The Image of the City Between the Local and the Global

Within the global competition among cities for recognition the ‘image’ plays a significant role. Cities work carefully on their iconic representation to attract tourists, knowledge-workers and investors. Therefore, they have the challenge to create a coherent as well as a distinctive image. One can argue that the field of city marketing is today highly professionalized, and operates with standardised practices and similar beliefs. On that account, the images would be quite uniform, displaying rather a global culture than a local one. At this very point, the argument is reinforced by the claim that the ‘self-representation’ of a city is highly contested within the local context. Hence a study of the globally distributed images within their production and negotiation processes draws light on the local ‘urban imagery’ (Strauss 1960).

The presentation is focusing on the image production of two globally intertwined cities: Frankfurt, Germany and Glasgow, UK. Throughout several fieldtrips, city marketers and journalists have been interviewed. Thereby an insider’s perspective of how city marketing operates in daily business and a critical, independent opinion about the ‘outcomes’ of these efforts could be achieved. In addition, local archives have been combed out to discover how different campaigns are discussed in the local media. Lastly, the picture analysis displays what and how local peculiarities are condensed to a coherent image and what stays unaccounted.

Cities around the world try to attract almost the same audience. Within their image production they carefully observe other cities, which are perceived as role models and competitors. This paper presents a comparative in-depth analysis of the image production of Glasgow and Frankfurt, and shows how globally communicated ‘self-representations’ refer to the ‘cumulative texture’ (Suttles 1984) of the local urban culture.