The Impact of Cultural Events on City Image_Rotterdam (1)

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Urban Studies, Vol. 41, No. 10, 1931–1951, September 2004

The Impact of Cultural Events on City Image:Rotterdam, Cultural Capital of Europe 2001

Greg Richards and Julie Wilson

[Paper first received, May 2003; in final form, March 2004]

Summary. Cities are increasingly using cultural events to improve their image, stimulate urbandevelopment and attract visitors and investment. As part of its event-led regeneration strategy,Rotterdam staged the ‘Cultural Capital of Europe’ event in 2001. The aims were to attract

visitors and to stimulate cultural consumption among residents, while positioning Rotterdam asa cultural destination. Over 2000 questionnaire responses by resident and non-resident visitors tothe Cultural Capital event were used to evaluate the image effects of the event. In depthinterviews were also undertaken with policy-makers and cultural managers, to permit evaluationof survey ndings in the context of richer qualitative material. The image of the city as a culturaldestination did improve in 2001, but the physical and tangible elements of the city’s image(modern architecture, water) and its character as the working city of the Netherlands continuedto dominate.

Introduction

Cities have long used mega events such as

World Fairs, Expos and sporting events as ameans of revitalising their economies, cre-ating infrastructure and improving their im-age (Getz, 1991). Recent studies of citymarketing and tourism have pointed to theincreasing use of events as a means to marketplaces and major cities in particular (for ex-ample, Law, 1993; Robertson and Guerrier,1998; Waitt, 1999, 2003; Schuster, 2001).This phenomenon can be linked to a generalincrease in competition between cities for theattention of important stakeholders, includingconsumers, investors and policy-makers. Asa result of the increasing integration of theglobal economy, a greater number of placesare drawn into this competitive environmentand, at the same time, the built environment,infrastructure and amenities in differentplaces tend to become more similar.

Cities therefore need to nd new ways of

distinguishing themselves from their com-

petitors. As Paddison (1993) points out, citymarketing is often directed at the levering of private capital to support infrastructural de-velopments. For example, signature build-ings frequently feature in urban strategies todevelop an image or ‘brand’ and create com-petitive advantage, often at great nancialcost. Recent examples include the BilbaoGuggenheim museum, the Tate Modern gal-lery in London and the Baltic Flour Mills inGateshead.

However, Paddison (1993) also underlinesthe relative inexibility of such infrastruc-ture-based strategies. The cost of buildingsuch landmarks is perhaps one of the mostimportant reasons why events have becomean increasingly important aspect of inter-urban competition in recent years. Eventsprovide a means of adding exibility to xedstructures, supplying a source of spectacle

Greg Richards is in the Fundacio Interarts, c/Mallorca 272, 9a, 08037 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Fax:

34 487 2644 and theSchool of Geography, Rovira i Virgili University. E-mail: [email protected]. Julie Wilson is in the School of Geography, Rovira i Virgili University, Placa Imperial Tarraco 1, 43005 Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain and the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Fax: 44 (0) 117 344 3002. E-mail: [email protected].



GREG RICHARDS AND JULIE WILSON1932

which adds to the image value of a landmark.Events may also be used as a platform forcreating landmarks, as in the case of the 1992World Expo in Seville or the 1992 OlympicGames in Barcelona. They often represent aless costly means of distinguishing placesand often generate signicant media interest.Events may also encourage people to visit aplace more than once and, by hosting a seriesof different events, a city may prole itself ina number of different potential markets. Cit-ies therefore compete ercely for the honourof hosting events such as the OlympicGames, the World Cup Final or a WorldExpo (Hall, 1992).

Cities and their hinterlands have becomestages for a continual stream of events,which lead eventually to the ‘festivalisation’of the city and ‘festival marketplaces’ (Har-vey, 1991). With the growth of the ‘symboliceconomy’ (Lash and Urry, 1994; Zukin,1995) and the ‘experience economy’ (Pineand Gilmore, 1999), culture has become in-creasingly important as a means of consum-ing the city (Ritzer, 1999). Indeed, Harvey

(1989) maintains that the growth of ‘block-buster’ events is a feature of the increasinglyrapid turnover of consumption.

In such a climate, cultural events in par-ticular have emerged as a means of improv-ing the image of cities, adding life to citystreets and giving citizens renewed pride intheir home city. This enhancement of com-munity pride and destination image follow-ing an event has been referred to as the ‘halo

effect’ (Hall, 1992), the ‘showcase effect’(Fredline and Faulkner, 1998) and the ‘feel-good effect’ (Allen et al. , 2002). Zukin ar-gues that

culture is a euphemism for the city’s newrepresentation as a creative force in theemerging service economy …[andthat]… culture is the sum of a city’samenities that enable it to compete forinvestment and jobs, its ‘comparative ad-

vantage’ (Zukin, 1995, p. 268).Zukin’s view of ‘culture’ as covering all the

in not just ‘traditional’, ‘high’ culture attrac-tions such as museums, theatres and concerthalls, but also increasingly includes elementsof ‘popular’ culture, such as pop music, fash-ion, ethnoscapes (Appadurai, 1990) andsport. Both high culture and popular culturehave become important sources for the im-ages which are used to underpin the ‘brandimage’ of cities (Kearns and Philo, 1993).

Increasing competition between cities in acrowded eld of images is one of the majorfactors stimulating cities to adopt suchbranding strategies, or even ‘hard branding’(Evans, 2003; Meurs and Verheijen, 2003)that seeks to transform xed cultural capitalinto competitive advantage through the stag-ing of cultural events or the construction of cultural landmarks. City branding used to beassociated with the ight from an industrialpast (Holcomb, 1993; Bramwell and Rawd-ing, 1996), but is now linked to enhancingthe urban landscape with globally brandedarts and entertainment destinations, encapsu-lated in the ‘fantasy city’ (Hannigan, 1998).As Hannigan (2003) suggests, a successful

brand should be instantly recognisable, playon the desire for comfort and certainty andprovide a point of identication for con-sumers in a crowded market-place.

Some major cultural events have arguablybecome ‘brands’ in their own right, such asthe Edinburgh Festival, the Cannes Film Fes-tival or the Notting Hill Carnival. The Eu-ropean Cultural Capital (ECC) event has alsoarguably become a ‘brand’, which is now

extending to other continents as well (Evans,2003). Such is the value of this brand that thehonour of staging the event is almost asercely contested as the Olympic Games. Forexample, 14 UK cities competed in the start-ing line-up for the honour of hosting the2008 ECC event.

