Globalization is dramatically changing the context of urban communities and the premises for urban development policy. Due to increased cross-boundary flows of resources, urban governments have become increasingly concerned about their role in the global economy. Such an orientation paves the way to a new role for cities, their strategic task being to adjust to the conditions of the global economy (Sellers 2002; Douglass 2002; Savitch and Kantor 2003; Anttiroiko and Kasvio 2005; Kresl and Fry 2005; Sassen 2006; Chien 2008; Anttiroiko 2009b). In the context of global intercity competition, the major goal of cities is to

increase their competitiveness, in which the positioning and attractiveness of a city have a critical function. Attraction-oriented strategy aims at effective absorption of external resources from the global space of flows. The operational side of attraction rests on promotion activities with tempting incentives offered to businesses, but it is assumed that such a competition is risky and may lead to a race to the bottom. Therefore the emphasis is increasingly on less costly and more synergistic city marketing, which utilizes symbolic assets through city branding and smart specialization though ‘city profiling’ that aim at attracting value within some special high-value adding service or high-tech sector. Mayors, councillors and urban managers know that they are in competition

with other cities on various markets. There is thus an imperative to learn more about city marketing. As stated by Kapferer, ‘[by] creating a good reputation for their town they give themselves a voice. Like brands, towns need to grow: they therefore need to attract new resources (people, workers, companies, finances and so on). Like any brand, they must also be able to define where their unique attractiveness lies, or what is known as positioning’ (2008: 126). Practically all cities with direct connections to the international economy have already met this challenge. They are engaged in some form of city marketing, projecting their image or brand to the outside world. Marketing and branding place most emphasis on promoting the attractiveness of the city as a business or tourist location. This book proposes a city attraction hypothesis that states that global intercity

competition is essentially about a city’s ability to attract the highest possible value from global flows of values in order to promote local development. The result of such a global intercity competition determines cities’ functions and positions in the global division of labour and thus in the global urban hierarchy. Ultimately it

determines city governments’ ability to increase prosperity and welfare in their communities. We look at this scene through ‘First World’ lenses and thus from the perspective of challenges faced by cities in the developed world. In practice, the discussion concerns primarily cities in North America, Western, Northern and Southern parts of Europe, and Asia-Pacific with a focus on East Asia, Singapore and Australia. What most of the major cities in these regions have in common is that they have faced the need to revitalize their industries and to restructure their economy from industrial to post-industrial. Practically all cities ranking highest on the ladders of the global urban hierarchy are in these areas. In this sense we discuss the global benchmark cities. This makes the discussion focused and manageable, even if it undeniably increases conventional wisdom at the expense of intellectual surprises, and erases the nuances and diversities inherent in the global urban system as a whole, characterized by the huge differences in profiles and scales of cities as well as their special national, cultural and historical contexts. The purpose of this book is to describe how globalization and especially global

intercity competition pose challenges to the development of post-industrial cities. The term ‘post-industrial’ may not be particularly fashionable in the postmodern age, but as the focus is on economic restructuring, diversity of post-industrial activities and local industrial policy, the chosen term is probably the best available. This book aims at analyzing the fundamental logic of attraction-oriented intercity competition, categorizing the economic city profile options associated with post-industrialism, identifying advanced cities in each post-industrial activity area on the basis of empirical sector-specific city rankings, and lastly, discussing the strategic and social dimensions of such attraction-oriented economic city branding. In order to shed light on the framing or contextual issues relating to city brand-

ing, we next briefly discuss:

(a) the approach applied in this book, i.e. ‘political economy’; (b) globalization as a mega-trend of our time and a conditioning factor for cities; (c) the rise of post-industrial society and the nature of post-industrial cities; (d) city branding in context; (e) the role of city rankings in analyzing cities’ global competition and position-

ing.