The public image of our city shapes how the world treats us

A note before you read. This is a perspective, not a finding, and certainly not a directive. I am writing it to open a discussion, not to settle one, and every claim in it is open to scrutiny, correction and disagreement in the comments. Nobody is speaking from a position of authority here. Take it as one resident thinking out loud with others.

Think about your bedroom. Some mornings it is a mess: clothes on the chair, an unmade bed, a plate from last night. You do not take a photo of it like that and post it. When you do post your room, it is the day you cleaned it, opened the curtains and the light was good.

Nobody forced you to do that. You just understand, without being told, that people will judge you by what they see.

Now think about our city the same way.

What this study is about

The question is:

How much does a city's public image affect the way its people are treated, and what can ordinary residents do to shape it?

A few terms, in plain words

Public image. The picture that comes into a stranger's mind when they hear the name of a place. Say "Paris" and most people picture the Eiffel Tower, not a traffic jam. That picture may be fair or unfair, but it is powerful.

Stereotype. A simple idea about a whole group of people, applied to every person in it. "People from that place are like this." Stereotypes are lazy and often wrong, but people act on them anyway.

PR, or public relations. The work of looking after how you are seen. A company does it. A musician does it. You do it when you dress well for an interview.

Reputation. What people expect from you before they have met you. It walks into the room before you do.

What we have noticed

Japan is known around the world for respect and good manners. When Japanese football fans stay behind to clean the stadium after a World Cup match, the video travels everywhere. Of course there are rude people in Japan, as there are anywhere. But that is not the picture the world holds, and Japanese people benefit from that picture wherever they go.

India is home to some of the world's best engineers, doctors and business leaders, and it has beautiful, clean and wealthy places. Yet, often the videos that get shared the most online only show places that are struggling. Because of these unfair pictures, people from India sometimes have to deal with mean and hurtful comments on the internet. The people making those comments are always the ones to blame. But it shows how much a bad online image can hurt an entire group of people.

The United States and other high-income countries have struggling, neglected and dangerous neighbourhoods too. You rarely see them in films, adverts or tourist photos. The picture the world carries is mostly of their best parts.

The lesson we take from this is simple. Every place has a best side and a worst side. What differs is which side the cameras are pointed at.

Why it may matter more than we think

We went looking for evidence rather than assuming. Here is what the research says so far.

• Jobs. Researchers have sent out thousands of identical job applications that differ only in the applicant's address. In Paris, the same application with a good address could triple the chance of being invited to interview (Bunel, L'Horty and Petit, 2016). It is like arriving at an interview: the same person in a clean shirt is treated differently from the same person in a dirty one. Two cautions: this is one European study with formal CV hiring, and a later Swedish study found that an address penalty disappeared once the length of the commute was taken into account, so some of what looks like stigma may be plain distance. Nobody has run this test in Zimbabwe.
• Visitors and business. The clearest case is The Gambia in 2014. It had no Ebola cases at all, yet tourist arrivals fell by about 60% and direct tourism jobs dropped from around 49,500 to 29,000, because visitors treated the whole continent as one risky place (Novelli and colleagues, 2018). Nobody in The Gambia did anything wrong. Closer to home, when Zimbabwean investment promoters were interviewed in 2013, all of them said media coverage had given the country a mostly negative investment image, and a Dutch survey they cited found 61% of respondents associated Zimbabwe with the word "filth" (Matiza and Oni, 2013). A shop with a dirty window loses customers who never came in to check.
• How we are treated online and abroad. Here the evidence is thinner than the argument. Careful studies of how Africa is covered by foreign newspapers do not support the idea that coverage is relentlessly dark; what they do find is that African countries get lumped together, so one country's crisis becomes everyone's. And no study has measured online abuse against a group and traced it to images of their home. We will treat this as an open question, not a settled fact.
• How we see ourselves. A four-year study of Santiago neighbourhoods found that when residents felt their area had a bad name, they identified with it less, felt less rooted and trusted their neighbours less (Otero and colleagues, 2023). A bad image does not only cost us outsiders' respect. It quietly costs us each other.
• Zimbabwe's own brand. A 2026 review of 98 studies found that Zimbabwe changed its official national brand three times with no measurable effect. A separate 2026 study found that the one durable positive in Zimbabwe's image is what it called a "people-led reputational profile": the reputation carried by Zimbabweans themselves, at home and abroad. That is this whole post in one phrase.

What a stranger finds when they search for us

On 6 October 2026 we searched for Bulawayo the way a stranger would. The plain searches, "Bulawayo", "Bulawayo city", "Bulawayo Zimbabwe travel", returned nothing negative on the first page: Wikipedia, travel guides, the council, the Publicity Association. Travel writers call us "a relaxed, elegant city with wide tree-lined boulevards" and praise the Natural History Museum. That is better than many of us fear.

The damage sits in three specific places.

