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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.
Notes
1. In the supranational geopolitical terrain of Europe, city branding has long found institutional recognition, for example with the implementation of the European Capital of Culture scheme (Richards & Wilson, Citation2004; Aiello & Thurlow, Citation2006; Griffiths, Citation2006). The scheme, which began in 1985 with the title of the European City of Culture with the idea to ‘help to bring the peoples of the member states closer together’ (European Commission, Citation1985), was renamed the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) scheme in 1999 and is now funded within the EU Culture programme (Aiello & Thurlow, Citation2006). Every year a city is so designated to showcase its cultural life and performance. Glasgow was named European City of Culture in 1990, Liverpool in 2008, while Birmingham, defeated in 2008, participated in the bid for UK City of Culture 2013 together with Derry, Norwich, and Sheffield, a bid which was won by Derry in July 2010.
2. The phrase ‘urban marginalities’ here defines all forms of social exclusion retraceable in the contemporary city in Europe, social exclusion which is not alleviated, rather, is often made worse by the uprooting of traditional communities, the competitiveness of urban life and the weakening of the welfare system, especially in the present scenario of global economic downturn. Besides the well-known categories of underprivileged migrants, segregated ethnic minorities, the unemployed, the disabled and the elderly, a new, less visible but increasingly conspicuous configuration of dispossessed seems to be emerging in the city, cutting across class, ethnicity and gender: for example, single parents, youth receiving poor or inadequate schooling, underemployed young adults, and mature workers forced to retrain, or to retire before time.
3. Launched on 30 September 2010 in order to encourage the free use and re-use of public sector information, the UK Open Government Licence is based on the conviction that access to official data sets represents a civic right and a public asset in the contemporary knowledge economy.
4. The Demos publication, Logging On: Culture, Participation and the Web (Holden, Citation2007), is a good example of this national trend towards widespread and inclusive web literacy which was central to the New Labour agenda.
5. Though Vickery (Citation2007) recognizes a degree of credibility in the British city councils that worked in this direction, the expression ‘culture-led regeneration’ is far from being aproblematic, especially when culture becomes a very impoverished notion, covers what is in fact real-estate gentrification or becomes ‘subject to a national political agenda, emphasizing social and community welfare; for example, “housing-led” regeneration has since become a political imperative for all local authorities’ (Vickery, Citation2007, p. 22).
6. As an example of how e-government services reflect a wider national culture and intellectual investment, Gnoli et al. (Citation2006) compare the new Directgov website (2004), replacing the previous and less functional UK Online, to the equivalent Italian website (http://www.italia.gov.it), launched in 2002, showing the superiority of the information architecture of the British portal, which is grouped around target audiences and topics, over the hierarchical and one-dimensional taxonomy of its Italian counterpart.
7. Doubtless, the August 2011 London riots and David Cameron’s criticism of social networking sites as fuelling disorder add complexity to the potential uses of the web, since during the riots social media were both employed to orchestrate civil unrest and rally volunteers in the following clean-up operations.
8. From the City Mayors website: ‘Established in 2003, City Mayors encourages city leaders from across the world to develop innovative and sustainable solutions to long-standing urban problems such as housing, transport, education and employment. City Mayors also debates ways to meet the latest environmental, technological, social and security challenges, which affect the well-being of citizens’ (‘About Us’, http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/city_mayors.html).
9. ‘With a population of more than seven million people, London, the UK’s capital, has no equal among its UK peers and is followed by Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow and Sheffield. There are only three more British cities with a population of more than 500,000’ (http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/uk_topcities.html). (N.B. These figures refer only to the city centres; the Greater Manchester conurbation has a population of 2.6 million).
10. An additional Greater London Authority (GLA) initiative concerns the creation of the official London Data Store account on Twitter which releases ‘all of the Greater London Authority’s data for all Londoners to see and use free of charge’ (http://data.london.gov.uk).
11. ‘BEAT THE RECESSION’ (below a picture of a street sign showing Recovery Road). Bristol City Council is committed to helping the city manage in the current economic climate. These pages offer you advice, tips and ideas for beating the recession and managing your finances (Bristol City Council).