Introduction: The City as a Kaleidoscope

It must be the dream of every ambitious brand creator: to turn a city into a strong city brand. Certainly a highly fascinating task. In the best case, something is achieved that exists many times over, but usually has taken very long periods of time and is the result of a multitude of activities, a long chain of events, and a large number of different personalities: turning a city into a myth. How this myth formation actually takes place remains largely unclear, ultimately a curiosity: does it happen purposefully, are there relevant ‘success recipes’, can the responsible parties be identified? But above all: can the process be replicated (and that in fast motion)? Or is this claim simply illusory? So what can it mean to develop a city brand? How could brand creators deal with the complexity of the phenomena ‘city’ and ‘city brand’—which seem to become more mysterious the more one deals with them—in a practical way, in order to give reasonable chances of success to attempts to develop a city brand? How should brand creators respond to the irritations that regularly and justifiably accompany the development process of city brands: biting criticism from outside and nagging self-doubt (at least among the serious actors)? The following introduction describes in this sense the colorful and diverse working environment of city brand creation and explains the approach in the book to comprehensively present the practice of developing city brands.