·Introduction

City identity constitute the core of the cultural tourism economy. As a concentrated expression of the city’s individuality, cultural heritage has an obvious contribution to the cultural tourism economy. After the new archaeological discovery of Sanxingdui in 2021, the comprehensive income of Sanxingdui Museum Scenic Spot has achieved four times that of the same period in 2019 and six times that of the same period in 2020.¹ Therefore, questions related to how to use cultural heritage build city identity have attracted a large share of attention in debates.

·Question

For cities with relatively less rich cultural heritage resources (such as Sanxingdui in Guanghan mentioned above), as long as a good grasp of a cultural heritage can be established, a distinct city identity can be established. But for Nanjing, a city with 300 intangible cultural heritage², it has become a difficult problem to establish a distinct city identity.

This study contributes to use the cultural heritage of the Qinhuai River to build Nanjing’s city identity to combat the current problem of cultural homogeneity and promote the cultural tourism economy in Nanjing.

·Research Methodology

Aiming to understand how to use the cultural heritage of the Qinhuai River to build Nanjing’s city identity, this study principally conducts a research methodology of interpretivism. Based on interviews with stakeholders and target audiences and observations of moderately successful attempts in this field, this research employs the perspectives of hermeneutics, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism to conduct discourse and case studies. However, since interpretivism is easily subject to the subjective bias of researchers, in order to solve this shortcoming, this study also extensively refers to related philosophical viewpoints, such as Global City³ and Holographic Urban⁴, to avoid overly subjective value judgments.

·Research

Although cultural heritage is an important embodiment of city identity, it’s often borrowed from popular culture in the process of dissemination. Among the many cultural and entertainment activities in London in summer 2022, several events with the theme of East Asian culture, such as the MIK Korean pop music festival from July 30 to 31⁵, and the HYDE JAPAN Japanese animation culture festival from July 22 to July 24⁶, are all based on pop culture, but It is worth noting that these activities are still interspersed with cultural heritage-related content, such as traditional costumes and food; another example is the 2.4 version of the Chinese game “Genshin”, which has received extensive international attention in recent years. The character “Yunjin” which designed based on Chinese opera culture, its tag ranked fifth on Twitter’s trend list after the game version was updated, and reached the second highest.⁷ Although its popularity is not all affirmation of Chinese opera, it makes more people have direct contact with Chinese opera. Popular culture brings more exposure to cultural heritage so that it is possible to gain recognition and acceptance. Therefore, the establishment of urban personality through cultural heritage should be combined with the form of popular culture.

Under the background of global urban theory, city identity is no longer only limited to the local, but needs to be combined with the background of globalization and metropolis, and consider the issues of mutual influence between countries and regions.⁸ From the perspective of holographic urban theory, cyberspace has also become a composite space-time outside of urban space, which is no longer “tangible” but a civilization that gradually tends to “invisible”.⁹

Therefore, the use of cultural heritage to establish urban personality should take into account the popularity, internationality and contemporaneity (The Internet age) in concrete practice.

·Intervention

The intervention of the research would like to be a system which combine short videos, online curation and cultural creative design.

Short videos is the way of story-telling. Using short videos as a carrier, combined with popular trends (such as memes, hot topics, etc.), tell the story of the Qinhuai River cultural heritage.

Online curation is a platform to integrate the narrative of the short video, explain the cultural heritage involved in the short video, and build a connection with cultural creative design.

Cultural creative design is the final destination, as a possible path for the project to extend to the cultural tourism industry.

·Audience

The project is mainly planned to be carried out on Douyin and tiktok, mainly for people who interested in culture and tourism.

·Concluding

The advantage of this project is that it solves the problem of fragmentation of short video creation, the overall idea is more systematic, and it can achieve interaction and transformation. The disadvantage is that short videos are in the form of popular culture, and there will still be a certain degree of restrictions on conveying the serious connotation of cultural heritage; in addition, because it is necessary to borrow popular hot spots as an attractive way, it may sometimes cause the target audience to pay attention when watching short videos. The point deviates from the cultural heritage and the urban personality of Nanjing.

At present, the project has completed the preliminary investigation, determined the list of cultural heritage, and has started the shooting of a series of short videos.