From Urban Meanings to Personality: The Construction of Destination Personality and Gendered Urban Imaginaries through Social Media UGC

This study explores how destination personality and gendered urban imaginaries are constructed through user-generated content (UGC) in platform-mediated communication environments. Drawing on UGC from Xiaohongshu, Ctrip, and TripAdvisor, the study examines tourists’ narratives of Beijing, Shanghai, and New York. Using Grounded Theory, the research identifies the Urban Meaning Structures embedded in tourists’ expressions of urban imagery, symbolic atmosphere, emotional experiences, and lifestyle practices. The findings suggest that destination personality is not directly expressed through explicit personality labels but emerges through recurring patterns of meaning construction. Four Urban Meaning Structures were identified for Beijing, five for Shanghai, and five for New York. Based on these meaning structures, the study proposes the concepts of Personality Implication and the Urban Personality Spectrum to explain how cities develop layered personality configurations composed of dominant, secondary, and auxiliary personality dimensions. The findings further indicate that different personality configurations tend to evoke distinct forms of gendered urban imaginaries, including Composite Masculinity, Modern Elite Femininity, and Hybrid Androgyny. The study proposes an integrated framework linking UGC symbolic expressions, Urban Meaning Structures, Personality Implication, the Urban Personality Spectrum, and gendered urban imaginaries, providing a process-oriented explanation of destination personality construction in social media contexts.