M40 - How to Sell a City?

Author(s)

Fatma Tanis (Delft University of Technology)

Keywords

Port City Culture, Izmir, Representation

Abstract

The East Mediterranean port city İzmir —also previously called Smyrna— is promoted today as “Güzel Izmir” (Izmir the beautiful). The concept is not a present-day finding. It is an outcome of manifold literal and visual productions accumulated over centuries that created the narrative and associated the city with beauty. Depictions of port-related spaces (i.e. warehouses, quay, retail sale offices) and inhabitants’ lifestyle —that varies from the local peasants to trader elites— played a substantial role in this construction. This study focuses on the role of the trading heads in urban promotion.

The city was a key node in oversea trade networks, particularly during the 19th century. European traders, who became long term residents of the city, were main actors in the continuity and expansion of trade as they operated commercial activities within the city and outside world. The companies that they established in Izmir produced cultural products in line with their commercial interests. Not only did such depictions promote the goods that elites were trading (i.e. Smyrna figs, Smyrna carpets), but they also promoted Izmir by building the city with visuals in the minds of the Europeans. This contribution discusses the role of the Izmir based trading company Oriental Carpet Manufacturers (OCM) in Izmir’s urban promotion during the long nineteenth century. It displays media (i.e. trade catalogs, postcards, 1851 London and 1855 Paris exhibition catalogs) and their contribution to the city branding that was motivated by OCM’s marketing strategies. The study analyses depictions that were used in the publication in relation to Orientalism —dominant concept of the time—. Moreover, it highlights the channels in which the publications were disseminated.

In conclusion, this paper showcases that trader elites were the main actors behind the urban promotion during the long nineteenth century. Moreover, it shows how oversea trade played a key role in this promotion, and contributed to the overall port city culture. This cultural construction is still powerful and can open up further possibilities for the promotion of the city.

Author(s)

Maria Ana Bernardo (University of Évora) and Ana Cardoso de Matos (University of Évora)

Keywords

Tourism, Cities, Railways

Abstract

From the nineteenth century onwards, the western world underwent profound technological, economic and social changes that led to the recognition of workers' right to rest, leisure and holidays. The evolution of means of transport has made possible for hitherto unreachable destinations to become closer and more affordable to wider sectors of the population. The interest to travel became popular and tourism came to be thought of as an economic activity.

In this context, the main means of transport used by those who liked to travel and discover new places was the train. The railway was a powerful instrument of social transformation of the nineteenth century, having undoubtedly revolutionized the use of time and space.

In fact, the construction of the rail network in major European countries has brought with it a major change in terms of tourism. On the one hand, it has made leisure travel accessible to more people. On the other hand, the places that were identified as important tourist destinations were for the most part located at points reached by railway. Early on, the representatives of rail interests had the notion that tourism could favor an increase in the number of users of this means of transport, contributing to the financial success of the railway companies themselves. They therefore developed strategies and products to attract passengers and fostered travel, namely strategies that intended to promote the cities as a travel destination. In Portugal, the Gazeta dos Caminhos de Ferro de Portugal e Espanha was an important product of the relationship between rail and tourism, namely urban tourism, either because it encouraged the visit of several urban centers, or because it indicated the facilities that the train user would have, or reported travels that had been made. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the content of this magazine, between 1888 and World War II, in order to identify how cities were presented so that they were appealing to visitors, identifying the similarities and / or differences in the promotion strategies of the Portuguese and Spanish cities over the period under review.

