The Strategy of City Cultural Governance: 2009 Kaohsiung World Games and the Glocalized City Cultural Images

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Kaohsiung city has utilized the 2009 Kaohsiung World Games as a strategy of city cultural governance. Through the represented city cultural images, the paper depicts the City’s attempts to reconcile citizens’ mixed feelings of wanting to be instantaneously “global” and “local”. Adopting a qualitative approach, the paper employs content analyses and cultural interpretation as the main research methods. Through the cultural programs and festivals (especially the opening and closing ceremonies), the mobilization of city cultural capitals, and cultural infrastructures that are exhibited in this mega‐sport event, it examines how Kaohsiung City has strategically repackaged its local cultural traits and accommodated them to a wider global vision. The paper devises the various interweaving facets or narratives of desired “glocal” city images, namely, modern/historical, cosmopolitan/national, creatively urban/ embedded local, which are at times mutually enhancive, and sometimes contradictory, yet overall indispensable to each other. It argues that the key underlying the success of Kaohsiung World Games is lesser about its modern city infrastructure and urban expression in the event, but the strategic leverage of cultural resources and presentation of a glocalized culture in Taiwan―the adaptation and practice of distinctive cultural roots and embedded local cultural values of the Southern Capital City.