The New Urban Language?

I stumbled on this fun little article about city branding this week. Obviously I was looking for something a bit more drab about urbanization or something but this is what really gave me the mental, imaginational work out.

It resonated with me the idea of the name of city transcending the mere namesake and becoming something other with in the context of language, like a noun or a verb.

I like it. Although it's not new, 'space' and 'place' and so on are pillars of the urban studies rhetoric, it's nice for a bit of a chat about the subject.

What we're getting at here is that a place is not just a name, it is an imprint on your mind. Thoughts, feelings, impressions, understandings and assumptions all manifest in to inscribed meaning about a place. To mention your home town is more than just to state a location, it's more than that in your mind and in the collective minds of hundred or thousands or millions of people. Similarly, you don't necessarily have to have visited Los Angeles to understand the concept of LA as or Berlin as adjectives. This is the above article's alternative urban language.

The article sights Amsterdam's 'i am sterdam' campaign (a fun pdf about the marketing strategy) as a weird overhaul to veneer an already established city. As you could guest it is trying to move away from the tired old misconceptions about the city but this is obviously this is the brain child of someone in my parents  or even gran-parents generation. I can't believe than anyone now thinks of Amsterdam over Krakow or Talinn when it comes to all the junk. Perceptions about Amsterdam are already changing and in most minds of my generation have already changed.

I really like Amsterdam and I think it's a shame that it is trying so hard to transform itself in to just another bland, faceless, distorted city break that can be summed up in a suitable 50 word comment in the in flight magazine. Amsterdam has all the history, culture, awesome eating, blah blah blah that anyone could possible consume on holiday. I personally would be put off by having to look a bit harder through the bullshit to find some relaxed honest realism.

With that in mind I thin about the East. There is a non stop stream of Chinese cities clambering to look a bit shinier with a few more shopping malls, with more smiler assistants than the last city you visited. I can barely tell one campaign from another and as such all China's cities are solidifying in my mind in to one homogeneous mass of glass facade and LV.
The writer of this article is calling for a rejection of the strategies of those who thought up a campaign with the letter 'i' in front of the cities name. He states the obvious in that cities should be nurturing and then show casing their actual, natural, home grown identity instead of just the addresses of the brand name hotels, but in an ever shrinking world of city rankings and short sighted money grabbing it is easy to over look the very things that make a cities own urban language.