entertainment infrastructure that characterizes major American meeting destinations (Sanders, 2014; Rojek, 1993). The relationship between the convention economy and vice is structural rather than incidental: the destination attributes that make cities attractive for convention traffic — the density of entertainment options, the availability of after-hours activities, the promise of experiences unavailable in the delegates’ home communities — are precisely the attributes that vice-based place branding delivers.
This structural alignment between convention demand and vice-adjacent destination attributes has not been lost on destination marketing organizations. The explicit promotion of nightlife, entertainment options, and the general culture of adult indulgence in convention destination marketing — the implicit promise that the conference dinner will be accompanied by memorable entertainment and that the post-session hours will be well provided for — is a standard feature of convention city marketing that reflects a sophisticated understanding of the demand attributes that drive meeting planner decisions about destination selection (Clark, 2004; Judd & Fainstein, 1999).
3.2 Las Vegas and the Institutionalization of Convention Vice
Las Vegas represents the most fully institutionalized example of the alignment between convention traffic and vice-based destination marketing. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) — the destination marketing organization responsible for promoting Las Vegas as a meeting and tourism destination — has been among the most successful and well-resourced destination marketing organizations in the United States, and its success is inseparable from its explicit deployment of Las Vegas’s vice-based place brand as a convention destination differentiator (Rothman, 2002; Schwartz, 2003).
The convention infrastructure of Las Vegas — the Las Vegas Convention Center, the meeting facilities of the major casino-resort properties, and the specialized convention services that have developed around the city’s meeting industry — is physically and organizationally integrated with the casino and entertainment infrastructure in ways that deliberately dissolve the boundary between the convention experience and the vice consumption experience. The convention delegate who attends a session at the Las Vegas Convention Center walks through a casino to reach the meeting rooms; the networking reception is held in a casino ballroom; the conference dinner is served in a celebrity chef restaurant attached to a gaming floor. The physical design of Las Vegas’s convention infrastructure is a deliberate spatial technology for the normalization of vice consumption in the context of professional activity — a normalization that serves the convention city’s economic interests by extending the spending duration and intensity of convention delegates (Gottdiener, Collins, & Dickens, 1999; Hannigan, 1998).
The LVCVA’s “What Happens Here, Stays Here” campaign — one of the most successful and widely recognized destination marketing campaigns in American advertising history — is analytically significant precisely because of its explicit framing of vice permission as the primary destination differentiator. The campaign does not promote Las Vegas’s conference facilities, its hotel quality, or its transportation accessibility — all genuine convention destination attributes. It promotes the social permission structure of the Las Vegas experience: the licensed transgression that the destination context provides, the release from home community social controls, and the confidentiality that this release requires. The campaign is, in the most precise sense, an advertisement for vice — and its success as a convention destination marketing instrument demonstrates the structural alignment between vice-based place branding and convention traffic generation (Gotham, 2007; Urry, 1990).
3.3 Secondary Convention Cities and Vice Differentiation
The Las Vegas model of convention-vice alignment has been partially replicated in a range of secondary convention cities that have sought to differentiate their meeting destination offerings through vice-adjacent attributes. New Orleans, Nashville, Miami Beach, and New York City’s Times Square all deploy vice-adjacent destination attributes — the Bourbon Street experience, the honky-tonk culture of Lower Broadway, the nightlife of South Beach, the entertainment density of Times Square — as convention destination differentiators that distinguish their offerings from the generic meeting facility and hotel infrastructure that most American cities can provide.
The convention vice differentiation strategy reflects a structural dynamic of the meetings industry: meeting planners selecting destinations for their organizations’ conferences face the challenge of competing for delegate attendance at a time when the opportunity cost of attendance — measured in travel time, expense, and time away from family — is high. Destinations that offer compelling non-meeting experiences create a selection advantage because they make attendance more attractive to delegates who might otherwise decline or deprioritize conference participation. The promise of a distinctive urban experience — the jazz clubs of New Orleans, the live music of Nashville, the nightlife of Miami Beach — serves as a delegate recruitment tool that benefits conference organizers and meeting planners, creating a demand from the meeting industry for vice-adjacent destination attributes that is independent of any individual delegate’s vice preferences (Clark, 2004; Sanders, 2014).
