The international face of Thessaloniki: the “Greek crisis,” the entrepreneurial mayor, and mainstream media discourses

Thessaloniki and its mayor have been portrayed quite favourably in international mainstream media compared to the Greek state after the 2008 economic crisis. The dominant (media) discourses on Greece interpret the crisis as the result of the failure of the Greek state to reform due to the prevalence of a traditional political culture over a modern one and the moral failures of the population. In the international media representations of Thessaloniki, the local government has been described as “exceptional” in its crisis management compared to the state and other local governments, and the city's mayor, Yiannis Boutaris, has been portrayed as a reform hero, due to the implemented entrepreneurial development strategy and the revamp of the city's image through place branding. Analysing the key role of international media in the production and reproduction of a place-branding campaign of Thessaloniki in international media by employing critical discourse analysis, the paper questions the favourable representations of the city compared to the Greek state during the same period. I argue that the serial repetition of positive images contributed to Thessaloniki being perceived as an example to be followed by other Greek local governments and the central state, acting as a best practice example for transformations envisioned on wider scales. The paper contributes to place-branding debates by illustrating the important role of international media in the dissemination of place brands, and by analysing how media representations of place may serve the legitimation of processes of neoliberalisation on scales wider than the concrete urban setting where they occur

Contemporary crisis across Europe and the crisis of regional development theories

Hadjimichalis C. and Hudson R. Contemporary crisis across Europe and the crisis of regional development theories, Regional Studies. This paper explores the prima facie puzzling issue of why so much contemporary theory in economic geography and regional planning – specifically New Economic Geography (NEG) and New Regionalism (NR) – has so little to say about the causes of the current post-2007 crisis and its geography globally and in Europe. It is argued here that this reflects its obsession with the regional ‘success stories’ of the 1970s and 1980s, its failure to appreciate the onset of crisis and the reasons for it in these regions in the 1990s, and its failure to appreciate the nature of capitalism as a crisis prone social system of combined and uneven development. Thus, the current economic crisis pushed dominant regional development theories into a homologous deep theoretical crisis. It is concluded that the time is ripe for a paradigm shift in theory and that this should involve a reconsideration of earlier theoretical approaches that fell out of fashion for a variety of intellectual and political reasons and of current radical social movements

Rethinking Local and Regional Development: Implications for Radical Political Development in Europe

This article focuses upon the practicalities of what people actually do and can do in the present era of neo-liberal globalization to build more progressive local and regional development strategies in Europe. To do so, we introduce three examples of'alternative' local and regional development activities in Europe: (a) social economy projects to tackle problems of localized social inequalities and local development; (b) public sector procurement and related intiatives to create healthier diets; and (c) participatory municipal budgets as a means to make radical participatory democracy a practical proposition. We discuss the issues that arise from them in terms of a radical local and regional development strategy and how they help to re-formulate our theoretical agendas and research practice. Unlike many uncritical studies of `successful' places that then seek mechanistically to transplant the bases of `success' as `off the shelf ' blueprints to be applied in and to other places we instead see these examples as providing an alternative framework for thinking about local and regional development that adapts more general principles (such as those of equity, accountability and democracy) to the specifics and local and regioanl circumstances