Who’s Ready for Relocation? A Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Amsterdam’s and Milan’s Bids for the European Medicines Agency

The chapter analyses the offers/bids submitted by the cities of Milan and Amsterdam to the European Union to be selected as locations for the ‘relocation’ of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) which, after Brexit, had to be moved from London elsewhere. The study investigates how the two cities have organised and structured the relocation offer plan. Therefore, all the materials (written and visual) produced within what can be called a promotional campaign have been studied to understand the marketing and branding strategies adopted by the two cities in support of their candidacy. The analysis of a series of institutional promotional discourses, in which both verbal and visual elements of communication play a significant role, aims at (i) understanding the target audience that the two campaigns want to address and ‘sell’ their cities to; and (ii) possibly assessing what reasons led to the final choice for the city of Amsterdam. The study combines different methodologies, integrating social semiotic studies with Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, employing a corpus comprised of the bid files (i.e., ‘bidbooks’) and several related online documents (including audiovisual materials). The analysis thus offers an example of how the city is described and presented from an institutional perspective within a promotional discursive context. From the analysis, Amsterdam’s bid appeared to be the result of a carefully coordinated project, with coherent planning of all communications, including a bidbook, a website, and a set of videos. By contrast, Milan displayed a more unsystematic campaign, only later redressed, and partly relying on more amateurish materials.