Abstract
Cities are acquiring a key geopolitical importance in the shaping of world-wide flows and exchanges, playing a key part in modern socio-economic relations within the framework of the world order termed globalization. Urban areas are the nodes where networks of various types of interchange come together: economic, social, cultural, communications and interpersonal. While having a leading role in these major relations of world-wide exchanges, cities in addition shape their own interchanges between what they can offer and the demands from the various groups within them. These are principally their citizens, but also investors, tourists, and administrative and civil institutions. Strategic marketing and management approaches have been implemented into the field of countries, regions, and especially cities, which are adopting these approaches to sell what they have to offer; to better manage and compete more effectively. Marketing provides a conceptual framework, and tools for managing these exchange relationshipsbetween what cities supply and demand. This chapter explores these issues, and examines the evolution of city marketing, from emphasizing infrastructures and urban regeneration towards stressing intangible values, such as multicultural integration, urban quality of life, appreciating aesthetics, the design and beauty of a city, a marketing of cities by means of intangible and emotional elements.
TopThe Identity Of Cities In Socio-Economic Globalization
As an outcome of economic globalization and the growing internationalization of markets, numerous relationships are developing that encourage a multiplicity and mixing of identities, in what Castells (1998) calls a network society. Cities, as the places or centers where these numerous flows of exchanges converge, gradually form an identity for themselves as a function of how these interconnections take shape within them. In this way, the concept of the identity of cities gains prominence. There are some cities that have clear identities relating to certain more or less unusual features that make them well known. Others, in contrast, especially large cities that constitute centers of power or world standards, become famous as an outcome of multiple facets (Table 1).