Conclusion: Should the City Become a Brand?

City is essentially built (also natural) environment. In their social dimensions, cities are primarily living and experiential spaces for very different people, in the best case their ‘home’. Not least—so the central argument here—different cities always exist also in the form of human ideas as a result of social imaginations. Under the pressure of global competition between cities, the construction of city images becomes an increasingly important tool in urban competition. Under what conditions such images can be purposefully created is the central subject presented in this book. Now this crafty intention—to make successful city brands—is to be critically questioned again. To what extent city brands can process and rework (reconstruct) the given (natural and human-made) structures has already been discussed several times. Finally, possible ethical challenges, questionable effects on social life in the city and associated limits of city branding are to be asked.