A new role for maps in urban place marketing?

The Bünting Clover Leaf Map, also known as The World in a Cloverleaf, (German title: “Die ganze Welt in einem Kleberblat/Welches ist der Stadt Hannover meines lieben Vaterlandes Wapen”) is an historic mappa mundi drawn by the German Protestant pastor, theologist, and cartographer Heinrich Bünting. The map was published in his book Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Travel through Holy Scripture) in 1581

by Prof Gary Warnaby

In the first volume of the Journal of Place Management and Development in 2008, I wrote an article about why place marketers should understand cartography. In it, I argued that maps – as frameworks for spatial communication and representation – could be an important aspect of place marketing activity.[1]  The process of mapping can “symbolize, depict, portray, describe, present clearly to the mind” a particular milieu[2] and can, thus, arguably be part of a place marketer’s ‘toolkit’. Indeed, maps have been a long-standing element of place marketing ‘representation work’.[3]  The use of maps in this particular context is evident at two spatial scales: the inter-urban (where maps are used to emphasise location in relation to other places), and the intra-urban (where the purpose of the map is primarily to facilitate navigation around a particular locale)[4], and it is the latter that is the focus of this discussion.

In the past, perhaps the most obvious example of urban place promotion which incorporated cartography at the intra-urban scale was the town guide – a well-established staple of urban place marketing activity, which according to Burgess, had to “serve many functions at the same time – residential guide, tourist guide, commercial and industrial directory and planning handbook”.[5]  Narrowing the spatial focus further, a more contemporary cartographic manifestation is the town centre guide, which is one of the most commonly used promotional activities employed by (especially retail oriented) urban place marketing actors. In the past, I have analysed the content of how town/city centres are represented cartographically in such guides, in relation to graphic interface features of scale, projection and symbolisation, to assess their effectiveness as aids to navigation for place users.[6] 

Continue reading “A new role for maps in urban place marketing?”

Using data from geo-tagging to map the Happy City

photo_sharing_logos

by Irina Shafranskaya*

Photo-sharing is currently becoming a huge part of social media activity. Several applications, with Instagram the most popular among them, represent people’s emotions. Such data pose new challenges for city data analysts as a lot of pictures are geo-tagged. City representation via images is not a new topic; it seems to us that Antonioni was one of the first with his “Blow-up”, who tried to catch the place by a camera click in his 1966 film Blowup. The digital era just brings new insights – as Ames and Naaman (2007) argued. Instagram covers additional aspects of this representation as sociality and functionality – we geo-tag places to give a special social signal of the places’ livability and share our emotional state-of-the-moment. Continue reading “Using data from geo-tagging to map the Happy City”