Place Branding and Culture: ‘The Reciprocal Relationship between Culture and Place Branding’

The identity of cities and regions is a concern of many who reflect the spatial consequences of globalization, global values, global mobility and global consumption patterns (Kunzmann, 2004). In this chapter, we review the state of knowledge about arts and culture as the main element of a place’s image and highlight tools used by urban planners and decision-makers to achieve regional development through existing resources. The goal of this chapter is to develop a conceptual framework to describe possible key features in the relationship between culture and place branding, to identify methods, including the harnessing of branding, and to leverage the cultural resources that convey meaning to places in a co-creative process by providers who have aspirations for their place brand and citizens, visitors and investors who imbue such brands with personal relevance. Thus, this chapter does not seek to create a discourse about developing a culture and infrastructure for the sake of the arts first and then communicating the same to the place-brand audience.