However, it should be remembered thatthis strategy of using replicated and brandedevents as a means of distinguishing citiesleads to a paradox whereby those cities seek-ing to differentiate themselves and escaperoutine identities tend to end up striving for



CULTURAL EVENTS AND CITY IMAGE 1933

vey, 1989). Similarly, Rojek observes thegrowth of “universal cultural space” that“provides the same aesthetic and spatial ref-erences wherever one is in the world” (Ro- jek, 1995, p. 146). In response, new formatsfor major cultural events are now being de-vised to enhance the image of cities andregions (such as the Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona or the World CulturalForum in Rio de Janeiro, in 2004), even if these new formats tend to emulate previousmega-event models in reality. Nonetheless,the Universal Forum of Cultures 2004—orig-inally conceived as a stand-alone event forBarcelona—is now receiving competitive in-terest from cities including Durban, Fukuokaand Monterrey for hosting this latest globalbranded event in the future.

In the absence of experimenting with oraspiring to new formats, though, cities arestarting to innovate with existing formats,although the longevity of this particular strat-egy is uncertain. For example, hosts of morerecent ECC events have attempted to pindown a more distinctive aspect of the city’s

current (or desired) identity by employing aspecic theme for their version of the eventbut, to date, little has been done to evaluatewhether this type of strategy is sufcient toovercome the potential serial reproductioneffect of branded major cultural events. In-deed, the image effects of events on theirhost cities per se have not been examinedmuch in research thus far, in spite of thewide range of disciplines from which exist-

ing research on mega-events has emerged.The aim of this article is to examine theinuence of the European Cultural Capitalevent on city image, using the specic exam-ple of the Rotterdam ECC event staged in2001. It examines the success of the Rotter-dam 2001 ECC in terms of the aims estab-lished for the event, particularly in improvingits international image and generating econ-omic benets through tourism. The studydraws upon surveys of different types of visitor to the event—local residents anddomestic and international tourists—and

sons are also made with other studies of cityimage held elsewhere in Europe prior to andduring 2001, in order to monitor externalimage change for Rotterdam in the inter-national domain. In concentrating on the cul-tural image of the city developed for touristconsumption, the paper does not consider themany other potential aims of image change,such as attracting business tourism, mobilemiddle-class executives and investment.

Place Images and Events

The image of a place is usually very import-ant in attracting visitors and place imageresearch has been particularly prevalent inthe tourism studies eld. Research has tendedto underline the complexity of the imageconcept (for example, Jansson, 2003), a pointthat is made clear when reviewing the imageliterature, although in broad terms, imagescould be described as the ‘currency of cul-tures’ (Morgan and Pritchard, 1998),reecting and reinforcing particular sharedmeanings and beliefs and particular value

systems.Major events have become a particularvaluable form of cultural currency, particu-larly in terms of their image effects. As Hall(1992, p. 14) notes: “it is apparent that majorevents can have the effect of a shaping animage of the host community or country,leading to its favourable perception as a po-tential travel destination”. This potential hasbeen a reason for events being used as an

image-enhancement tool, particularly forlarge cities (Law, 1993; Holcomb, 1993;1999; Sassen and Roost, 1999; Judd andFainstein, 1999; Selby, 2003).

A major problem with such strategies isthat their impacts are very hard to measure.This is particularly true in the case of therelatively nebulous area of city image. Oneof the major problems is the complexity of images; multifaceted, highly subjective andoften aimed at different publics (Paddison,1993). Previous empirical work on visitors’images has highlighted the wide range of




scales (see, for example, Crompton, 1977;Goodrich, 1978; Pearce, 1982; Gartner andHunt, 1987; Richardson and Crompton,1988; Gartner, 1989; Calantone et al. , 1989),‘attribute checklists’ (Echtner and Ritchie,1991) or category-based approaches(Tapachai and Waryszak, 2000). Other re-searchers have examined unstructured andinterpretive qualitative data on tourist imagesand experiences (such as Reilly, 1990;Jenkins, 1999).

On the conceptual side, many theorisednotions of place imagery (most notably frombehavioural geography, for example, Pocock and Hudson, 1978; Golledge and Stimson,1997; Nasar, 1998), have distinguished be-tween ‘designative’ and ‘appraisive’ compo-nents of the image. The ‘designative’ orinformational aspect is related to the cate-gorisation of cognitive elements of the en-vironment. The ‘appraisive’ aspect isconcerned with feelings, values and mean-ings, or what is ‘felt’ about a place. Theappraisive component can itself be demar-cated into two different components (Pocock

and Hudson, 1978; Wilson, 2002)—The evaluative (concerned with the ex-

pression of an opinion) (see Nasar, 1998;Walmsley and Young, 1998).

—The affective (concerned with thespecication of a preference) (Gartner,1993; Dann, 1996).

The cognitive–affective dichotomy has beenemployed by many authors, albeit often with

differing terminology (for example, Echtnerand Ritchie, 1993; Gartner, 1993; Dann,1996; Baloglu and Brinberg, 1997; Um,1998). Other authors have shown that suchimages and their subjective meanings areoften shared as a ‘common image’ (Harvey,1973; Walmsley and Lewis, 1993) or ‘collec-tive images’ (Lynch, 1960). The currentstudy attempts to examine the common im-ages held by visitor groups to the RotterdamECC 2001 event, including local residentsand domestic and international tourists, interms of both the designative and appraisive

added to by the wide range of factors that caninuence image formation (see, for example,Mayo and Jarvis, 1981; Ahmed, 1994). Somestudies have developed models of image for-mation that include information sources (var-iety and type), socio-demographics andsocio-psychological travel motivations (Ba-loglu, 1996; Baloglu and McCleary, 1999) ortemporal factors (Gunn, 1993). Imagemodication (of images ‘received’ by indi-viduals and groups following direct experi-ence of the city) has been the focus of various studies (for example, Gunn, 1988;Pearce, 1982; Chon, 1990) which have em-phasised the difculty of changing rmlyxed preconceptions held by actual or poten-tial visitors. However, the current article fo-cuses on the modication of the ‘ projected ’images of the city, in that Rotterdam hasattempted to use cultural events as a meansof changing its image from that of a ‘work-ing city’ into that of a cultural city.

Some studies have also considered theprocesses of changing imagery received byvisitors—for example, through the use of different information sources (Telisman-Ko-suta, 1989; Butler, 1990; Bojanic, 1991) orspecically through pictorial images(MacKay and Fesenmaier, 1997). Other stud-ies have considered the effect of geographi-cal or cognitive distance from a place(Walmsley and Jenkins, 1992; Ankomah et al. 1995, 1996; Hunt, 1975). Familiarity witha place may also be important (Baloglu,2001) and this has often been measured interms of previous visitation or direct desti-nation experience (Pearce, 1982; Phelps,1986; Fridgen, 1987; Chon, 1990; Ahmed,1991; Fakeye and Crompton, 1991; Hu andRitchie, 1993; Milman and Pizam, 1995;Dann, 1996; Baloglu, 2001).