3.4 Convention Center Investment and Vice District Co-Location
The spatial organization of American convention investment reflects the structural alignment between convention traffic and vice-based destination attributes: major American convention center developments are consistently located in or immediately adjacent to entertainment districts that feature the vice-adjacent activities that convention destination marketing promotes. The convention center-entertainment district co-location is not accidental; it reflects deliberate urban development strategy in which public investment in convention infrastructure is paired with private investment in entertainment development to create the integrated convention destination environment that meeting planners seek (Hannigan, 1998; Sanders, 2014).
This co-location strategy has spatial consequences for vice geography that reinforce the companion paper’s analysis of clustered district spatial dynamics. Convention center development attracts hotel, restaurant, and entertainment investment that intensifies the vice-adjacent character of the surrounding district; the intensification of vice-adjacent activity reinforces the convention destination marketing narrative; and the reinforced marketing narrative attracts additional convention traffic that sustains the commercial viability of the entertainment district. The convention center-entertainment district co-location thus produces a development feedback loop that systematically intensifies vice geography in the areas of highest public investment in tourism infrastructure — a dynamic with distributional consequences that urban development policy has consistently underestimated.
4. Nightlife Tourism: Vice as Urban Vitality Marker
4.1 The Nightlife Economy as Tourism Asset
The nightlife economy — the commercial infrastructure of bars, clubs, restaurants, live music venues, and late-night entertainment that constitutes after-dark urban commercial life — has become one of the primary tourism assets of contemporary cities, and its promotion is a central element of the destination marketing strategies of cities competing for the young, mobile, high-spending tourists that the nightlife economy attracts (Chatterton & Hollands, 2003; Roberts, 2006). Nightlife tourism is analytically distinct from convention tourism in that its primary demand mechanism is experiential rather than instrumental: nightlife tourists travel specifically for the nightlife experience rather than primarily for meetings, conferences, or other professional purposes. But the two tourism streams are economically and spatially integrated in ways that make them mutually reinforcing components of the same vice-based tourism economy.
The theoretical framework for understanding nightlife as a tourism asset draws primarily on Urry’s (1990) analysis of the tourist gaze and its extension into the consumption of place identity — the idea that tourists seek not merely entertainment but authentic encounters with the distinctive cultural character of a destination, and that nightlife is understood as a privileged site of authentic urban culture in the tourism imaginary. The best bar in New Orleans, the most authentic jazz club in Memphis, the most credibly underground nightclub in Berlin — these are presented in travel journalism, on review platforms, and in destination marketing as access points to the genuine cultural life of the city, as sites where the traveler encounters the real city rather than the tourist simulacrum (MacCannell, 1973; Judd & Fainstein, 1999).
4.2 The Nightlife-Vice Bundle in Destination Marketing
The integration of vice into nightlife tourism marketing operates through the bundling mechanism analyzed in the companion paper on demand formation and cultural normalization: the association of vice consumption with the broader aesthetic, social, and cultural experience of nightlife tourism in ways that make the vice component inseparable from the overall experience product. The traveler who visits a craft cocktail bar in Nashville, attends a jazz performance in a New Orleans club, or experiences the electronic music scene of a major European city is purchasing an integrated cultural experience in which the alcohol (and, frequently, other substances) consumed is inseparable from the music, the social atmosphere, the aesthetic environment, and the cultural capital of having participated in an authentic urban cultural experience (Lloyd, 2006; Ocejo, 2017).
This bundling is not merely a consumer experience phenomenon; it is a deliberate marketing strategy of the nightlife tourism industry. Destination marketing organizations, hospitality brands, and travel media companies invest heavily in the cultural framing of nightlife tourism experiences in ways that position vice consumption as a component of sophisticated cultural engagement rather than as simple intoxication. The craft cocktail movement, the foodie-tourism complex, and the music tourism industry each contribute to this cultural framing, producing a representation of nightlife tourism that is thoroughly integrated with vice consumption but that presents itself as primarily about culture, authenticity, and urban sophistication (Gaytán, 2014; Zukin, 2010).
4.3 Music Tourism and Vice Geography
Music tourism — travel organized around live music performance, music festivals, and the cultural geography of musical genres — represents a particularly consequential form of nightlife tourism for urban vice economies because of the strong structural association between live music venues and alcohol service. The economic model of live music in American cities is substantially organized around beverage sales: venues subsidize or comp musical performances because the music drives alcohol consumption; music festivals generate economic returns primarily through food and beverage revenue; and the live music tourism economy is, at its financial foundation, an alcohol retail economy dressed in cultural clothing (Connell & Gibson, 2003; Gibson & Connell, 2007).
