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City Branding and Social Inclusion in the Glocal City

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  • Maria Cristina Paganoni

Abstract

This article begins with a re-assessment of city branding that focuses on the marketing strategies routinely employed to promote a competitive identity for the contemporary 'glocal' city, before moving on to the issue of social inclusion. Combining a socio-semiotic approach with recent insights from urban studies, it explores a sample of 12 British city council websites to discuss to what extent web-mediated communication, within the modernisation agenda espoused by local authorities, may effectively help to represent and give voice to today's multicultural and migrant urban communities. The article adopts a critical reading of municipal websites with the aim of understanding how a social inclusion agenda can be incorporated into the authoritative and functional discourse typically used by the sites and proposes that the onset of new interactive technologies, such as blogs and social networks, do have significant democratic potential in this respect, even though their incorporation into the sites is still at a preliminary stage. As such, the article is concerned with how flows of information and people are coming together in the early twenty-first century and transforming what began as a static textual/discursive space into one that is responsive to the flux of the contemporary city. At the time of writing, this is very much a communication revolution in the making, with the new interactive portals sitting somewhat awkwardly alongside information-based web pages and links. In addition, the article investigates the ways in which the sites attempt to present their cities as diasporic, cosmopolitan and 'glocalized' spaces, paying particular attention to the subjugated discourse of migration and the way that the cities' non-white population is fixed and bounded by aesthetic and discursive means .

Suggested Citation

  • Maria Cristina Paganoni, 2012. "City Branding and Social Inclusion in the Glocal City," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(1), pages 13-31, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:rmobxx:v:7:y:2012:i:1:p:13-31
    DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.631809
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    Cited by:

    1. Jonathan Darling, 2013. "Moral Urbanism, Asylum, and the Politics of Critique," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(8), pages 1785-1801, August.
    2. Molina, Arturo & Fernández, Alejandra C. & Gómez, Mar & Aranda, Evangelina, 2017. "Differences in the city branding of European capitals based on online vs. offline sources of information," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 28-39.
    3. Bill Merrilees & Dale Miller & Gloria L. Ge & Charles Chin Chiu Tam, 2018. "Asian city brand meaning: a Hong Kong perspective," Journal of Brand Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 25(1), pages 14-26, January.
    4. Alison L Bain & Julie A Podmore, 2021. "Linguistic ambivalence amidst suburban diversity: LGBTQ2S municipal ‘social inclusions’ on Vancouver’s periphery," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 39(7), pages 1644-1672, November.
    5. Tianren Yang & Minghai Ye & Pei Pei & Yongjiang Shi & Haozhi Pan, 2019. "City Branding Evaluation as a Tool for Sustainable Urban Growth: A Framework and Lessons from the Yangtze River Delta Region," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(16), pages 1-11, August.

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