Femininity As a City Marketing Strategy

Abstract

Rotterdam organised the festival ‘La City’ as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the city’s class position, using femininity as a tool. ‘La City’ was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, ‘La City’ campaign material, texts on the character of the city and interviews in local newspapers with policy-makers are analysed in the context of the urban renewal and gentrification policies of Rotterdam. This research shows how the city uses femininity as a marketing strategy to ‘cleanse’ Rotterdam of its working-class mythology as well as construing a hegemonic gender identity capable of excluding lower-class groups. Rotterdam, according to its own texts, is after bourgeois, feminine inhabitants that ‘lounge’ in ‘cocktail bars’ to replace the ‘rough’ men who worked in the harbour. ‘La City’ is one of many strategies to establish genderfication: the production of space for not only more affluent users (as gentrification is often defined), but also for specific gender notions. Genderfication is also established by practices of ‘mixing’ urban neighbourhoods and building homes for middle-class families.

Expanding the Domain of Festival Research: A Review and Research Agenda

“…) and community festivals (Chacko and Schaffer ; Lee and Kyle ). Consequently, understanding is limited regarding alternative themes, such as gender (Van Den Berg ), wildlife (Hvenegaard ; Lawton and Weaver ) and nature (Song et al . ).…”

“…Van Den Berg's () case study of the ‘La City’ festival in Rotterdam provides an interesting perspective on the use of festivals to change the image of a place. Specifically, it demonstrates use of a ‘genderfication’ strategy to encourage urban renewal and to change the image of a destination from one of masculinity and post‐industrialization to one of a service‐based, ‘feminine’, new economy.…”

“…Specifically, it demonstrates use of a ‘genderfication’ strategy to encourage urban renewal and to change the image of a destination from one of masculinity and post‐industrialization to one of a service‐based, ‘feminine’, new economy. Van Den Berg's () findings indicate that, while efforts to encourage a more feminine image may have been effective with certain audiences, such as white, middle‐class women, they simultaneously excluded others, including ethnically diverse populations.…”

“…Based on this, it is recommended that, despite the extensive resource implications, the staging of local festivals in tourist destinations needs to be marketed more effectively (McKercher et al 2006). Van Den Berg's (2012) case study of the 'La City' festival in Rotterdam provides an interesting perspective on the use of festivals to change the image of a place. Specifically, it demonstrates use of a 'genderfication' strategy to encourage urban renewal and to change the image of a destination from one of masculinity and post-industrialization to one of a servicebased, 'feminine', new economy.…”

Longing for Wikitopia: The study and politics of self-organisation

“…Rotterdam has become known in the Netherlands and in the academic literature as a city where revanchist sentiments have been forcefully expressed (Van den Berg, 2012;Van Eijk, 2010). Anxieties about the discontents of multicultural society are now compounded by concerns over austerity measures.…”