The cities most successful in music tourism — Nashville, Austin, New Orleans, Memphis — are cities in which the live music venue cluster and the alcohol retail concentration have co-evolved into integrated vice-music ecosystems that are simultaneously genuine cultural phenomena and commercial vice economies. The dual character of these ecosystems — authentic cultural production and commercial vice retail — is the source of both their tourism appeal (the authenticity is real, not merely performed) and their governance complexity (the cultural dimension creates political protection for the commercial vice dimension that makes regulatory intervention politically costly).
4.4 Nightlife Tourism and Urban Identity
The most significant consequence of nightlife tourism for urban governance is the construction of civic identity around the nightlife tourism economy in ways that make any governance intervention in the vice component of that economy a challenge to the city’s sense of itself. Cities that have built their tourism economies and their civic brands around their nightlife — New Orleans as the city that care forgot, Austin as the live music capital of the world, Nashville as Music City — have also built civic identities in which the nightlife economy is a marker of local distinctiveness, a source of civic pride, and a dimension of what residents understand as the authentic character of their city (Gotham, 2007; Lloyd, 2006).
This identity construction has structural consequences for governance: when the nightlife economy is central to civic identity, regulatory interventions that would reduce the intensity or accessibility of nightlife — earlier closing times, reduced alcohol licensing, increased entertainment regulation — are framed not merely as economic restrictions but as attacks on the city’s cultural character and civic identity. The political resistance to such interventions is correspondingly greater than the resistance to purely economic regulatory interventions, because it draws on the affective attachment of residents to their city’s identity rather than merely on the financial interests of nightlife industry operators. This identity-based political protection for the nightlife vice economy is a significant structural feature of vice governance in cities where nightlife tourism has become central to civic self-understanding.
5. Branding Tension: Edgy Versus Respectable City Identity
5.1 The Fundamental Branding Contradiction
The incorporation of vice into urban place branding creates a fundamental and structurally irresolvable tension between two competing imperatives of urban brand management: the imperative of distinctiveness, which in the current landscape of inter-urban competition for tourism dollars frequently requires the cultivation of an edgy, transgressive, or vice-adjacent brand identity; and the imperative of respectability, which is required for the attraction of corporate investment, professional talent, middle-class residents, family tourism, and the institutional relationships — with universities, hospitals, corporate headquarters, and government agencies — that constitute a broadly attractive urban economy.
This tension is not merely a marketing management challenge; it is a structural feature of vice-based urban economies that shapes governance decisions, investment patterns, and development trajectories in ways that extend far beyond the tourism sector. The city that has built its tourism brand around transgression cannot simultaneously offer the family-friendly environment, the safe public spaces, and the institutional legitimacy that corporate location decisions require — or, if it can offer those attributes, it faces constant tension between the brand narratives required to market to each audience, because the brand narratives are fundamentally incompatible.
5.2 Managing the Edginess-Respectability Continuum
Cities engaged in vice-based tourism development employ a range of strategies for managing the edginess-respectability tension, none of which fully resolves it but each of which represents a different point of equilibrium along the continuum. The spatial containment strategy — concentrating vice tourism activity in designated entertainment districts while maintaining the respectable character of other urban areas — represents one approach: vice is allowed to be fully edgy in its designated spatial domain while the rest of the city maintains the respectability required for non-tourism economic development (Hannigan, 1998; Judd, 1999). The limitation of this strategy is that spatial containment is difficult to maintain as entertainment districts expand and as the marketing of the vice-branded entertainment district generates spillover effects in adjacent neighborhoods.
The temporal segmentation strategy — differentiating the city’s offer by time of day or week, with the vice-edgy identity activated for nighttime and weekend tourism marketing while the respectable identity is activated for daytime and weekday corporate and institutional marketing — represents a second approach. This strategy is employed with particular sophistication by cities like New York and Chicago, which maintain vice-branded nightlife and entertainment tourism offerings while also competing successfully for corporate headquarters, university research partnerships, and institutional investment. The limitation of temporal segmentation is that the two brand narratives are not actually temporally isolated: corporate location decision-makers also encounter the nighttime brand narrative, and vice-tourism visitors also encounter the daytime respectability narrative.
