Professor Deb Verhoeven is Chair of Media and Communication at Deakin University. Dr Brian Morris is Senior Lecturer in Media in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Together they are undertaking research on urban rivalry and city comparison.

Brian Morris is a Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University. His current research interests focus on the role of media and communications technologies in the formation of urban cultures and experience; city comparisons and identity formation; and cinematic representations of cities.

Making Cities Count: Rankings, Liveability and Cultural Comparison

This research seeks to foreground the cultural uniqueness of second cities, thereby distinguishing them from the economically defined category of ‘second-tier’ or ‘secondary’ cities. The example of Melbourne (Australia) is used to investigate how second city identities are historically sustained through evaluative media discourses rather than being only an effect of immediate social or financial relations. In developing an argument for the non-economic analysis of second cities this paper provides an alternative to current global city indexes and typologies.

We investigate the popularly reported phenomenon of city rankings and, in particular, the category of ‘second city’ that regularly features as part of this prolific evaluative discourse. Our paper proposes that the notion of second cities has a specific analytical value that has to date been underestimated in academic accounts (particularly in the confusing interchangeable use of ‘second-tier’, ‘secondary’ and ‘second cities’ in the dominant urban studies literature).

Our research into the evaluative discourse of liveability generated in the reportage of city rankings redresses the division between culture and economics in the study of cities. Rather than focussing on how culture industries are harnessed to the territorial claims of different cities, we are concerned with how widely reported economic rankings produce cultural effects. Our specific interest is in the cultural expressions of second city identity represented through narratives of envy and rivalry with ‘first’ cities, or in relation to other cities competing for the title of second city. In this way culture is not positioned as subordinate to a city’s economic progress but is also shown, through analysis of evaluative media discourses, to actively deliver and develop city distinctions.