Massimo Giovanardi
In Italia è molto raro scorgere il brand territoriale come tematica dibattuta all’interno di una campagna elettorale o più in generale nel dibattito politico. Un paio di anni fa ricordo un documento programmatico di Matteo Ricci, presidente della Provincia di Pesaro Urbino, in cui si parlava di branding territoriale. Per il resto, a parte dozzine di loghi turistici lanciati ogni stagione estiva, non vi sono tanti altri esempi.
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Hong Kong tenement buildings
by Rowena Lee and Patricia Woo*
Dave never quite enjoys climbing the five flights of dark, narrow staircases to his home. The landing on each floor is so small, he thought as he put one foot in front of the other, he would be pushed off to the stairs if a pregnant Christie emerged from one of the doors.
Christie and Dave love each other. She is 26, saleslady in a high-end fashion boutique. He is 35, an experienced merchandiser in a medium-size clothing enterprise. Together they earn HK$28000 (about 2800 Euros) a month. HK$3300 goes to rent, for a “sub-divided apartment” 2 blocks away from Dave’s office. Continue reading
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Conference venue: The new Business School of the Manchester Metropolitan University.
Manchester Metropolitan University 13th-16th February 2013
The Business of Place: Critical, practical and pragmatic perspectives
Conference Chairs: Professor Cathy Parker and Dr. Ares Kalandides
Place branding, place management, place marketing, strategic spatial development, public-private place partnerships, all synonyms describing one thing – the application of business principles to place. The language and conventions of business have spread across the world, to places of all scales, from district centre management through to nation branding. This widespread extension of market principles to places (districts, towns, cities, regions, countries and even continents) is not without critics, with many economists explaining that it is firms that compete not places. Nevertheless, those charged with place leadership chant the mantra of place competition, hence the expanding business of place.
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by Valentin Schipfer
I have always been fascinated by shrinking cities like Detroit. Maybe because of their mysteriousness, their myths and the thousands of pictures of ruins in the internet. But last week’s book presentation by Katja Kullmann (author of the book “Rasende Ruinen – Wie Detroit sich neu erfindet”, Rushing ruins – Reinventing Detroit) demonstrated that there is more behind it than decay. Quite contrary to that these cities become places of new forms of cooperation, reorganization and alternative economies. I’ll try to sum up one of her book chapters about two local art initiatives and a special urban gardening project. Continue reading
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By Jakob Hebsaker and Renard Teipelke*
In our first article, we introduced the waste management system in Cairo. Now, we want to shed light on recent developments and further implications for the future.
The waste management system in Cairo knows three important groups: the Wahis (license owners and fee collectors), the Zabbaleen (waste collectors and sorters), the Mo’allimin (recycling processors and resellers; former Zabbaleen). Focusing on the two opposing groups – the Wahis and the Zabbaleen – one has to underscore that the Wahis are an influential, well-educated group in the Cairene society, while the Zabbaleen are socially marginalized. Most of the 60,000 Zabbaleen are Coptic Christians and are thus part of a religious-social minority in Egypt. However, the recycling business is profitable for all stakeholders and even the Zabbaleen are in a relatively better position than other low-income groups in Cairo. Nevertheless, because of their dependence of the Wahis and their marginalized role in the Egyptian society, the Zabbaleen have only low social and economic capital as well as little political leverage. Furthermore, they are living in currently six informal neighborhoods (slum settlements), such as Manshiyat Nasser (aka Garbage City) in the outskirts of Cairo at the base of Mokattam Hill.
Map of Scotland - showing the 7 main cities
by Kenneth Wardrop
There has been increasing debate in Scotland over the past couple of years about the need for the country to develop an effective urban development policy. This led to the coming together of the major cities in a new collaboration to raise the profile of the role of the cities as drivers of the country’s economy. It also resulted in November 2011 in the Scottish Government, working with the Scottish Cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness and Stirling, and the organisation Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI http://www.scdi.org.uk/ ), publishing the report ‘Scotland’s Cities: Delivering for Scotland’ http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/365367/0124252.pdf. Continue reading
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by Ares Kalandides
It is a strange place, this Zen haven in the middle of Athens. You leave the heavy traffic of Iera Odos behind you, to find yourself in the tranquillity of the Loft2Work, one of the few co-working spaces in town. I have written in the past about the ways that creative professions are changing the way we work. Both time and space seem to be reconfigured to adapt to new working habits. I think there are basically two major changes here that are bound to influence the way we thing of and design our cities: Continue reading
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By Jakob Hebsaker and Renard Teipelke*
Waste management might belong to those urban issues that are best managed when we do not recognize them. Once we are complaining about dirty streets or overflowing trash cans, we are reminded of hidden waste management being a true backbone of the urban system. In Cairo, Egypt, the waste management system has its roots in the 1880s. Former oasis inhabitants, the Wahis, were migrating into Cairo and started to earn their living by picking up the waste of every household and selling it to public baths which used the waste for heating. After oil heating replaced the waste burning in the 1920s, the Wahis began to sell the waste to Coptic immigrants from the South of Egypt which used the organic waste of the trash for feeding their pigs. Continue reading
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make sure you check the map 
Buffalo’s Tagline Highlights the Worst of Tourism Marketing | News – Advertising Age.
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An Exonym (Finland) and Endonym (Suomi) on a tourist T-shirt
by Hans Pul
For building and maintaining brands, uniformity in communication is crucial and confusion needs to be avoided. However, many places have different names in different languages. München is Munich in English, London is Londra in Italian, while Mailand is German for Milano. More extremely, some place names look and sound completely different in other languages, some of the most prominent examples being Suomi* (Finland), Hellas (Greece) and Nippon (Japan). In short, there are more exonyms (foreign language names for geographical features) than places out there. How does this affect place branding efforts abroad?
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