The current study combines some of thedifferent approaches to place image de-scribed in the literature by examining differ-ent components of imagery, using theconceptual framework shown in Figure 1.Longer-term changes in image are also




Figure 1. Components of place image.

the image effect of the Rotterdam 2001 ECCevent.

Previous Studies of Event Impact

Although festivals range widely in their na-ture and require a wealth of perspectives tobe studied properly (Schuster, 2001), most

research on event impacts has tended to con-centrate on the economic impacts (for exam-ple, Crompton and McKay, 1994). However,an economic emphasis is perhaps limited interms of understanding the full range of event impacts. For example, in his pre-eventstudy of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Waitt(1999) identied shifts in the political agendafor staging ‘hallmark events’. First, a shiftfrom welfare to entrepreneurial goals; sec-

ondly, a functional transformation of cityscapes to generate cultural capital; and,thirdly, the growing importance of mediaimages. This indicates that economic goalsare being augmented by socio-cultural andimage objectives. Hence, recent studies havebegun to consider the socio-cultural impactsof events, such as Johnston’s (1999) socialimpact assessment of the Sydney Gay andLesbian Mardi Gras; Waitt’s (2003) study of the socio-cultural impacts of the 2000 Syd-ney Olympics and Jones’ (2001) study of the1999 Rugby World Cup. Attention has also

garded as the image makers of moderntourism” (Hall, 1992, p. 155). Strong cityimages based on events are perhaps now soimportant that those images “are starting todominate the natural or physical features inthe identication of cities” (Burns et al.,1986, p. 5). Hiller (1989, 1998) and Ritchieand Smith (1991) were among the rst to

place importance on the image effects of major events. For example, Ritchie andSmith’s study of the 1988 Calgary WinterOlympics indicated that the image of Calgaryhad changed in the minds of many non-resi-dent respondents. Since the early 1990s,there has been an increase in the number of studies acknowledging the image impacts of major events (for example, Foley, 1991;Roche, 1994, 2000). However, a somewhatnarrow and one-dimensional interpretation of the term ‘image’ has often been adopted insuch studies, with little consideration for thedifferent dimensions of the image of theevents’ host destinations. In parallel, verylittle consideration has been given to event-based image effects over time.

This lack of attention to the image effectsof events in general also extends to the studyof cultural events and, as Formica andUysal have argued, “few if any studiesrelated to cultural and historical internationalfestivals have been developed and pub-




measure image effects, it is not surprisingthat previous studies of cultural event impacthave also tended to concentrate on economicor visitor impacts (for example, Myerscough,1994; Gratton and Taylor, 1992; MunichTourist Ofce, 2002).

Recently however, more image-related im-pact studies of cultural events have begun toemerge. For example, Myerscough’s (1991)study of the 1990 Glasgow ECC event brieyconsidered image effects. This researchshowed a more positive cultural image of thecity developing in the run-up to the event andduring the year itself, but dropping off veryrapidly thereafter. Dos Santos and da Costa(1999) examined the image impacts of theLisbon 1998 Expo event and found that overthree-quarters of visitors considered that ithad enhanced the international image of Lis-bon and of Portugal as a whole. Puczko andRatz (2001) studied the image of Budapest inrelation to the Budapest Spring Festival. Thisresearch indicated that festival visitors had amore positive image of the city than non-vis-itors. In spite of this apparently positive im-

age effect, however, Budapest did not haveas strong an image as Vienna, one of itsclosest tourism destination rivals. A recentstudy of the Edinburgh Festival examines thesuccess of the event in modifying the imageof Scotland as a whole, but does notspecically deal with the image of the cityitself (Prentice and Andersen, 2003). Otherstudies that purport to assess image changefollowing major cultural events do exist, but

have tended to be based more on assertionthan empirical evidence (for example,Robertson and Guerrier, 1998).

The present study attempts to provide amore complete evaluation of the impact of the Rotterdam event on the image of the city,both for visitors to the event itself and longi-tudinally in the European tourist market as awhole. The following two sections of thearticle give a general background to the Eu-ropean Cultural Capital event and the city of Rotterdam.

event originally had purely cultural aims.The event was designed to “help bring thepeoples of the member-states [of the Eu-ropean Union] closer together” through the“expression of a culture which, in its histori-cal emergence and contemporary develop-ment, is characterized by having bothcommon elements and a richness born of diversity” (European Commission, 1985).The development of the original event con-cept was also motivated by a wish to give theCommunity (later Union) “an attractive im-age” (Sjøholt, 1999, p. 341). Overall, theevent was designed to reect the culturalpositioning of the European Union (EU) as a‘unity in diversity’, with each host city dis-playing its own local or national culture aswell as the shared elements of ‘Europeanculture’. The promotion of a shared Eu-ropean culture has arguably become an im-portant aspect of EU policy in recent years,since culture is considered an important‘glue’ which binds the EU member-statestogether (Richards, 2001).

Athens was designated the rst EuropeanCultural Capital in 1985. Since then, theevent has rotated around the member-statesof the EU; with a different city beingawarded the honour every year. 1 The aims of the event were basically twofold: rst, tomake the culture of the cities accessible to aEuropean audience; and, secondly, to createa picture of European culture as a whole(Corijn and van Praet, 1994). However, asthe event has developed, it has been used indifferent ways by the cities, either to support,extend or challenge the original ECC con-cept.

Corijn and van Praet (1994), in their re-view of the history of the Cultural Capitals,highlight the way in which different citiestreated the designation. Athens—for exam-ple, concentrated on big foreign names andignored ancient Greek art. Florence high-lighted its own historical importance, whileAmsterdam projected itself as a European artcity. Berlin was criticised for having an eli-




Paris. The common feature of all these citieswas that they were already established Eu-ropean ‘Cultural Capitals’, identied by Bi-anchini and Parkinson (1993) as having awealth of cultural facilities.