Author(s)

Hartshorne Sally Ann (University of Leicester)

Keywords

Urban Tourism, Promotion, City Branding

Abstract

In recent years, the city of Leicester, in central England, has become famous for the discovery of the remains of King Richard III and for Leicester City Football Team winning the Premier League. Such events saw increasing numbers of visitors attracted to Leicester and local stakeholders continue their marketing efforts to promote the city. However, the local authority’s promotion of the city to a range of different audiences has a longer history. Leicester’s Publicity and Development Committee, which existed from 1933 to 1961, produced a varied range of publications about the city for different audiences. Some leaflets were aimed at attracting business to the city, some were aimed at local residents and some were for tourists. Although the terminology was not in use at the time, the Publicity and Development Committee were undertaking what we today recognise as ‘place marketing’. Jacqui L’Etang considers that the practice of public relations in Britain developed from Local Government in the interwar period. In the early 1930s a combination of the 1931 Local Authorities (Publicity) Act, which encouraged promotion abroad for tourism and more general industrial promotion, and the centenary of local government in 1935, which the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) wished to celebrate via their branches in every town, called for more self-promotion of towns and cities. Through an examination of the work of Leicester City Council’s Publicity and Development Committee, this paper will show how a range of factors influenced the promotion of the city to a variety of audiences. It will also examine the strategies and media deployed to ‘boost’ the city locally, nationally and internationally from the 1930s to the 1960s, as the promotion of the history and heritage of Leicester was balanced with the image of the modern city.

Author(s)

Wes Aelbrecht (Cardiff University)

Keywords

Chicago and Downtown Renaissance, Visual Culture, Kevin Lynch and the Image of the City

Abstract

In the literature on Chicago’s downtown renaissance, most scholars agree that the dominant political role played by the former Mayor Richard Daley shaped the Chicago’s contemporary urban landscape and influenced all subsequent urban downtown development towards the building of the entrepreneurial city in the 1980s. In these debates, the building of the image of the entrepreneurial city has been downplayed, or simply neglected, even though, as the geographers Hall and Hubbard stress, the entrepreneurial city is “an imaginary city, constituted by a plethora of images and representations”. If the entrepreneurial city is indeed “an imaginary city”, as this paper argues, we have to study the images that produce the “imaginary”. Hence, in this paper I present how what I call a soft public relations campaign was produced between the 1960s and 1980s using visual images and Kevin Lynch’s ideas around the construction of the image of the city. Through the use of discourse analysis, this paper is able to show how “a critical infrastructure” (Zukin) was built – namely, a network of partners (public and private) and media technology by which image of cities are constructed, disseminated and sold. Particular focus will be placed on the newly founded public information city departments and the internationally well-known public relations companies the city hired to assist in spreading the message of rebirth (architectural tours, citizens’ meetings and conferences, designed exhibitions and scale models, radio and television programmes, etc.). It will be argued that this investment can be held responsible for the development of the 1960s Chicago city symphony films. In discussing the making of the entrepreneurial city, this presentation also opens up a space for the voices opposing the dominant renaissance rhetoric that suppressed the failures and continued decline of large sections of the city. To do so, this presentation will outline how in Chicago a new strategy using visual images was developed to try to give a voice and face to the residents of the ghetto. It is a voice, this paper argues, that aims to function as a “bridge builder” between the inner city, the Loop and the suburbs. I will suggest that the counter-urban imaginary attempted to shatter the “social blindness” (Harrington) in order to affect how Chicagoans perceived the ghetto and its residents.

Author(s)

Bethan Bide (University of Leeds)

