Le discours identitaire des grandes métropoles européennes : émergence d'une maturité communicationnelle

Since the work of JACOBS (1961) and LYNCH (1960), the concept of urban identity has been the subject of many developments in urban economics and geography, social psychology, and more recently, management science (marketing and tourism management). The state of the art of these multidisciplinary developments suggests that cities generate "interpretative identities", disconnected from their real or perceived attributes, oriented toward dynamism for large cities and proximity for the smallest. From this literature, we test this hypothesis on a sample of 29 European metropolitan areas, taking a statistical multidimensional analysis approach. Their identity discourses, categorized by examining in 2011 and again in 2013 the photographs used in the home pages of these cities' websites, reveal a shift in positioning and the emergence of a more "constructive" identity consistent with their real and perceived functional attributes for the sites' main targets (tourists, residents and firms).