Local councils often struggle with how and when to insert novel urban planning ideas into local discourses and effect change from ‘above’. This article examines the pre-suasive communication strategies employed by the Moreton Bay Regional Council (MBRC) to realign the city's planning horizons and branding, and to convince stakeholders that the Moreton Bay Region (MBR) should become a city. Support for the proposed changes was initially uncertain and elusive. The application's ultimate success in the face of widespread scepticism warrants a closer examination of the MBRC's public communication strategies. This article uses theories of framing and rhetorical analysis to examine how MBRC crafted city-shaping narratives to mobilise stakeholder support across diverse audiences. We analyse two critical texts in this shaping process: the Local Government Reclassification Report submitted to the Local Government Change Commission, and the brief public-facing ‘discussion document’, Reimagining our Moreton Bay: A City of Amazing Places and Natural Spaces . We find that the Council deployed the notion of a ‘polycentric’ city as a ‘floating signifier’ early in the process, allowing stakeholders to refract and absorb meanings that mattered to them, thereby galvanising sufficient support to secure city status for Australia's third-largest Local Government Area (LGA). Results from this ‘pre-suasive’ communication process serve to complement future city and regional planning and participatory processes, contributing to broader scholarship on persuasive communication, framing and place-shaping.
Dugmore et al. (Mon,) studied this question.