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Researcher(s):
Tasha Addington-Ferris Roan Shea Emily Tucciarone Charlotte Copp
ENVS course(s): 330 Initiated: March 2017 Completed: May 2017 Go to project site
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Aesthetics, the appearance and visual representations of place, play an important role in any environment. City branding can encompass anything from city-wide fashion trends, social media representations, corporate branding schemes, and city government branding initiatives. In this project, we ask, To what extent does the visual representation of a city affect the city’s branding and tourist culture?
Portland is a unique city in the context of the USA because it represents a hub of sustainable efforts. The way a city looks is the result of both the aesthetic decisions of those building the city and by the preferred aesthetic that individuals expect the city to embody, and in the case of Portland (and other cities), a sense of wealth and pristine sustainability. What aspect of Portland branding is generated through the individual promotion of aesthetics?
Instagram is a way to show travel of the individual. Not only does the geotagging of a place add that photo to a collection of other photos with the same location tag, but it also adds the photo to the individual’s map of tagged places. The photo is associated with the place, and then the place is associated with the individual. The individual promotions of large bodies of people can both reflect, and make a significant impact on the branding of a place. These brands influence the ways people think about and interact with these places. Social media branding then becomes vital to the health of the tourism industry.
When locations are included, the five most frequent hashtags of our list were #portland (344 times), #pdx (109 times), #oregon (96 times), #pnw (74 times), and #travel (30 times). This is significant not only because the first four most common word associations were places but also because of the sheer difference in numbers between location words and descriptive words. The most commonly used hashtags not including location were #travel (30 times), #spring (27 times), #art (24 times), #photography (18 times), #vsco (18 times), #pnwonderland (17 times), #vscocam (15 times), #portlandia (14 times), #nature (14 times), #fashion (12 times), #streetphotography (11 times), #flowers (10 times).
A wide array of images were associated with #travel, from images displaying the natural beauty of Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, to images of campers and downtown Portland. This has interesting social and economic implications. The Pacific Northwest has long been associated with exploration and the rugged outdoors. By using #travel, users can be seen as expressing this pride, as they provide the lens of travel to view their images. However, it would seem that most of the people using this hashtag would not be native Portland residents because they were most likely traveling in Portland when they took the pictures. Does this mean that the most commonly used hashtag under the #Portland umbrella is created purely by tourists? How does the branding of Portland change from residents to tourists? Does it matter, or do they paint a comprehensive picture of the Portland brand? To what extent does the branding of a place relate to the reality of the place? It seems that the brand of Portland is at least in part perpetuated by tourists, who come to the city with existing expectations that have also been perpetuated by the tourists who came before them. Economically, this #travel branding of Portland could be giving the tourism industry a boost. The literal and metaphorical imagery of Portland as a hub of Pacific Northwest travel is important to the branding of the city when it comes to tourism.