Analyzing the contribution of cultural heritage-related factors to city reputation. The case of civic museums in Brescia, Italy

The article explores how the city reputation is shaped by cultural heritage-related factors, analyzing the case of the industrial city of Brescia in Italy. By examining the literature, the theoretical framework identifies city reputation's dimensions and how cultural heritage-related factors can contribute to them. Moreover, applying the topic modeling technique to a corpus of 1791 newspaper articles collected during the Italian Capital of Culture 2023 event, the analysis labels the topics associated with the different dimensions of city reputation to identify the contribution of civic museums' activities to reputation. Results show that the influence of cultural heritage-related factors primarily involved some dimensions of city reputation – livability, social dimensions, landscape quality, infrastructures and identity – while others remain residual. These results are of interest to local policymakers and shed light on the existing relationship between cultural heritage and city reputation, which is an aspect that is still not widely studied.