A window on: Liverpool

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Since the 2008 European Capital of Culture (hereafter abbreviated by the acronym ECoC), Liverpool presented  its strategies for urban regeneration to the media and the entire world, becoming a peculiar best practice in the international scenery. This success has been mainly due to two causes:
• the event marketing strategy, which was particularly simple and straightforward, re-positioning the city on the top destinations map;
• the branding strategy of the event, presented as a sort of event with no architecture (Garcia 2010), privileging the preservation and the enhancement of city culture.
Indeed, the first point consists of a simplified and communicative image of the city, artificially built to match with a selection of labeled items, circulating in the media: the place is the centre of the city, and its time is the future, its inhabitants are for the most part not poor, not old, not an ethnic minority, not unhappy.
The second point is the most critical: although there was no urban and architectural transformation for the event, the event is a reflection of a wide process of physical regeneration, evaluated in the long term. Beyond the event, the brand of Liverpool as a competitive and innovative city, continues to lead political choices in the city. The most hazardous result of this oriented storytelling was not to convey rhetorical and unrealistic images; the real risk was the resulting occurrence of selective  actions and  policies, and the distortion of existing meanings and contents, searching for a coherence between the built city and its carefully predetermined image.

NOTES
[1] Paul Jones is lecturer at the Department of Sociology of the University of Liverpool

SHORT REFERENCES
Allen Chris, Housing Market Renewal and social class, Routledge, London - New York, 2008
Bayley Stephen, Liverpool, Shaping the City, RIBA Publishing, London, 2010
Couch Chris, City of change and challenge, Urban planning and regeneration in Liverpool, Ashgate, Aldershot (UK), Burlington (US), 2003
Garcìa Beatriz, Creating an Impact, Liverpool's experience as European Capital of Culture,  University of Liverpool, Liverpool, 2010
Kim Yeong-Hyunt, Short John Rennie, Globalization and the City, Longman, Harlow (UK), 1999
McBane Jack, The rebirth of Liverpool, The Eldonian Way, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2008
Murden John, City of Change and Challenge, Liverpool Since 1945, in Belcham John, Liverpool 800, Culture, Character and History, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2006
O’ Brien Dave, No cultural policy to speak of, Liverpool 2008, in “Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events”, vol. 2, n. 2, 2010, pp. 113-128
Parkinson Michael, Make no little plans The regeneration of Liverpool city centre 1999, Report per Liverpool Vision, Nonconform Design Ltd, Liverpool, 2008

Annie Attademo
PhD at Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
E-mail: annieattademo@yahoo.it