Paris is tops; London, next; with Barcelona in third. Berlin. Amsterdam. Munich, Stockholm, Prague, Rome, and Athens round out the top 10 European city brands, according to this new ranking (via Planetizen).
What do you think?
Creative Class
The source on how we live, work and play
September 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Some of the 10 points the report recommends in making a place “truly great” would have a lot of truck on this website – ambitious vision and good leadership, pride and personality, distinctive environment. But others seem arbitrary and steeped in prejudice: what is “conversational value” and how do you measure it? What is “somewhere specal” or an “interesting area” other than wherever I say it is?
Nevertheless I like the way the report tries to get under the skin of city marketing and boosterism based on spin and bombast rather than genuine “assets”. For example, here in Birmingham UK there is a plethora of “international festivals” in the arts: book festival, jazz festival, comedy festival, whatever festival. This forms part of a vague strategy of positioning Birmingham as a city for the arts – and yet, go to any of these events and they are poorly attended, have very few “big names” other than performers who were scheduled to appear in the city regardless of the festival and with very little genuine grassroots involvement and excitement in the programmes. These festivals always stuck in my head when reading “the rise of the creative class” and the paradox of cities trying to attract the creative class through municipal action rather than nurturing the people.
Liverpool is also a case in point. I imagine its image to most Americans or Europeans is of a vibrant port city with a great music scene and where everyone is a cheeky Liverpool football fan. It’s not. It’s a dive. It has lost something like 350,000 people over 30 or so years and its city centre is like going back to the dark days of the late 80s. Its probably on the way up now slowly, but it’s an interesting case in terms of the split between marketing and reality.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Barcelona is an amazing turnaround success story. When I went there in the early ’80’s it was a medium sized city known for little besides Gaudi’s buildings. The other cities on this list (except Munich)are national capitals with centuries old reputations. Barcelona has built its rep in 30 years, and it’s largely as a creative class city, one like Vancouver and Portland that were fairly recently relative backwaters.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:22 am
Barcelona is indeed interesting. Everyone talks about it as an example of prudent use of funding from the Olympics and EU membership. Given that Poland is now in the EU and is co-host of the European Cup in 2012, it will be interesting to see if cities like Poznan, Wroclaw, Krakow, Gdansk and Warsaw can “do a Barcelona” and use EU structural funds to their advantage.
Having said that, what is Barcelona actually known for now, other than being a “city break destination”? It’s like a Victoria Beckham city – she’s only famous for being famous. I’m sure it’s got style and cafe kulcha and shops and buildings but pah, big deal. So’s Brighton.