Sjøholt (1999) identied common ele-ments in the approaches adopted by the ear-lier host cities—for example, the ‘festivalprototype’ (Florence ’86 and Dublin ’91),‘workshop prototype’ (Amsterdam ’87 andW. Berlin ’88), the ‘creative tradition proto-type’ (Madrid). The turning-point for theECC event came with the designation of Glasgow in 1990, an example of the ‘in-frastructural implementation’ prototype(Sjøholt, 1999) which was also characteristicof Lisbon ’94 and Athens ’85. However,Glasgow (unlike its predecessors) was nei-ther a capital city nor one of the established‘cultural destinations’ of Europe (van derBorg, 1994). Glasgow won the nominationagainst competition from other British citieslargely on the basis of promised commercialsponsorship and the fact that it planned touse the event to stimulate urban regeneration

and to boost the image of Glasgow as acultural city. Certainly, Glasgow has beenexemplied as a model of ‘image reconstruc-tion’ that was later copied by other cities but,although the Glasgow event is often seen asa success regarding its new image, evidenceto underpin this assumption is inconclusive(Gomez, 1999). Paddison (1993) argues thatthe event had relatively little impact on theoverall image of the city, underlining the

transience of event impacts. As Bianchini(1999) argues in the context of Europeancultural policy, this transition marks the ad-vent of the ‘age of city marketing’ (mid1980s to present). In this period, concernshifted away from the socio-political con-cerns of the 1970s towards economic devel-opment and urban regeneration policies. Theextent to which urban redevelopment andcity marketing objectives have replacedpurely cultural ones in cultural policy is illus-trated by the objectives of recent hosts of theECC event. For example, the Glasgow event

40 and 47 million Euros in 1990, mainly as aresult of tourist expenditure (Myerscough,1991).

In 2000, the ECC event in Helsinki hadtwo major aims: “to enhance the quality of life of the inhabitants and to increase inter-national awareness of Finnish culture”(Helsinki City of Culture Foundation, 2000,p. 3). Helsinki, one of the lesser-known Eu-ropean capitals, wanted to put itself on thecultural map of Europe with the event. Intheir study of Porto 2001, dos Santos et al.(2003) concluded that the event had not beenas successful in attracting visitors as the 1994Lisbon ECC event, but it had succeeded inwidening the cultural audience for Porto. InBruges (ECC in 2002), a city which alreadyattracts 3 million visitors a year, one of themajor aims was to convince more day visi-tors to stay overnight, thereby increasing theeconomic impact of tourism (Brugge 2002,2001). An additional aim of the Bruges 2002event was to shift the image of the city awayfrom that of an historical city with traditionalcultural heritage by adding elements of con-

temporary culture, an aim shared by the otherEuropean Cultural Capital of 2002: Sala-manca, in Spain.

Although many cities have claimed thatcultural motives remain at the fore of theevent, success is often measured in terms of the visitors it attracts. Annual visitor num-bers increased substantially relative to theyear prior to the event in a number of cit-ies—for example, 12 per cent more in

Copenhagen in 1996 (theme: ‘Kaleidoscope’;Fridberg and Koch-Nielsen, 1997) andStockholm (‘Culture and the city’) in 1998,and a claimed threefold increase in the caseof Antwerp in 1993 (‘choose arts’)(Richards, 2000). Sjøholt (1999, p. 343)maintains that common to most host cities upuntil the Millennium was a hope that the yearcould function as “a seedbed for multipliereffects within cultural industries” and, giventhe trajectory since then, this looks set tocontinue as a key aspiration. The ECC eventis also attractive not only as a means of




and a means of enhancing the image of thecity and these were also the basic argumentsused by Rotterdam when the city began bid-ding for the event.

Rotterdam as a Cultural Capital

With a population of almost 600 000, Rotter-dam is the second city of the Netherlands,Europe’s largest port and a major industrial,trade and business centre. Rotterdam hasundergone a long post-war trajectory of economic and cultural regeneration (Meursand Verheijen, 2003) and its regional econ-omy experienced strong post-war growth.However, in the 1960s, the city began tosuffer problems because of overdependenceon transport and traditional manufacturing.In the 1980s, Rotterdam experienced re-newed growth in the business services sectorand managed to attract the headquarters of many large international rms. In the 1990s,the city also developed new ‘clusters’ intelecommunications, audio-visual services,design and media, which have provided a

basis for developing the city as an ‘arts andcultural city’ (van den Berg et al. , 1999).However, in terms of the cultural sector,Rotterdam has always been in the shadow of the Dutch capital, Amsterdam. Competitionwith Amsterdam has provided a major stimu-lus to develop a cultural image alongside theexisting image of an industrial port city.

In Rotterdam, therefore, culture has longbeen a major theme of tourism marketing.

The strategic marketing plan for the Rotter-dam city tourist ofce (VVV) for the period1992–94, for example, identied the key ele-ments of the tourist product as water, archi-tecture and culture. The weakness of Rotterdam was its relatively poor supply of traditional cultural facilities, particularly onan international level, compared with citiessuch as Amsterdam. Rotterdam therefore de-cided to project an image of being a modernart city, using its futuristic architecture as aspearhead. Product developments undertakenin the 1990s in relation to cultural tourism

ment of the Museum Quarter and the Wittede With ‘cultural quarter’ (Hitters andRichards, 2002).

In Rotterdam, the general cultural policyhas shifted away from the traditional Dutchmodel of decentralising and subsidising cul-tural resources (Bevers, 1993), towards low-ering barriers to participation throughmarketing (Brouwer, 1993). By enriching thecultural life and prole of the city, the localauthority hopes to be able to compete moreeffectively with other ‘second-tier cities’(such as Barcelona, Frankfurt and Milan) inattracting tourists, investment and jobs. Toachieve this, a development programme wasestablished with the aims of stimulating in-ternationally orientated culture, building theimage of Rotterdam as a cultural festival andevent city, and supporting the applied arts,such as architecture, design and photography.In fact, image is seen as so important forRotterdam that an ‘image manager’ was ap-pointed in the city’s Communications De-partment.

Brouwer (1993) argues that, for Rotter-

dam, art is becoming increasingly inter-changeable with sport and tourism, asanother ‘top attraction’ that can be used toattract the ‘new urban middle class’, whosehigh incomes can stimulate the local econ-omy. As a result of this cultural event-ledstrategy, Rotterdam recorded the highestevent attendance growth rate of all Dutchcities in the 1990s (Bonink and Richards,1997).

The staging of the ECC event in 2001tted well in this general strategy. The de-cision to bid for the event was taken afterlocal government ofcials had visited theECC in Antwerp in 1993. Impressed by thesuccess of Antwerp, which claimed to haveattracted 10 million visitors that year (al-though only 2.2 million of these actuallyattended events in the Cultural Capital pro-gramme) (TFPA, 1994), Rotterdam decidedto emulate its closest rival port city. Thebudget for the Rotterdam event was almost24 million Euros; much lower than most




Table 1. Budget for selected European Cities of Culture/Cultural Capitals

City Budget (million € )Year

27.2Athens1985Florence1986 20.4

9.01987 Amsterdam1988 W. Berlin 27.21990 Glasgow 54.4

45.31991 DublinMadrid1992 22.6

40.81993 Antwerp1994 Lisbon 23.61995 Luxembourg 136.1

86.21996 CopenhagenThessaloniki1997 285.8

54.41998 Stockholm1999 Weimar 28.12001 Rotterdam 23.6

Porto2001 104.0

Source : based on Richards et al . (2002).

event. The remainder of this article focuseson the research ndings to date. Longitudinalstudies of the long-term effects of the eventare planned over the coming years.

