INFOCITY: New Cities Reading & Promotion System

Image: Special mapping of Patras, Greece

Abstract

This chapter provides an insight into those endeavours that aim to address the issue of creating a renewed and competitive image of a city, using new ways of reading and presentation with an emphasis on linking local data with those of other international areas. The authors, Petridou and Pangalos propose a new methodological enhancement tool of mapping the multicultural identity of cities through creating a City Identity Workshop along major reading axes such as architecture, art, religion, collective memory, museums, archives, public places, cultural events and the economic and productive functions of civilization. The city of Patras is set as the scope for this proposal. Cities are seen as strategic sites in the network society, a sort of laboratory of emerging new and dynamic trends of the global era manifesting the „glocal”, yet still claiming distinctiveness. The chosen brandname itself expresses how the given city wants to be perceived by its residents and by the outside world. Reputational capital, the representation of a city, has always been important in history, but nowadays the growing sense of place-competitiveness makes city leaderships use branding as a vision-led complex policy development strategy to drive city renewal and growth as a form of reinventing the city in global times of transition.