Femininity As a City Marketing Strategy: Gender Bending Rotterdam

Rotterdam organised the festival ‘La City ’ as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the city’s class position, using femininity as a tool. ‘La City ’ was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, ‘La City ’ campaign material, texts on the character of the city and interviews in local newspapers with policy-makers are analysed in the context of the urban renewal and gentrification policies of Rotterdam. This research shows how the city uses femininity as a marketing strategy to ‘cleanse ’ Rotterdam of its working-class mythology as well as construing a hegemonic gender identity capable of excluding lower-class groups. Rotterdam, according to its own texts, is after bourgeois, feminine inhabitants that ‘lounge ’ in ‘cocktail bars ’ to replace the ‘rough ’ men who worked in the harbour. ‘La City ’ is one of many strategies to establish genderfication: the production of space for not only more affluent users (as gentrification is often defined), but also for specific gender notions. Genderfication is also established by practices of ‘mixing