Lynch, Urry and city marketing: Taking advantage of the city as a built and graphic image

Abstract

City marketing is usually addressed from the perspective of marketing theory. This article follows an alternative approach by exploring city marketing from the viewpoint of urban planning and the sociology of tourism. In his classic ‘The Image of the City’ (1960), planner Kevin Lynch found that people perceive the city predominantly as a built image, made up of distinct paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. In turn, sociologist John Urry argued in ‘The Tourist Gaze’ (1990) that for most of us the city is a (photo)graphic image. The work of Lynch, Urry and their colleagues suggests how important it is for city marketers to scan the urban landscape for built objects and (pseudo)authentic attractions that can be photographed well. If a city does not have imageable and photogenic features, it will be a hard job to communicate it to the outside world. Two brief urban case studies, one on the imageability of Enschede and the other on the tourist gaze on Barcelona, show that the theories discussed in this article might have some implications for the practice of city marketing.