Abstract
Place branding might, could, and maybe even should play a central role in urban and regional governance. The vantage point of this chapter is that every place is a brand and that the processes of nonstandard regionalization that can be witnessed all over Europe create new places and, thus, new place brands. When employing place branding to these new types of regions, however, the traditional meta-geographies cannot be ignored. In this chapter, the aim is to take a first step to bring some order into the chaos. To this end, three categories of nonstandard regionalization are proposed and compared concerning place branding.
Introduction
This chapter offers a critical view of place branding in relation to nonstandard regionalization. It is not meant to be the outline of a theoretical framework, but together with the rest of the contributions in this book, it aims to set out some lines of thought for both theory and practice.
The recent decades have seen a strong increase in the implementation of place marketing and place branding instruments in relation to economic development in Europe (Kavaratzis 2004; Boisen 2007; Braun 2008). Although some voices have been heard proposing that place marketing and place branding can be (and, arguably, should be) viewed outside of the traditional focus on competitiveness (Kalandides 2012), the neoliberal economic policy doctrine places strategic thinking and policy action in line with the competitiveness paradigm firmly on the agenda of local and regional authorities. At the same time, various developments have seen a rise of nonstandard regionalization in Europe. Many of these “new” regions engage in socalled place branding.
Concluding Remarks
Place branding is becoming a commonly used instrument for both old and new regions to assert themselves. Although there is a lot of terminological confusion at work, the beginnings of some disciplinary consensus are emerging. The popularity of place branding and kindred instruments (place promotion, place marketing) is not likely to decline anytime soon. The competitiveness paradigm and the processes of re-scaling and entrepreneurialism means that more and more places engulf in activities to become or remain relevant in expanding markets and disrupted metageographies. “New” places are not blank pieces of paper that can be “brought to market” or “branded” distinctively from their spatial context.
