Intersecting Global and Local Influences in Urban Place Promotion: The Case of Christchurch, New Zealand

The promotion of cities as tourism destinations is seen as a way to enable growth. This promotion involves the projection of selective imagery to specific target groups and often includes the physical reshaping of places to fit a promotable image. Attempts to understand these processes have often focused on one of two approaches: a global perspective stressing the consumptive nature of the tourist gaze and the resultant commodification of place at the local level; and a local perspective emphasising difference and uniqueness. In this paper the authors outline an investigation into the promotion of the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. They found that local place-promotional messages are a product both of global economic forces, which stimulate the growth of tourism, and of a local search for identity. The local ‘sense of place’, as constructed in place-promotional imagery, is constantly reviewed and reflects changing social relationships in place and through time. Christchurch, therefore, is not simply promoted in the image of tourism with, as it is often claimed, the inevitable commodification of place and destruction of meaning. Local claims to uniqueness are an expression of the current social relationships in place, which construct selective histories of the past based on ideas of the present that are linked to a search for identity both at the local and at the national level.