ABSTRACT
Two paradoxes underpin all place marketing practices. First, the discourse produced by marketers tries to ‘grasp the city as a totality or, conversely, present quarters of the city as a total environment’ (Bass Warner and Vale, 2001, p. xviii), through the packaging of a complex political, social, cultural and economic space into a recognizable entity. But place marketers always have to select and single out specific sites and landmarks in that process, thus fragmenting urban space into ‘represented’ and ‘non-represented’ spaces. The represented spaces are sites or landmarks long associated with that particular place in the collective imagination; 1 or newly built sites, landmarks or buildings which are selected to symbolize the message(s) promoted by the place marketers. Those spaces, sites and buildings become visual symbols, emblems or icons for the entity as a whole through a process of association with desirable attributes and narratives. This association is performed through figures of speech such as metaphors, connotations and analogies, as explained in Chapter 2.
