Designing spaces, constructing images.

The success of the urban image has become a priority in local administration politics and projects. These days a positive, attractive image of the city and its territory is considered an essential tool for promoting and attracting the flows of people and capital that make up the life-blood of the globalised society of the beginning of the century. Urban marketing can no longer be seen today as a simple approach, specific and circumscribed, to the transformation of the city; it rather pervades the whole of contemporary projectual culture.
The relationship between construction processes of representations of cities and enhancement of the actual quality of urban life and the city’s real capacity for attraction is a field of research on the project for space that has been little investigated up to now. This article analyses the relations between urban identity redefinition processes and projectual action, highlighting globalisation processes of urban images and policies and possible alternative directions.