The brand bifurcation strategy — maintaining two distinct brand identities for different target audiences, with minimal explicit connection between them — represents a third approach, employed most explicitly by Las Vegas, which maintains a corporate meetings brand that emphasizes professional facilities and service quality alongside a leisure tourism brand that emphasizes transgression and excess. The “What Happens Here, Stays Here” campaign is a leisure brand instrument; the LVCVA’s convention marketing materials are a corporate brand instrument; and the two are deliberately kept in separate communicative channels for different audience targets. The limitation of brand bifurcation is that it is ultimately incoherent: the same city cannot be simultaneously the premier venue for professional seriousness and the premier venue for consequence-free excess without those brand attributes undermining each other in the minds of audiences who encounter both (Anholt, 2007; Kavaratzis, 2004).
5.3 The Respectable Vice Reframe
A more sophisticated strategy for managing the edginess-respectability tension is the respectable vice reframe — the cultural repositioning of vice-adjacent activities from transgressive indulgences to sophisticated pleasures that are entirely compatible with the respectable, cosmopolitan, culturally engaged urban identity that the city wishes to project. This strategy, analyzed at the individual consumption level in the companion paper on demand formation and cultural normalization, operates at the place branding level through the deployment of culinary, aesthetic, and cultural capital to frame vice consumption as a marker of urban sophistication rather than of moral transgression.
The craft cocktail movement, the celebrity chef restaurant complex, and the cultural tourism reframe of nightlife experience all contribute to the respectable vice reframe at the place brand level. When New Orleans is marketed as a destination for culinary tourism and jazz culture rather than simply as a destination for Bourbon Street excess; when Las Vegas is marketed as a destination for world-class dining, art museums, and entertainment residencies rather than simply for casino gambling; when Nashville is marketed as a destination for a distinctive American musical culture rather than simply for honky-tonk bars — these marketing strategies are deploying the respectable vice reframe, using cultural capital to dissolve the edginess-respectability tension by elevating the cultural status of vice-adjacent activities to the point where they are no longer experienced as transgressive (Zukin, 2010; Hannigan, 1998).
The respectable vice reframe has real cultural substance: the culinary, musical, and artistic cultures of cities like New Orleans, Nashville, and Las Vegas are genuine cultural phenomena that have value independent of their role in vice tourism marketing. But the reframe also functions as a normalization mechanism — as analyzed in the companion paper — and as a governance complication: the cultural elevation of vice-adjacent activities makes governance interventions that target the vice component of these activities more politically costly, because the interventions are now framed as attacks on cultural heritage rather than restrictions on commercial vice.
5.4 Corporate Discomfort and the Respectable Economy
The branding tension between edgy and respectable city identity has specific consequences for cities’ ability to attract the corporate investment and professional talent that constitute the high-wage, high-productivity economic base that urban economic development strategy seeks. Corporate location decisions are influenced by a range of urban quality-of-life attributes — public safety, school quality, cultural amenities, housing affordability — that are in complex and not always negative relationship with vice-adjacent urban culture. But there are specific dimensions of the edgy-vice brand that consistently create friction with corporate location attraction: the public safety concerns associated with entertainment district crime spillover; the school quality concerns associated with neighborhoods adjacent to vice districts; and the workplace culture concerns associated with cities whose brand identity is organized around excess and the suspension of professional norms.
These corporate discomfort dynamics create a structural tension in the political economy of vice-based tourism development: the tourism sector and hospitality industry that benefits from vice branding are organized politically to support it, while the corporate sector that is deterred by vice branding is typically less organized in its opposition, because individual corporate location decisions are made privately rather than through collective political action. The result is a political economy that consistently favors vice-based tourism development over the concerns of the corporate location economy — a bias that may produce short-term tourism revenue maximization at the cost of long-term economic diversification (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Florida, 2002).
6. Reputational Lock-In: The Central Analytical Concept
6.1 Defining Reputational Lock-In
Reputational lock-in describes the structural condition in which a city’s association with vice as a defining feature of its place brand becomes self-perpetuating and resistant to strategic repositioning — a condition in which the accumulated institutional, economic, cultural, and reputational investments in the vice brand create a path-dependent trajectory that constrains the city’s ability to construct a substantially different brand identity even when political actors, civic leaders, and residents wish to do so. Reputational lock-in is the place branding analogue of the technological lock-in described in the path dependency literature (David, 1985; Arthur, 1994): just as network effects and switching costs can lock a technology standard in place even when superior alternatives are available, reputation effects and repositioning costs can lock a city brand in place even when the brand no longer serves the city’s strategic interests.