Methods

A combination of quantitative and qualitativedata sources was employed in the currentstudy, including surveys of residents andnon-resident visitors to Rotterdam at the timeof the ECC event and depth interviews withkey informants from the cultural sector inRotterdam.

A study of visitors to the Rotterdam ECC2001 event was undertaken, carried out incollaboration with Rotterdam CultureleHoofdstad (or RCH, the event organisers),the City of Rotterdam and Rotterdam Festi-vals with the aims of establishing a visitorprole for and examining the motivations,activities, attitudes and expenditure of eventattendees. Surveys of visitors were conduc-ted at 11 different events within the ECCprogramme, selected to represent a mix of

cultural forms (including ‘high’ culturalevents such as the Hieronymus Bosch exhi-bition and ‘popular’ culture events such asthe WOMEX world music event) and eventswith a local or a more international character.The surveys were carried out predominantlythrough self-completion questionnaireshanded out and collected during the events.A small number of questionnaires were re-turned after the events by post. A total of

2200 questionnaires were returned. Many of the items used in the questionnaire werederived from the ATLAS surveys describedbelow, ensuring a high degree of comparabil-ity between the two studies. The image at-tributes were based on those alreadydeveloped by Rotterdam Marketing (WE-MAR, 2000), again allowing comparisons tobe made with other image measurementsprior to the event (the 13 image attributes arelisted in Table 2).

A study of the external image of Rotter-dam and other cultural destinations in Europe

arate activities, which attracted a total of 2.25million visits (Richards et al. , 2002). Thediversity of the Rotterdam programme sup-ported the overall theme of ‘Rotterdam is

many cities’; based on a cultural programmethat was much more ambitious than the jointECC in 2001, Porto, which attracted 1.25million visits to the 450 events in its pro-gramme. The Porto theme was ‘Bridges tothe future’, which underlined a desire to“associate the image of Porto with a desirefor the future” (Porto 2001, 2001, p. 3).

The basic aims of the Rotterdam ECC2001 event were to:

—stage a festival with activities aimed at thewhole city, attracting a broad audience aswell as art-lovers;

—strengthen structurally the cultural infra-structure of the city in terms of partici-pation, activities and facilities;

—help to improve the international culturalimage of Rotterdam; and

—generate long-term economic benets—for example, by stimulating tourism.

In order to determine the extent to whichthese aims had been achieved and to analyse




Table 2. Agreement with image attributes among visitors to Rotterdam 2001 European Cultural Capital(percentage totally agree)

Residents of Zuid ForeignImage attribute Other Dutch Image

Holland visitorsRotterdammers dimensionvisitorsof Rotterdam Total

Modern 66.4 Designative84.9 80.178.6 88.0architecture

Water 79.679.9 Designative83.8 89.1 68.5Multicultural 83.1 81.3 85.3 60.2 77.5 AppraisiveWorking city 84.2 Appraisive79.7 76.381.3 57.0International 74.4 73.777.5 Appraisive84.3 61.8Dynamic 66.3 70.9 75.4 44.9 63.7 AppraisiveCulture and art 64.0 Appraisive65.3 59.071.3 38.1Lots to discover 62.1 57.7 71.7 33.2 56.8 AppraisiveEvents 65.8 60.4 65.8 26.2 55.7 DesignativeShopping 54.4 Designative66.7 50.159.7 25.9Nightlife 43.5 46.3 42.3 21.4 38.5 DesignativeCosy 13.0 Appraisive38.5 31.141.1 32.2

(gezelligheid )2

Unsafe 17.720.5 Appraisive19.1 21.4 8.4

1999 and 2001/02. This study involved sur-veys which covered the prole of the visitorsand their assessment of destination image for19 European cities, with a total of 12 000responses over the 2 survey periods. Thesesurveys obviously exclude people who didnot visit cultural sites during this period.

By comparing the results of these surveysit is possible to assess the short-term imageeffects of the Rotterdam event.

In order to assess in more detail thelonger-term effects, a series of depth inter-views were conducted with policy-makers,cultural venue managers and marketing or-

ganisations on the impact of the event on thecultural climate of the city and its image as acultural destination. A total of 10 interviewswere completed in 2002/03.

Research Findings

Visitors to the RCH 2001 Event

The overall visitor prole for the event asrevealed by the RCH 2001 study was notsignicantly different from that of previousstudies of cultural attractions and events un-

were divided almost evenly between maleand female. Over half the respondents wereover the age of 40, underlining the appeal of ‘high’ culture events to an older audience.Over 70 per cent of the sample was eitheremployed or self-employed, with signicantgroups of retired people (12 per cent) andstudents (9 per cent). The visitors were pre-dominantly from managerial or professionalbackgrounds, and the vast majority (over 70per cent) have a higher educationqualication. The relatively high status of therespondents is underlined by the fact thatalmost 40 per cent of the sample had annual

incomes above 40 000 Euros.The nal sample of visitors to the Rotter-dam ECC 2001 event consisted of 48 percent local residents, 35 per cent domestictourists and 17 per cent foreign tourists. Acomparison with representative visitor sur-veys held at the same events indicated thatour sample contained fewer local residentsand more foreign tourists than the total visi-tor population to the Rotterdam ECC.

Visitors’ Image of Rotterdam




dents and tourists visiting Rotterdam ECC2001 events were the designative, physicalattributes of modern architecture and thewater in the city (see Table 2). These arefollowed by four appraisive image compo-nents: Rotterdam as a multicultural city, aworking city, its international orientation andits dynamism . These elements of the imageall stem from the function of Rotterdam as amajor international port and a major indus-trial centre. In essence, these componentsdene the character of the city as seen byboth residents and visitors. Culture and art isstill a relatively highly rated appraisive im-age component, illustrating that the Rotter-dam ECC has been successful in raising theprole of art and culture facilities in the city. Events , shopping and particularly nightlifescore lower as designative image aspects,perhaps because these may be perceived asmore general urban amenities that are notused by all visitors.

