Proud to Be Pride: A Discourse Analysis of the Presentation of Diversity on City Websites

Abstract

City-branding strategies today often stress ideas and stereotypes of culture and creativity. As urban managers increasingly focus on establishing cities as brands to position them at home and abroad (Saez et al 2013), a city’s official website becomes an important tool for brand construction and communication. In this paper we set out to study if and how diversity, here represented by gay friendliness, constitutes a component in creative branding of cities. The study is based on discourse analysis of material presented on official city websites of the five Northern European capitals. Our focus on gayness as an example of diversity shows that the topic is used in different ways in the communication of the city websites included in the study. While these cities might be seen as culturally similar, there are differences in how they present themselves regarding gayness. The results demonstrate a variation in the display of diversity both in terms of the character of the language used and in terms of the amount of information posted.