Images in action. City-Image making in processes of urban transformations

Having a good image, strong and well-defined image, seems to have become in recent times a sort of “guarantee of success”, however one might articulate such a concept. In today’s increasingly image-conscious (Jukes, 1990), appearance-oriented society of finely-edited communication, the image, by virtue of its potential as a medium for the experience of reality, has taken on the qualities of an object that can be acted on and manipulated, and therefore designed and built. Images of cities are no exception. The need expressed by municipalities to define a stronger image for a city finds its realisation in a multiplicity of policies and strategies that involve the transformation of urban space. Many recent urban development and redevelopment projects implemented by European cities in the past twenty years are explicitly aimed at building, enhancing or even overturning the image of a city, becoming a recurring theme that ever more frequently redefines priorities and the way choices are made in urban interventions. Well-defined image for cities is today a key point to reach different aims: to promote cities in the international scene, to attract firms and tourism, to recreate a sort of inner coherence for different projects of specific local context, to represent urban identity. But even though these goals were always present in urban history, the importance of the informational dimension, the condition of growing competition between cities and the use of urban marketing strategies have changed the nature and the role and also the content of the city images