Perhaps most signicantly, the appraisivecomponents cosy and unsafe score the low-est. Because these components are related to

people’s personal feelings about the city(they can both be classied as appraisive-af-fective), clearly the city does not affect visi-tors very strongly on a personal level. Thisimplies that the city lacks the ‘atmosphere’necessary to affect visitors either in a posi-tive or a negative sense. Rotterdam is notreally seen as a cosy city, apart from byRotterdammers. The majority of visitors donot feel that Rotterdam is unsafe, but Rotter-

dammers feel more unsafe than tourists, per-haps because they are more aware of thecrime that does take place. Dutch touristsfrom outside Rotterdam tend to imagine Rot-terdam in terms of its physical features andappraisive aspects such as ‘multicultural’,‘international’ and ‘dynamic’. Residents of Rotterdam tended to be much more positiveabout their city than tourists in terms of thestrength of their agreement with favourableimage attributes.

Some of the image attributes for Rotter-dam are strongly correlated with each other

to the association of Rotterdam with eventsare most highly correlated with associationswith art and culture and lots to discover .There is also a signicant positive correlation(r 2 0.484) between the score given for theevent’s programme and the score for Rotter-dam as a tourism destination, which suggeststhat the ECC event had some positive impacton the image of Rotterdam as a tourist desti-nation. The image of Rotterdam as a citywith lots of events was also positively corre-lated with its score as a tourism destination.This indicates that visitors who perceive thecity as an event city also see it as moreattractive because of the existence of events.

A comparison of 10 image indicators com-mon to the current study and image researchundertaken in 2000 by Rotterdam Marketing(WEMAR, 2000) indicates that the score forart and culture was considerably higher in2001 (see Table 3). Culture was ranked 10thby the 2000 respondents compared with aranking of 5th for visitors to the RotterdamECC event in 2001. Although this differencecan be partly explained by a more positive

reaction among the more culturally orien-tated visitors to the actual ECC event, asurvey of residents of Rotterdam and the restof the Netherlands carried out in 2001 by the Algemeen Dagblad , a Rotterdam-based na-tional newspaper, also indicated an 11 percent rise in the ‘cultural rating’ of the cityover the same period (Hamerlynck, 2001).Although the ranking of art and cultureamong the image attributes of Rotterdam

apparently increased in 2001 among boththose who had visited Rotterdam and non-visitors, the traditional image aspects of thecity remained dominant (Table 3). A rank correlation between image attributes in thecurrent ECC 2001 study and the WEMAR2000 Rotterdam image study indicated a highdegree of consistency in the ranking of mostof the common attributes ( r 2 0.73).

When looking at the image of Rotterdamaccording to visitor characteristics,signicant differences are evident. For exam-ple, women are far more likely to agree that




Table 3. Rotterdam image attributes before and during the RCH 2001 event(percentage of respondents agreeing with attribute)

RCH 2001Image attribute of WEMAR Algemeen Dagblad 2000 study 2001 studyRotterdam study

80Modern architecture 6998Water/harbour 8088

76Multicultural 6989Working city 7579

Culture and art 42 53 5855Events 51

Shopping 71 5038Nightlife 6457

Cosy (gezelligheid ) 46 32Unsafe 4045 18

to think Rotterdam is a more international,multicultural city, which they associate morepositively with shopping, nightlife andevents. Older respondents tend to emphasisethe dynamism of Rotterdam and its associa-tions with water; images with a more tra-ditional basis that reect the city’s sea portorientation. A similar division is evident

when looking at students and retired people.Events as an image associated with Rotter-dam tend to be emphasised by students andthose in employment far more than retiredrespondents, which may suggest that the cur-rent events policy does not provide as muchbenet for senior citizens.

When looking at foreign respondents,there are some marked differences accordingto tourist origin. For example, French tourists

tend not to agree that Rotterdam is a multi-cultural city, possibly because they also tendto visit high culture events with low ethnicminority participation. German tourists tendto see the city as more international thanFrench tourists. Belgian respondents alsotend to see Rotterdam as more international,as well as being linked to culture and art,architecture, shopping, dynamic, lots to dis-cover and having lots of events. In spite of the initial assumption that the more positiveattitude of the Belgian tourists might relate toa high frequency of visitation (due to the

ence in image attributes by extent of previousvisitation.

Relationships between place image and rea-sons for visiting Rotterdam . The reaction tothe different image attributes for Rotterdamvaried according to the visitation patterns of respondents. Tourists coming to Rotterdamfor the rst time were signicantly less likelyto agree totally with the attributes than oth-ers, probably because they did not haveenough information to make a rm judge-ment about the nature of the city. The imageof the city therefore appears to becomestronger with a higher frequency of visitation(hence a higher degree of familiarity), al-though the greatest difference is found be-tween rst-time visitors and those who havevisited only once or twice before. It seems

that the image of the city is sharpened con-siderably between the rst and the second orthird visits, with subsequent visits havingconsiderably less impact.

There were also signicant differences inimage in terms of purpose of visit. Thosecoming to Rotterdam specically for theECC event tended to see Rotterdam as aninternational city with modern architecture.Interestingly these respondents tended to seeRotterdam less as a cultural city or a centrefor events. This may be because people witha specic motivation for visiting Rotterdam




Tourists who agreed most strongly with theimage attributes for Rotterdam were alsomore likely to be highly satised with theirvisit. This suggests that those people whoidentied most closely with the image thatRotterdam promotes are also most likely tobe satised with their visit to the city and theevent. This underlines the importance of en-suring that visitor experiences of the city arerealistic against their expectations. In ad-dition, tourists who saw Rotterdam as a suit-able destination for a cultural holiday werealso signicantly more likely to be satisedwith their visit to the city. These touristswere also more likely to see Rotterdam as acultural and art city.

The image of Rotterdam relative to other cities . One aspect of the image assessment of Rotterdam was to ask visitors to evaluateRotterdam and a number of other cities ascultural destinations (Figure 2). This ques-tion was posed in previous years during theATLAS surveys in different European coun-tries, and was also posed in other locations

during 2001. This makes it possible to judgethe image effects of the Rotterdam ECCevent over time as well as providing anadditional measure of the image impacts of the event for people who did not visit Rotter-dam in 2001.

When the image of Rotterdam is measuredagainst other European cities over time, it isclear that the Rotterdam ECC had a positiveeffect on the image of the city in 2001. The

proportion of respondents to the ATLAS sur-veys conducted outside Rotterdam indicatingthat they considered Rotterdam to be in thetop 5 cultural destinations in Europe in-creased from under 3 per cent in 1999 to 5per cent in 2001. Rotterdam consequentlyrose from 20th place to 15th place in theranking of 22 European cities as culturaldestinations in the ATLAS survey.

