Putting Malmö on the Map - Studying the city's transformation and the effects of its efforts in place marketing through a spatial analysis

The city of Malmö has gone through a remarkable transformation in the last 20 years, from struggling to adapt to the implosion of its industrial sector to a poster child of sustainable development. The focus of the present thesis is to study how this transformation occurred, how the city marketed it and what the effects of this place marketing were. For this a structured, indicator driven approach was adapted from Kostiaianen and Sotarauta to qualitatively study the transformation. This study revealed that Malmö is utilising place marketing to hide its industrial past and current social issues. To learn if Malmö is successful with this, a spatial analysis was conducted using geo-mapped photos from Flickr. The geo-location of these photos was then linked to four districts representing the old and new in Malmö. Over time popularity of places changed, showing a complete change in interest and attention in Malmö – revealing that attention towards the new has replaced the old.