The concept draws on the institutional economics analysis of path dependency (North, 1990; Pierson, 2004), the brand equity literature (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993), and the urban political economy analysis of growth coalitions and development trajectories (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Harvey, 1989). From institutional economics, it inherits the emphasis on increasing returns to existing institutional arrangements — the tendency of established patterns to become more entrenched over time as actors make complementary investments that increase the value of the existing pattern relative to alternatives. From brand equity theory, it inherits the analysis of brand associations — the specific mental connections between a brand and its attributes that are accumulated through repeated exposure and that are resistant to revision precisely because of their accumulated depth. From urban political economy, it inherits the analysis of growth coalition interests — the specific economic and political actors whose investments in the existing development trajectory give them strong incentives to resist repositioning.
6.2 Mechanisms of Reputational Lock-In
Reputational lock-in is produced and sustained by several distinct mechanisms that operate simultaneously and that reinforce each other in ways that make the lock-in progressively more difficult to reverse as the vice brand matures.
The first mechanism is media and cultural reproduction. Cities with established vice-based reputations are continuously represented in entertainment media, travel journalism, social media, and popular culture in ways that reproduce and reinforce the vice association across successive generations of audiences. Las Vegas is represented in hundreds of films and television programs as the vice destination; New Orleans is represented in music, literature, and film as the city of excess; Nashville’s honky-tonks are the setting of countless country songs. These media representations are produced by actors — studios, publishers, musicians, travel journalists — who have no direct interest in maintaining or dissolving the vice brand but who use the established cultural geography of vice destinations because it is culturally legible and narratively convenient. The aggregate of these representations constitutes a cultural reproduction machine for the vice brand that operates independently of any deliberate place branding effort and that is, for practical purposes, beyond the control of any city government or tourism authority (Hall, 1980; Gerbner, 1998).
The second mechanism is tourist expectation and experience matching. Tourists who visit a city with a vice-based reputation do so partly because of that reputation — they expect to encounter vice-adjacent experiences and they are primed to perceive, seek out, and positively evaluate those experiences. Their subsequent reviews, social media posts, and word-of-mouth recommendations reproduce the vice brand for subsequent potential visitors, because they describe the experiences they sought and found rather than the experiences that a repositioned brand might offer. The tourist experience matching mechanism thus ensures that the vice brand is continuously reproduced through user-generated content that reflects the expectations created by the existing brand (Urry, 1990; Buhalis & Law, 2008).
The third mechanism is infrastructure investment lock-in. Cities with established vice-based tourism economies have accumulated physical infrastructure — casino buildings, entertainment venues, nightlife districts, convention facilities oriented toward entertainment-based delegate experience — that is specifically adapted to vice tourism and that is difficult and extremely expensive to repurpose for different economic functions. The physical infrastructure of the Las Vegas Strip, the casino-hotel complexes that have defined the city’s urban form, represent investments of hundreds of billions of dollars that are functionally specific to the casino-entertainment tourism economy and that cannot be readily converted to alternative uses without massive financial loss. The capital sunk in this infrastructure creates powerful interests in the maintenance of the vice tourism economy that are independent of any brand preference and that constitute a structural barrier to repositioning (Sternlieb & Hughes, 1983; Hannigan, 1998).
The fourth mechanism is political economy entrenchment. As analyzed in Section 2.3, the vice tourism economy generates concentrated, organized political interests — the hotel corporations, casino operators, restaurant and nightlife entrepreneurs, and real estate developers who profit from vice-based tourism — that are institutionally embedded in the governance apparatus of convention and visitors bureaus, tourism promotion agencies, and economic development authorities. These actors are not merely passive beneficiaries of the vice brand; they are active participants in its reproduction, investing continuously in the marketing, lobbying, and cultural production that sustains the brand. Their political organization and financial resources give them systematic advantages over actors who might favor repositioning — the corporate sector deterred by the vice brand, the residents who bear the negative externalities of vice tourism, and the civic leaders who aspire to a different urban identity (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Von Herrmann, 2002).
