City Branding and New Media Linguistic Perspectives, Discursive Strategies and Multimodality

Like nations and regions, cities have become aware of the importance of building a convincing reputation to engage their local and global stakeholders – residents, businesses, investors, tourists, students, sports and cultural organisations. Thanks to this wide potential reach, the city brand has expanded from a mere tourism strategy into a multifaceted tool of e-governance in the hands of local administrations and their civic partners by addressing key issues such as active citizenship, social inclusion and promotion of cultural heritage and mega-events like world fairs. This book explores city branding in the public sector from a privileged linguistic, discursive and semiotic perspective, analysing how local municipal governments use new media in their communication agendas.

Maria Cristina Paganoni is a tenured researcher in English Language and Translation at the University of Milan, Italy. Her current research focuses on web-mediated communication and the branding of cities and heritage, drawing on discourse analysis, multimodal analysis and social semiotics. She has authored several contributions on these topics in books and peer-reviewed journals.

Introduction
1. City Websites as a Multimodal Genre
2. E-Governance on the Web: Linguistic Strategies
3. Branding Heritage, Digital Genres, Transmedia Storytelling
4. Expos and the Rhetoric of Sustainability