Tourism data also indicate a short-termincrease of tourists to Rotterdam in 2002,with an increasing percentage of foreigntourists within this (Table 4). However, the

been short-term. Also interesting was that thepercentage of foreign tourists droppedagainst domestic tourists in hotels during theECC year itself but returned to the 2000 levelafter the event.

Perspectives of the Rotterdam Cultural Sec-tor

The interviews conducted with policy-mak-ers, event organisers and venue managers inRotterdam were also important in interpret-ing the image effects of the event. Most of the interview respondents felt that the ECC2001 event had a positive impact on theimage of Rotterdam, although there weredifferential effects within the city.

The event gave an extra impulse in dis-playing the cultural face of Rotterdam topeople from outside the city. However,there was little image change among localresidents, except for those in the culturalsector (Rotterdam Festivals).

One of the problems identied by intervie-

wees was the ambitious nature of the eventprogramme, which made it difcult to ‘read’for those outside the cultural sector. Some of the most successful events were smaller in-novative projects, which lowered the overallvisibility of the event, particularly for thelocal audience. “In 2001 people didn’t ex-perience a big event … If you didn’t look forit, you didn’t see it” (journalist, Algemeen Dagblad ). The few major events, such as the

Hieronymus Bosch exhibition that attractedover 200 000 visitors, did have an impact:“I’ve never seen so many queues in Rotter-dam. People suddenly said, ‘Here’s some-thing good’” (journalist, Algemeen Dagblad ).

Many interviewees made a clear distinc-tion between cultural visitors and other visi-tors. Most accepted that the cultural capitalattracted mainly those people who visit cul-ture anyway, rather than reaching signicantnew audiences. Rotterdam was not intendedas a ‘mass event’ and therefore did not tryand reach the culturally uninterested. This




Figure 2. The image of Rotterdam in 1999 and 2001.

little in the programme for local people(journalist, Algemeen Dagblad ). Those in-volved in organising the event, however,maintain that “These people never go to cul-tural events anyway” (Marketing Depart-ment, Rotterdam Historical Museum). Asoutlined above, the event aimed for improve-ment in the city’s cultural infrastructure interms of cultural participation, facilities andactivities. However, the visitor surveys indi-cated no evidence of a signicant extension

cultural facilities was undertaken specicallyfor the Rotterdam ECC 2001 event (unlikewith the Porto ECC 2001, where a newconcert hall—the Casa de Musica —and anew museum were constructed specially).The main cultural infrastructure benets inRotterdam are therefore only likely to beseen in the long term, if some of the activi-ties developed as part of the 2001 pro-gramme are repeated. The cultural sectorrespondents also expressed general satisfac-




Table 4. Visitors staying in hotels in Rotterdam 2000–03

Percentage of allTotal hotel guests overnight stays inPercentage of

Foreign touristsYear the Netherlandsin Rotterdam

2.972000 59.6462 4002001 511 800 3.4054.9

3.092002 62.4462 8002.792003 a 188 300

a First six months only.

lion against a total budget of € 24 million),but there was a perception among the culturalvenues that the commercial sector beneted

more from these than the cultural attractions.The respondents generally acknowledged

that there was little use made of the ‘Eu-ropean’ aspects of the event. Although Rot-terdam was designated as ECC together withPorto, the links between the two cities wereweak, apart from one or two joint activities.The organisers of Porto 2001 in particularwere critical of Rotterdam, indicating thatthey felt there was little willingness on the

part of their Dutch counterparts to work to-gether (interviews with Teresa Lago and Pe-dro Burmester, Porto, 2003).

Overall, the consensus was not that thecultural capital event achieved spectacularimprovements to the image of Rotterdam;rather, it was viewed largely as one part of the long process of revitalisation of the city.Following the physical redevelopment afterthe Second World War, there was a need toadd cultural elements to the existing econ-omic fabric, explaining why Rotterdam hastherefore expended a lot of effort in recentyears in developing cultural events and fa-cilities in order to improve the cultural imageof the city. Interviewees generally felt thatthe ECC event could be seen as the crowningglory of this effort. In reality, however, theevent may mark the end of a major phase inthe city’s history, as the election of a moreconservative local government in 2002 mighthave the effect of reducing funding for cul-ture, making the continuation of previousi h dif l

city … but this has changed during thepast 15 years. The Cultural Capital in 2001is closing a period when the Labour Party

tried to create a diverse cultural image forRotterdam … [following the elec-tions] … I think the cultural image of Rot-terdam will change dramatically(Rotterdam Historical Museum).

However, some respondents are condentthat the momentum created by the ECC eventwill continue

because the local government has changedeveryone is very anxious that [the im-provements in the cultural climate] willnot continue … but the energy is there(Cultural Department, Rotterdam).

One of the ways in which the city is planningto capitalise on the momentum of the ECCevent is through the organisation of anothercultural year to be called Rotterdam 2005. Atthe same time, there is also a feeling that the2001 cultural capital event was a distinctone-off. The event was different from mostof the other major events developed in Rot-terdam because it had no history or develop-mental trajectory and thus there was lesschance to learn lessons from it or to anchorthe event in its local context. During 2001,there were plans to create an archive of theevent, which would act as a reference sourcefor future events in Rotterdam and othercities, but this plan dissipated after the 2001event was completed. There was also the




as one respondent from the DevelopmentCorporation noted: “a year is not longenough to notice a change in the image of Rotterdam”. However, long-term imagemonitoring is now likely to be linked to the‘large events policy’ being developed by thecity.

The ndings from the interviews reect toa large extent those of the visitor surveys. Ingeneral, the image effects of 2001 are viewedin a positive light, but debate remains as tothe differential effects of image changeamong residents and tourists and about thedurability of the positive image effects of Rotterdam as European Cultural Capital,2001.

Conclusions

The research presented here illustrates differ-ent aspects of the complex process of stimu-lating image change through a major culturalevent. The data indicate a marked positivechange in the image of Rotterdam, amongresidents and external audiences, at least im-

mediately following the event. This generalsatisfaction with the return on investment inthe event seems justied, particularly whencompared with the results of the Porto 2001ECC, which invested far more but obtainedfewer benets in terms of either imagechange or economic impact (Richards et al.2002).

However, the image impacts observed inRotterdam also underlined their complexity.