6.3 Attempted Repositioning and Its Limits
The history of attempted vice-brand repositioning provides extensive empirical documentation of the limits of deliberate strategic action in the face of reputational lock-in. Times Square in New York City represents perhaps the most frequently cited example of successful repositioning — the transformation of one of American urban history’s most notorious vice districts into a sanitized, corporate-branded entertainment zone through the combined application of aggressive law enforcement, regulatory intervention, and large-scale real estate development. The Times Square case demonstrates that repositioning is possible in specific circumstances — when real estate pressure is sufficient to motivate large-scale redevelopment, when political will and resources are committed over an extended period, and when the city’s broader economic trajectory creates powerful market forces favoring repositioning (Sagalyn, 2001; Reichl, 1999).
But the Times Square case also illustrates the limits and costs of repositioning. The redevelopment of Times Square required extraordinary public investment and political commitment over more than two decades; it displaced thousands of workers in the vice industries it eliminated; it generated significant criticism from urban culture advocates who argued that the sanitization destroyed the authentic urban character of the district; and it produced a destination that many observers regard as having exchanged one form of inauthenticity — the vice district simulacrum — for another — the corporate entertainment simulacrum — without creating the genuine urban vitality that the best urban entertainment districts produce (Zukin, 2010; Deutsche & Ryan, 1987).
Las Vegas has made periodic attempts to reposition its brand — the family-friendly Las Vegas of the 1990s is the most extensively documented example — that have consistently failed to achieve durable brand transformation (Rothman, 2002; Schwartz, 2003). The family-friendly repositioning initiative of the early 1990s, which produced the addition of theme park attractions to several major casino-resort properties, was abandoned within a decade when it became clear that the family market it sought to attract was both less profitable than the adult market it risked displacing and fundamentally incompatible with the vice-based experience economy that remained the city’s primary tourism asset. The failure of Las Vegas’s family-friendly repositioning attempt is a canonical illustration of reputational lock-in: the vice brand was sufficiently entrenched — in infrastructure investment, tourist expectations, media representation, and political economy — that even a determined, well-resourced repositioning effort could not overcome the structural momentum of the existing brand.
6.4 The Long-Term Consequences of Lock-In
The long-term consequences of reputational lock-in extend well beyond the tourism sector to encompass the full range of urban development options available to a vice-branded city. Economic diversification — the development of economic activities beyond the tourism and entertainment sectors — is substantially constrained by vice-based reputational lock-in because the city’s brand identity signals the values, culture, and social environment of the city to potential investors, workers, and institutions in ways that are not easily separated from its tourism identity. A city that is internationally known as a vice destination — Las Vegas, Atlantic City — faces structural disadvantages in attracting the technology companies, research universities, professional service firms, and government agencies that constitute a diversified, resilient urban economy, because those actors’ location decisions are influenced by the place brand in ways that are independent of any objective assessment of the city’s actual attributes (Florida, 2002; Storper & Scott, 2009).
This diversification constraint is perhaps the most consequential long-term consequence of reputational lock-in: it creates a structural dependence on the vice tourism economy that is progressively more difficult to escape as the lock-in deepens. Cities whose economies are substantially dependent on vice tourism are exposed to the volatility and secular risks of that economy — the cyclical demand fluctuations of tourism generally, the specific risks of competition from new vice destinations, and the long-term regulatory and public health pressures on vice industries — without the economic diversification that would buffer those risks. Atlantic City’s economic trajectory following the legalization of competing casino gambling in other jurisdictions represents the canonical illustration of the diversification constraint’s consequences: a city that had committed fully to a casino-based tourism economy had no alternative economic base to fall back on when the competitive advantage that commitment had purchased was eroded by regulatory change elsewhere (Sternlieb & Hughes, 1983; Lester, 2018).
7. Governance in the Vice Tourism Economy
7.1 The Governance Paradox of Vice Tourism Cities
Cities whose economies are substantially organized around vice tourism face a distinctive governance paradox: the institutional apparatus of economic development governance — the destination marketing organization, the convention and visitors bureau, the tourism development authority — is organized and funded primarily to promote the tourism economy, including its vice-based dimensions; while the institutional apparatus of regulatory governance — the police department, the licensing authority, the zoning board — is organized and funded primarily to manage the negative externalities of vice. These two governance functions are institutionally separated, organizationally distinct, and politically competitive in ways that systematically produce governance incoherence: the promotional apparatus works to expand and sustain the vice tourism economy while the regulatory apparatus works to manage and contain its consequences, without any institutional mechanism for resolving the tension between promotion and regulation.
