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The cultural visibility gap: strategic communication and city image in Baltimore

Baltimore’s interventions often work in practice. What goes unmanaged is what they say, so the city’s strengths stay invisible to visitors and to its own residents.

Baltimore holds the oldest national degree-granting art college, a top-tier research university and hospital system, a mature network of community arts organizations, and extensive Black cultural production. It also has a high violent crime rate, tens of thousands of vacant properties and high poverty rates. Some of the city’s attributes are highly salient in public perception, while others remain comparatively invisible.

In 2025, Baltimore recorded its lowest homicide rate in nearly 50 years (Dacey, 2026). In the same year, Numbeo’s Crime Index ranked it the third most dangerous city in the United States (WBFF Staff, 2025). Numbeo’s index is built from user-contributed perceptions, not official statistics (Numbeo, n.d.). Even residents who agreed the city had improved still reported anxiety about the local economy, employment and crime (Robbins, 2025). A city’s public image does more than shape its reputation. It has social and economic consequences: it affects graduates’ job prospects and where outside investment and government funding land.

How a city communicates

Kavaratzis (2004) describes three ways a city’s image is communicated. Primary communication comes through the city itself: its landscape strategies, infrastructure projects, organizational structure and behavior. Secondary communication is formal, intentional marketing and advertising. Tertiary communication is word of mouth, reinforced by the media. Every action and intervention carries both a functional and a symbolic meaning, and both are needed for a city’s brand and image to come across (Kavaratzis, 2004).

A city image is made of an external city and an internal city (Graham, 2002, as cited in Kavaratzis, 2004, p. 63). The external city “can, at least superficially, be encapsulated in one or two signature buildings or landmarks”; the internal city is “the city of the mind.” As Kavaratzis (2004) notes, the two meet in “the perception of the city, as formed by each individual that comes to encounters with the city. It is the city’s image.” A successful place brand is positively related to attracting visitors, residents and other target groups (Braun et al., 2014), and physical landmarks and buildings are the most direct form of primary communication. Many city managers focus on the functional development of the city and neglect the symbolic dimension. The result is a gap between the image a city projects and how its publics perceive it.

What Baltimore has built

Over the past decades, Baltimore has kept working at urban revitalization through planning, cultural production and education, and some of it has paid off.

The question

This brief asks why these interventions performed functionally while their symbolic dimension went unmanaged and invisible, and how strategic communication plays a part in producing this cultural visibility gap. The risk is that the city’s positive image never reaches outsiders or its own residents, so some attributes stay salient while others stay unseen.

Strategic communication is “the purposeful use of communication by an organisation to fulfill its mission” (Hallahan et al., 2007, as cited in Goransson & Fagerholm, 2018, p. 48). Here, cultural visibility means the symbolic visibility of a city’s interventions. The brief reviews three areas: how place brand communication applies to Baltimore; the gap between what a government communicates and what its publics perceive; and how local storytelling shapes a city’s image and residents’ sense of it. It is written for social designers assessing current visual communication, and for city officials and organizations planning their next interventions.

Sample studies

The effectiveness of place brand communication

How communicating a place’s image relates to attracting visitors and residents. A nationwide survey of Dutch place marketing professionals found that physical and word-of-mouth place brand communication both help attract residents and visitors through the place’s image, while traditional advertising had no measurable effect.

Braun, E., Eshuis, J., & Klijn, E.-H. (2014). Cities, 41, 64–70.

Storytelling neighborhood: paths to belonging in diverse urban environments

Whether storytelling builds residents’ sense of belonging. A multilingual study of seven Los Angeles neighborhoods found that the strongest factor was an active storytelling system linking residents, community organizations and local media.

Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Kim, Y.-C., & Matei, S. (2001). Communication Research, 28(4), 392–428.

Mind the gap: local government communication and citizens’ perceptions of their cities

Why government performance and public perception drift apart. Interviews and focus groups in two Spanish cities showed that citizens’ expectations, and the balance between information and persuasion in government messages, shape how satisfied they are.

Sanders, K., & Canel, M. J. (2015). Public Relations Review, 41(5), 777–784.

References

Skye Zheng, 2026. Research brief for the Cultural Visibility Gap fieldwork.