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

NEW FORMS OF GEOGRAPHICAL INEQUALITIES AND SPATIAL PROBLEMS IN GREECE

The dynamics of the restructuring of capital over the last fifteen years produced new territorial realities. One fundamental aspect of this evolution, in the case of Greece, is the relative decrease of interregional inequalities and the strengthening and/or appearance of new intraregional disparities. A second group of developments consist of the intensification of a series of spatial organisation problems that affect both urban and nonurban areas (land-uses' conflicts, environmental conditions, traffic). As far as the future is concerned, the determinant framework of the 1990s will be the process of European unification. Although the implications of the spatial dimension (regional policy, environmental policy, projected urban policy) of the EC policies will generally be beneficial, the broader implications of the above process seem much more ambivalent. The main fields of concern are: difficulties in the participation of Greek regions in the emerging Mediterranean arc of development; retardation of growth in rural areas (as a result of the new CAP) and the increase of intraregional inequalities; and aggravation of the conditions in the fields of land uses and the urban environment (because of the increasing competition between the southern European regions, and between the European cities)