This governance paradox is not unique to vice tourism cities — it characterizes the governance of all externality-generating economic development activities — but it is particularly acute in vice tourism contexts because the vice economy’s negative externalities are particularly concentrated and visible, because the promotional apparatus is particularly well-organized and politically powerful, and because the regulatory interventions that would most effectively manage the externalities — significant restrictions on nightlife intensity, aggressive enforcement of vice regulations in tourist districts — are most directly in conflict with the promotional objectives of the tourism economy (Judd & Fainstein, 1999; Hannigan, 1998).
7.2 Destination Management and Vice Regulation
The emergence of the destination management organization (DMO) as the primary institutional vehicle for tourism governance in American cities represents a partial institutional response to the promotional-regulatory paradox, but one that is structurally biased toward the promotional function. DMOs — typically quasi-public entities funded by hotel occupancy taxes and governed by boards drawn from the tourism and hospitality industry — are institutionally designed for promotional rather than regulatory functions: their performance metrics are tourist arrivals, visitor spending, and hotel occupancy rates; their governing boards represent the interests of tourism industry operators rather than affected communities; and their organizational cultures are oriented toward marketing and promotion rather than toward the regulatory management of externalities (Sanders, 2014; Clark, 2004).
The regulatory gap that DMO-dominated tourism governance creates is filled, in vice tourism cities, by a fragmented array of regulatory actors — police departments, licensing authorities, health departments, labor regulators — each of which manages a portion of the vice economy’s externalities without any of which having responsibility for the full governance challenge. The result, as analyzed in the companion paper on Legal Pathways to Vice Saturation, is the enforcement fragmentation that contributes to vice saturation — a fragmentation that is institutionally reproduced by the structural separation between promotional and regulatory functions in the governance of vice tourism cities.
7.3 Community Impacts and Distributional Justice
The governance of vice tourism cities requires engagement with distributional questions — about who bears the costs and who receives the benefits of the vice tourism economy — that are systematically marginalized in the institutional frameworks of tourism governance. The benefits of vice tourism development — the tax revenues, the employment, the economic activity — are relatively diffuse, accruing to the city’s fiscal position, its tourism industry workers, and the businesses that serve both visitors and the workers employed to serve them. The costs — the noise, the crime, the displacement of residential uses, the deterioration of neighborhood character in vice tourism districts — are geographically concentrated among the residents of neighborhoods adjacent to vice tourism infrastructure and disproportionately borne by lower-income communities that lack the political resources to resist vice tourism development and its externalities (Harvey, 1989; Gotham, 2007).
The distributional justice dimension of vice tourism governance is rendered invisible by the aggregate economic framing that dominates tourism development discourse: the total economic impact of the tourism economy looks positive at the city scale even when the distribution of those impacts is highly unequal at the neighborhood scale. Governance frameworks that engage seriously with the distributional justice dimension of vice tourism development would require the integration of community impact assessment into tourism development decision-making, the creation of institutional channels for the participation of affected communities in tourism governance, and the development of regulatory frameworks that impose some of the costs of vice tourism development on the industry actors who capture its financial benefits rather than on the communities who bear its negative externalities — institutional developments that are rarely achieved in the face of the organized political opposition of the vice tourism growth coalition.
8. Conclusion
This paper has analyzed the structural dynamics through which vice becomes a tourism selling point, the branding tensions that vice-based tourism strategies create, and the concept of reputational lock-in through which vice-based place brands become self-perpetuating and resistant to strategic repositioning. The analysis has demonstrated that the incorporation of vice into urban tourism and economic development strategy is not a peripheral or incidental feature of contemporary urban governance but a structural dimension of the political economy of place in cities where vice tourism has achieved commercial and institutional maturity.
The central analytical contribution — the concept of reputational lock-in — has implications that extend well beyond the tourism sector. Reputational lock-in constrains economic diversification, shapes the distributional politics of urban development, limits the governance options available to political actors who wish to manage vice externalities, and reproduces the cultural normalization of vice through the media and cultural reproduction mechanisms that sustain the vice brand across successive generations of audiences. Understanding reputational lock-in as a structural feature of vice tourism economies rather than merely as a marketing management challenge is essential for any assessment of the long-term consequences of vice-based tourism development strategies.