The image of Rotterdam seems to be stronglydifferentiated in terms of its components andin terms of the image held by differentgroups of visitors and thus it is clear that weneed to start talking about ‘images’ ratherthan ‘image’. In general, the image compo-nents identied most strongly by respondentswere the designative and tangible aspects of the cityscape, such as modern architectureand water . The appraisive-evaluative imagecomponents associated with the ‘character’of Rotterdam, such as multicultural , workingcity , international and dynamic also scored

other components related to the facilities oramenities available in the city, which sug-gests a positive impact of the ECC on theimage of Rotterdam as a cultural city by atleast adding a cultural dimension to the exist-ing images. Unfortunately the appraisive-affective components of the image of Rotter-dam score lowest, indicating that the cityprovokes a rather neutral affective responseand image formation has taken place at amore supercial and uninvolved level. Thisperhaps suggests that Rotterdam is lacking inthe ambience/atmosphere that many culturaldestinations strive for in order to comp-lement the hard cultural infrastructure (al-lowing visitors to make a more emotionalconnection with the city).

The components of the image of Rotter-dam identied by visitors to the ECC alsovary considerably according to visitor origin,age, status and gender, with different groupshaving distinctive common evaluations of image components. In general, Rotter-dammers tend to have a stronger and morepositive image of their own city. Dutch

tourists from other parts of the country tendto score Rotterdam higher in terms of itsphysical features and appraisive-evaluativeaspects such as ‘multicultural’, ‘inter-national’ and ‘dynamic’. This may reect thefact that Rotterdam has “an almost ‘Ameri-can’ urban form” (Russo and van der Borg,2002, p. 634), boasting the highest concen-tration of tall buildings and the largest pro-portion of ethnic minority population in the

Netherlands. Domestic tourists may thereforesee Rotterdam as a big international city incomparison with other Dutch cities. Foreigntourists, on the other hand, tend to scoreRotterdam lower on image attributes acrossthe board, indicating that they have a weaker,more diffuse image of the city as a whole.This study therefore suggests that the differ-ent components of place image identied inthe literature can be useful in analysing theimage effects of events.

A comparison of the research conducted inRotterdam during the ECC event in 2001




in the eld of European cultural tourismdestinations in 2001. The proportion of re-spondents seeing Rotterdam as a suitabledestination for a cultural holiday rose fromunder 3 per cent in 1999 to 5 per cent in2001. This still places Rotterdam way behindthe established cultural capitals such as Lon-don and Paris, but it has gained ground oncloser rivals, such as Antwerp and Glasgow.This indicates that the ECC event has had apositive impact on the image of the city inthe short term, although whether the imageimprovements and increased tourist hotelnights can be sustained long term remains tobe seen. There is indeed a potential paradoxin using a cultural event that already has astrong brand (Evans, 2003) to try and createan image for an individual city. Researchamong Dutch tour operators has indicatedthat tourist demand tends to follow the Cul-tural Capital as an event each year, ratherthan producing a long-term demand forshort-break packages to a particular host city(Richards et al. , 2001).

The ndings underline the importance of

including image assessment in the evaluationof major events, but there are also somewider implications for the study of events ingeneral. Given the differences in city imageencountered for different visitor groups,event organisers need to be aware that visitorperceptions of the event’s host city are un-likely to be homogeneous. This could have asignicant effect on the composition of theaudience attracted to an event and may well

have implications for the way in whichevents can be effectively marketed. Thisseems to be particularly important for dom-estic tourists, whose image of the event loca-tion may be more positive in some aspectsthan that held by local residents. Foreigntourists, on the other hand, may have a muchless coherent image of the place and may bemore inclined to attend because of the con-tent of the event rather than its immediatelocation.

The differentiation of image among visitorgroups is also reected among policy-mak-

population. For Rotterdammers, Rotterdam isalready a Cultural Capital, but culture asappreciated by locals is not the high culturethat attracts outsiders. This also emphasisesthe difculty of providing for different audi-ences within a single coherent programme.The complex theme developed for the Rot-terdam ECC event did succeed in reaching awide range of participants, but was less suc-cessful in attracting a diverse audience toindividual events of a given cultural type.

Future ECC events may have to considerwhether the ECC is a suitable tool for reach-ing specic policy objectives or whether it isonly useful as a short-term promotional de-vice. There is also the matter of whetherpositive effects from an ECC event alone cancontinue to provide benets for the host city,or whether events can only realistically beseen as one part of an overall growth strat-egy, as has been the case with Glasgow.Indeed, Sjøholt (1999) argues that high ex-pectations of boosting growth long-term bymeans of events like the ECC may be unreal-istic. Rather, Sjøholt suggests—with refer-

ence to the 2000 ECC in Bergen—that thelasting cultural value of the ECC might in-stead be in the international contacts andnetworks that have been cemented (although,as the interview quotes from the Porto 2001ECC above show, international links forgedfor ECC events may be supercial andephemeral in reality).

Potentially, the most interesting questionto be addressed in future research relates to

the durability of the positive image effectscaused by such events. An interesting aspectof the follow-up research on the effects of the Rotterdam ECC will be the extent towhich the city can sustain the image im-provements it gained in 2001. The experi-ence of other cities indicates that it isdifcult to maintain such gains unless thereis a structured programme of cultural devel-opment in subsequent years as well. In thecase of Glasgow—for example, the effects of the ECC in terms of visits to cultural attrac-tions in the city declined rapidly after 1990




seum and the staging of the European Yearof Architecture in 1999 (Richards, 2001).The durability of such effects could be exam-ined through longer-term longitudinal re-search, undertaking periodic measurement of the image of event locations before, duringand after the event. In undertaking such stud-ies, it would also be salient to measure thedifferent components/dimensions of placeimagery and to assess which image compo-nents are affected most strongly by the event.This would also allow the contribution of events to the overall reimaging of city desti-nations to be more accurately assessed.

Finally, further attention should be paid toimagery as represented by different groups,allowing due consideration of the wider pic-ture of the appropriateness of major culturalevents as a reimaging strategy for contem-porary cities with a range of social and cul-tural justice issues. As Jansson (2003) hasargued, there can never be an intersubjec-tively shared city image and the more effortthat is put into the projection of dominantimages, the more this image creation proba-

bly overlooks the complexities of social life.In other words, before celebrating any suc-cess in modifying a city’s image following amajor cultural event, it is pertinent to ensurethat more than just the overt, dominant repre-sentations of image are considered.

Notes

1. Originally, the ECC event was geared to EC(later EU) member-states, although non-EU

members such as Norway have since hostedthe event (for example, in Bergen, 2000).Stockholm, for example, was selected to hostthe 1998 ECC event prior to joining theEuropean Union.

2. ‘Cosy’ is a literal translation of the Dutchword gezellig , but the term in Dutch hasmuch wider connotations, describing the at-mosphere of a place, the company present orthe enjoyment of an event or gathering.

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The Impact of Cultural Events on City Image_Rotterdam (1)