【正文】 UK There is an eclectic and growing critical literature on place promotion(see Ashworth and Voogd,1990。Paddison,1993。Chang,1997。Harvey,1989。Kotleret al,1993).This is not to say that these methods are mutually exclusive,and writers often use both,often within the same piece of work,but as Short and Kim(1998,p 55)note,“there are differences in orientation[between the two approaches]with the former emphasising the transformation of urban governance and the involvement of business coalition,whilst the latter focuses on the detailed processes and strategies of urban marketing”. One area,by contrast,where there has been little sustained academic investigation is into the consumption or impacts of place promotion is surprising because,despite all of the rhetoric concerning the supposed saliency and centrality of place promotion to contemporary urban change, there is,to date,little,if any,empirical evidence that this is the simply,despite the great attention paid to place promotion by academics,we know little of the actual importance of place promotion to the location decision making processes of its intended audiences and less of its tangible impacts on the urban development omission is a widely recognised weakness of semiotic methods,which have dominated the study of place gap has implications both for the academic understanding of place promotion and for decision makers in,for example local authority planning and economic development departments,for this reason this paper is addressed to these two audiences. This paper takes a step to address this empirical lacuna by examining the impacts of place promotion and urban image enhancement on the location decisionmaking process of one key client marketconvention,exhibition and meeting anisers in the paper addresses three themes: How successful have former industrial towns andcities in the UK been in enhancing or transforming their externally perceived images? What are the contemporary externally perceived images of former industrial towns and cities in the UK? What is the significance of urban image to the location decision making of potential investors in the business tourist sector? Meetings tourism and economic development Meetings tourism,which we define as,travel associated with attendance at corporate or association meetings,conferences,conventions or congresses or public or trade exhibitions,has emerged as a significant subsection of the tourist industry both in terms of volume of travel and expenditure generated.“Meetings”demonstrate enormous variety,ranging from small business meetings of a few delegates to large conventionsof, for example,professional associations which might attract in excess of 20,000 delegates. Similarly exhibitions vary in size and nature depending on whether they are primarily aimed at a trade or professional audience and on the geographical range othe exhibitors and range of locations within which these meetings take place is also broad. It includes:hotels,universities,sports venues,specialist exhibition facilities and purpose built convention ,specialist meetings venues are able to cater for both exhibitions and conferences as there appears to be an increasing association between them(Hall,1987).For the purposes of this study weuse the umbrella term“meetings”to cover all such gatherings.