What exactly does Global City Local Heart mean?

Global city:

The immediate connotation here is the cultural mix of the city, embracing the immigrant communities stretching back pretty much to the founding of Birmingham and welcoming the city's status as a plural city by 2024 with no ethnic group in the majority.

It's also a reference to business with Birmingham being a centre of world trade during the industrial revolution through to the current post-Rover connections with China with the establishment last year of the Birmingham-China Business Forum.

There's also our status as a transport hub, hopefully to be strengthened as New St Station and BHX evolve.

Local Heart:

This one's a bit trickier. If the heart wasn't local, where else could it be? Can you have a non-local heart? What is the heart of the city anyway? Its people? Its character?

Googling around for clues I find this handy definition in The Birmingham Area Investment Prospectuses:

"We are committed to ensuring that Birmingham is a global city with a local heart.

"This ambitious vision means developing a global economic and cultural role for Birmingham, while at the same time nurturing the potential of everyone in the city, to create a productive, innovative and welcoming environment for visitors and investment."

So it's a training and environment thing, ensuring the people of Birmingham are fully equipped to engage with the world that the city helps rather the hinders their achieving this. I'm not sure "local" is the right word for that though. "Healthy heart" maybe but the locality of the organ seems pretty irrelevant if its arteries are clogged with gunk.

Another definition of "local heart" might apply to governance. Birmingham has a Conservative led council in a Labour governed country so there's bound to be conflict there. Even in blogland scarcely a week goes by without Deirdre Alden bemoaning "Mr Brown" for closing her Post Offices. You could even stretch to Whitby's alleged conflab with David Cameron over the elected mayor issue if you so wished and you'd have a case for People's Republic of Birmingham fighting it's corner against them down south.

Could the phrase really be a defiant, isolationist call to arms? Has the psuedo-market of regions competing for national redevelopment funding and prestigious events created a system of warring fiefdoms?

Flipping this over local heart certainly brings out a sense of pride and that could be what Whitby's going for here. He wants Brummies to be proud of their city and its achievements, especially those his administration has brought in recently. This, frankly, sounds rather mayoral so I had a quick skim through Ken's website to see if London have any similar phrases. Oddly not, but then Ken does like his wonk-speak - "Spatial Development Strategy for London" and all that.

In the end the phrase, like all slogans, means whatever you want it to mean. So what do you think it means?

I've been trying to get a definition out of the council on this and will keep you informed of my progress.