• Old headlines nobody has answered. Search "Bulawayo dying city" and the top results are still a 2014 article calling Bulawayo "a ghost town" and a 2013 piece asking "Is the city dead or dying?" Nothing newer has been written under those words, so the old verdict stands.
• A thin Wikipedia page. The Economy section still says "Most factories are deserted". Wikipedia is on the first page for most searches about any city, and a randomised experiment found that adding well-sourced content to short, incomplete city pages increased overnight tourist stays in those cities (Hinnosaar and colleagues, 2021). A thin page is an invitation.
• Our own news. Of 51 recent Bulawayo headlines from three online outlets, about 30 were negative, 14 neutral and 7 positive. The positives were real: ZITF, the Victoria Falls road, new rail investment. They were simply outnumbered.

One more thing stood out. The three most watched Bulawayo videos on YouTube, each above 100,000 views, were made by visitors, with titles like "Zimbabwe you have never seen". Residents' own videos mostly sit under 2,000 views. All of them are positive. The world is curious about us; we are just not the ones telling the story.

A suggestion, not a rule

Here is the idea we would like you to think about.

Before you post a photo or a video of Bulawayo, pause the way you would before posting your bedroom. Ask: is this the picture of my city I want a stranger to carry?

Some examples of what that could look like:

• You pass a burst sewer on your way to work. Report it to the council so it gets fixed. Then post the picture as a before and after, a testimony to the hard work of our city council workers. You did not lie. You simply waited a few days, and showed the world the same thing from a slightly different angle.
• A shop on your street closes, and someone posts the empty window with the caption "Bulawayo is dying". Before you share it, think of the new businesses that opened on the same street this year. Post one of them instead, tag the owner, and you have told a truer story about the street than the empty window did.
• You want to show a problem so that it gets attention. Show it to the people who can fix it, and when it is fixed, show the world the repair.

It is the same thing a family does. Every family has arguments. The photos on the wall are from the wedding and the graduation.

What this is not

We want to be very clear, because this matters.

Nobody is forcing anyone. This is not a law, a policy or an instruction. There is no authority behind it. Neither the City Council nor the government is asking anyone to censor what they post, and neither are we. You are free to post whatever you like.

This is not about hiding problems from the people who must fix them. Residents should keep reporting uncollected rubbish, burst pipes and broken streetlights. Journalists should keep doing their work. A city that cannot talk about its problems cannot solve them.

And it is not about pretending. You clean the bedroom first, then you take the photo. A good image has to be earned by a city that is actually getting better. That is why this study sits next to our first one, on litter.

And it must never be done to people. Zimbabwe already knows what image management looks like when the state does it by force. In 2005, Operation Murambatsvina was announced as a "clean-up" and "restoring order", and by the United Nations' count about 700,000 people lost their homes or livelihoods, Bulawayo among the cities hit. That is the line. A city's image is something its people offer, never something done to them.

It is simply a perspective that we, as people of this city, are offering to one another: we all hold a small share of Bulawayo's reputation in our phones.

What other places teach us

Every city that changed its image did the real work first and told the story second. Medellín's violence fell in the neighbourhoods around its cable cars and library parks from 2004; the "most innovative city" award came in 2013, nine years later. South Korea passed its cultural export laws in the 1990s; the world noticed K-pop two decades on. The honest rule of thumb from the research is seven to twelve years from real change to recognition, and the leading scholar of nation brands says plainly that advertising campaigns alone have "little evidence" of working. Slogans do not change images. Substance, and the people who carry the story, do.

What we will do, and how we will know

Nobody has ever measured whether a group of residents changing their posting habits changes a city's image. That means a careful Bulawayo effort would be new evidence, and it means we must measure honestly from day one. Our plan:

• Measure first, then act. Before anything else we publish a baseline: the tone of Bulawayo headlines coded on fixed days each month, the ratings of a fixed basket of Bulawayo places on one review site, Wikipedia page views, and what the first page of search results says. We will compare against a similar city, probably Mutare or Gweru, and we will publish the numbers whether they flatter us or not.
• Fix the Wikipedia page. With sources, not spin: what has reopened, what has been built, what the city is known for now. This is the one action with an experiment behind it.
• Answer the old headlines. Write and publish current, honest material under the same words people search for, so that "Bulawayo dying city" also finds 2026.
• Before and after. Report the broken thing, and when it is fixed, post both pictures and the report number. Residents get the credit for reporting and council workers get the credit for fixing.
• Help our own storytellers. The visitors' videos get the views because they frame Bulawayo as a surprise. Our own creators can do that better, and we will work with them.
• Trendsetters and a pledge. Research on how habits spread says a norm shifts when visible people change first and say so publicly. We will ask well-known Bulawayo voices to make the pledge above, in their own words, and we will keep count.

We will also keep two promises. We will never discourage anyone from posting a problem, and we will report every result, including the ones that show this did not work.

Tell us what you think

Have you ever been judged, well or badly, because of where you come from? What picture of Bulawayo would you want the world to have? Leave a comment below.

Si ye phambili.