44  City Branding: Image Building & Building Images

City branding is about how a city chooses to present itself to the world. In fig. 1, a configuration on the map is used to create a logo for a region. This region may or may not exist in reality, but the logo (and implicitly the analysis that produced it) can become a valuable pr-tool which can easily be remembered. Figs. 3 - 5 are other examples of how otherwise arbitrary images can be used to “brand” a city. These images are no real analyses in the traditional sense, but they can seem to be as evocative of reality as these earlier examples. Commercial and public relations based information can become equally important to characterise a city as its morphology or functional layout. One might say the drawing of the present map of Heerlen in fig. 2 is the least informative in this illustration. Statistical data has taken the place of graphical information.