The paper’s analysis suggests several directions for governance improvement, none of which is easily achievable in the political economy of vice tourism cities but all of which are structurally indicated by the analysis. First, the institutional separation between promotional and regulatory functions in tourism governance must be addressed — the creation of governance institutions capable of simultaneously promoting the economic benefits of tourism and managing its externalities requires institutional designs that are not currently standard in American urban governance. Second, the distributional justice dimension of vice tourism development must be incorporated into development decision-making through community impact assessment requirements and community participation mechanisms that give affected residents institutional voice in governance decisions that currently exclude them. Third, the long-term risks of reputational lock-in must be incorporated into the planning horizons of economic development strategy — the short-term fiscal appeal of vice-based tourism development must be assessed against the long-term constraints on economic diversification that lock-in produces. None of these governance improvements will eliminate the structural tensions that this paper has analyzed; but none of those tensions can be adequately managed without the structural governance reforms that their analysis indicates.
Notes
Note 1: The concept of reputational lock-in developed in this paper is distinguished from the related but analytically distinct concept of path dependency as used in the institutional economics literature. Path dependency describes the general tendency of institutional arrangements to become self-reinforcing through increasing returns; reputational lock-in describes the specific application of this dynamic to place brands — the particular form of institutional self-reinforcement that operates through the mechanisms of brand equity accumulation, tourist expectation matching, media reproduction, and political economy entrenchment identified in Section 6.2. Reputational lock-in is a species of path dependency, but its specific mechanisms and its governance implications are distinctive enough to warrant a dedicated analytical concept.
Note 2: The Times Square case discussed in Section 6.3 is treated as a partial exception to the general pattern of reputational lock-in rather than a refutation of the lock-in concept. Times Square’s repositioning was achievable because a specific set of conditions obtained that are unusual in vice tourism contexts: the extreme real estate pressure generated by Manhattan’s position in the global commercial real estate market created financial incentives for redevelopment that overcame the normal lock-in mechanisms; the political authority of the New York City government is unusual in the scale of its resources and its capacity for sustained regulatory intervention; and the scale and diversity of New York’s economy made the loss of the Times Square vice economy less consequential for the city’s overall economic position than comparable losses would be for cities more fully dependent on vice tourism. The Times Square case illustrates that reputational lock-in can be overcome under specific conditions rather than that it does not exist as a structural phenomenon.
Note 3: The analysis of Las Vegas throughout this paper treats it as the paradigmatic example of vice-based tourism development, a status that reflects both its exceptional scale and the extraordinary richness of the scholarly literature on the city. The concentration on Las Vegas should not be read as implying that the dynamics analyzed are unique to Las Vegas or even that Las Vegas is the most important case for all analytical purposes. International cases — Macau, Monaco, Amsterdam, Ibiza — exhibit comparable or in some respects more extreme versions of the dynamics analyzed here and would repay comparative analysis that this paper’s focus on American urban governance has not undertaken.
Note 4: The discussion of the distributional justice dimension of vice tourism development in Section 7.3 identifies a research gap in the existing urban political economy and tourism studies literature. While there is a substantial literature on the distributional consequences of gentrification and urban redevelopment generally, the specific distributional dynamics of vice tourism development — the geographic concentration of negative externalities in communities adjacent to vice tourism districts, the labor market consequences of tourism-dependent economies for low-wage hospitality workers, and the fiscal incidence of hotel occupancy taxes as a primary funding mechanism for tourism promotion — have received less systematic scholarly attention than their social significance warrants.
Note 5: The concept of the respectable vice reframe discussed in Section 5.3 connects the branding analysis of this paper with the cultural normalization analysis of the companion paper on demand formation. The respectable vice reframe is simultaneously a place branding strategy — a mechanism for managing the edginess-respectability tension in city brand management — and a cultural normalization mechanism — a process through which vice activities are progressively integrated into the cultural frameworks of sophistication and cosmopolitan taste. This dual character suggests that the branding and normalization dimensions of vice tourism are more deeply integrated than the separate analyses in these companion papers might suggest, and that a fully integrated theory of vice tourism would need to synthesize the branding and normalization frameworks more systematically than either paper individually achieves.
Note 6: The governance analysis in Section 7 identifies the institutional separation between promotional and regulatory functions as a central structural feature of vice tourism governance. This institutional separation is not uniquely American; it characterizes the governance of tourism-dependent economies across the range of institutional environments in which vice tourism has developed. Comparative analysis of how different national governance systems — with different traditions of integrated versus fragmented public administration, different relationships between public and private actors in economic development, and different legal frameworks for managing the externalities of commercial activity — handle the promotional-regulatory tension of vice tourism governance would be a significant contribution to the comparative urban governance literature.
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