Keywords

Fashion, Tourism, Retail

Abstract

London emerged from the Second World War unattractive, bomb damaged and with a depleted population. Crowds of visitors no longer flocked to the city’s retail centres of Oxford and Regent street, preferring to shop elsewhere in the suburbs and regions. Further, the city’s fashion industry was much diminished by competition from cheaper manufacturing elsewhere in Britain and beyond. Yet, in the midst of this broken industry and city, fashion emerged in the subsequent decades as a key selling point to attract domestic and international visitors to London. This paper traces the role that fashion retailers, designers and manufacturers played in promoting urban tourism in London between 1945 and 1971. Starting with the 1946 exhibition ‘Britain Can Make It’, staged at London’s Victoria and Albert museum, it explores how the boundaries between London’s cultural heritage and its consumer spaces were collapsed in order to attract visitors and entice them to spend their money at a time of austerity for the city. It demonstrates how the government sponsored push for international revenue through sales tax exemptions in the years that followed the war were exploited by London retailers to attract visitors, and how fashion magazines and promotional events sold London as an attractive tourist destination. It uncovers the role fashion industry groups played in rebranding London as a centre for innovative new design that was able to compete with Paris and New York as a destination for fashionable shoppers. In particular, it reveals how collaborations between fashion businesses and cultural institutions such as museums succeeded in rebranded London as a ‘swinging’ city in the 1960s, culminating in the groundbreaking contemporary exhibition ‘Fashion: an anthology’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1971. Finally, it opens up questions about how this rebranding of London’s fashionable reputation created an increasingly narrow and homogenous understanding of London as a fashion city that erased its diversity by excluding socio-economic groups and locations it deemed undesirable. The paper concludes by reflecting on whether this historic promotion of London as a fashionable destination may have harmed London’s longer-term desirability as a tourist destination as a result.

Author(s)

Barbora Vacková (Masaryk University) and Lenka waschková Císařová (Masaryk University)

Keywords

Small Town, Tourism, Postcommunism

Abstract

The city of Telč is one of the Unesco sites in the Czech Republic situated in its southern part. It is a small town with no more than 5 thousand inhabitants. The UNESCO is protecting the urbanism of the old city – mainly the square and the renaissance castle.

Thanks to its history, Telč has always been an attractive tourist destination. However, in different periods of the history of Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic, how the city was presented as an attraction differed. In our presentation, we would like to focus primarily on the two periods: The era of communist “normalization” (1968-1989) and on two decades after the 1989 revolution. We identify the leading players who played a role in the city’s promotion process. Besides the municipality, it is primarily a summer music festival. We will also be interested in how the ways of promotion differed during the Communist period and after 1989. Which topics remain the same, which have disappeared, and which remain? What role did the UNESCO protection of the city play in promoting the town at the beginning of the 90s? The presentation will be based on in-depth interviews with witnesses conducted during the field survey in Telč and analysis of the period materials as are the tourist guides, leaflets, journals and others.

Author(s)

Silke Geven (University of Antwerp)

Keywords

Urban Tourism, City Marketing, World’s Fairs

Abstract

The first world’s fairs appeal to the imagination and have almost mythical status, but for most participating countries it was just a form of good marketing. It was not only an opportunity for a country to promote its newest technologies, economic enhancements, educational system, science and art, but also to sell itself as a tourist destination. From the 1980s onwards, these world’s fairs were  examined from various academic disciplines and attention was also paid to the tourist component of these fairs. Previous research on tourism promotion at the fairs focused on the countries that participated or organized the world’s fairs or the cities in which the exhibition took place. What is still lacking, however, is research about the importance of the world exhibition for cities that did not organize the exhibition, but were a part of it. Belgium organized eleven universal exhibitions between 1885 and 1958, three in Antwerp (1885, 1894 and 1930), five in Brussels (1888, 1897, 1910 and 1935, 1958), two in Liège (1905 and 1930) and one in Ghent (1913). We see that Belgian cities were strongly represented at those world exhibitions. Not only the organizing city, but also other Belgian cities had their own pavilion with a tourist booth for their respective city. In this lecture, I want to shed more light on this barely explored type of tourism marketing. Which cities, beside the organizing city, where promoted on the exhibitions? Who were the stakeholders involved in the promotion of those cities? What image of the city did they want to promote? What media techniques did they use to promote their image of the city? Through an examination of a divers corpus of sources, such as newspaper articles, reports of the city council of the city of Antwerp and ephemeral objects from the collection 'Flying sheets' of the city of Ghent, this lecture will show how local growth coalitions of different Belgian cities used the World’s Fairs to promote their city to an international audience.