ABSTRACT
The proliferation of such electronic urban imagery, however, can lead to a blurring of the reality of the city and its image, and to social conflicts over how a city is marketed. Many actual residents of the city may take issue with the disinfected and
idealised urban images often portrayed by the marketing agencies. Such gulfs between the real and the simulated are, once again, a pervasive quality of postmodern urbanism that is encouraged by the instantaneous flows of images across time and space boundaries. To Paul Knox (1993; 17), ‘postmodernity, because of its anarchic, impulsive and parodic qualities, makes for particularly fluid and unstable relations between signifier and signified, image and reality’.
