Today we spent the day – Nina's birthday! – at the beautiful Mount Ray Studios here in Hamburg. Our photographer, Dietmar Theis, did a great job with the help of his assistant Sundaraj Tietz and make-up artist Anne Henrichsen. A good, healthy German breakfast and a stellar performance by Andy Ellis made this a thoroughly satisfying day's work.

Photography Dietmar Theis: www.dietmartheis.com
Studio Mount Ray: www.mountray.com

The other night I watched Woody Allen's 2008 movie 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona'. The title of which seems to already alert you of two things: Firstly, that the story centers on two women and one city. Secondly, that all three are equally fictitious. At least, that's what I imagine was Allen's intention. Apparently, the movie has been called Allen's homage to Barcelona – but did Allen really put any of Barcelona into it?

The movie was, rather controversially, funded with public money, with Barcelona's city hall providing one million euro and the Generalitat de Catalunya half a million. The controversy, however, wasn't really about the spending of public money, but about the fact that some of the dialog is in Spanish and not Catalan, which is the official language of the region. In any case, officials defended the investment by saying it helped promoting Barcelona to the world. I am sure that is true. I am positive that countless Americans and Europeans were seduced by the bohemian and sensual scenery and imagery.

But of course, the Barcelona that its citizens know have very little to do with the city in the movie. So exactly what is being promoted/sold through this vehicle? And how does it affect or benefit the people living in the city?

This, I believe, is a real issue in most city branding projects. In his concise book "The Brand Handbook" Wally Olins observes that '…cities, regions and nations are developing full-scale programmes, partly to encourage self-confidence and self-esteem and their own sense of place, and partly to attract inward investment and tourism.' Sadly, it seems to me, the first and most important reason stated – 'to encourage self-confidence and self-esteem and their own sense of place' – is more often than not playing second fiddle to attracting 'inward investment and tourism.' And what attracts investment and tourism is of course seldom the daily realities of a city as a complex organism and its inhabitants trying to make ends meet, but the city as a fictional flat backdrop to consumption disguised as experience.

During the Philips 'Livable Cities' webcast last November I asked the panel whether a city brand is really conceptually possible unless a very strong top down vision, shared by leaders and residents, is articulated and implemented. Something that sounds more Utopian than realistic. Ismael Fernández Mejía answered that by identifying 3-4 key aspects, key signifiers, a city brand can be created and marketed. What are we to understand by that assumption? That a city can be reduced and submitted to the same brand processes as a corporation, or a consumer-market product? That the different 'target audiences' of a city brand – residents, leaders, enterprises, tourists, urban planners, etc. – all can identify with and be guided by the same brand principles, as defined by one ad agency or another?

If we're talking about city brand as destination brand, this is less of an issue. The more people visiting the city the better, the more successful the brand. The brand speaks to a (superficially) homogeneous group. See destination brand sites like http://www.iamsterdam.com/, http://www.opencopenhagen.com/, http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/, or http://www.nycgo.com/ for example.

It becomes highly problematic though when applied to regeneration, community building or place-making. The problem then is that the two 'parts' that Wally Olins refer to in the quote above seldom share the same goals and processes. What benefits tourism and inward investment is often exactly that which derives cities of their 'own sense of place'. The former is achieved through the marketing of a fictional place, while the latter is about articulating and shaping true places.

Branding a city is of course a much bigger task then settling on a slogan or a logo that you stick onto the old facade. And the more successful city brands have either developed organically, like I ♥ NYC, or been part of larger development plans involving urban regeneration and infrastructure improvements, such as the Bilbao Guggenheim museum. Although the latter is often referred to as a 'transformative' piece of re-branding, it acts primarily on a symbolic level representing infrastructure improvements that included the new underground system, a new airport terminal, improvements to the port, etc.

City brand expressions no doubt need to be part of a commitment to a larger strategy to affect residents and the perception of visitors/investors positively. Which would seem to imply that brand strategists need to talk to and work with urban planners, city halls, residents and vice versa.

Oh, I thought "Vicky Cristina Barcelona", though far from being a great movie, was, well, entertaining. Like many other expressions of city branding though, it is of course pure fiction.