CITY BRANDING – THE NEW PHILOSOPHY OF URBAN MANAGEMENT –


Marius Cristian NEACŞU, Silviu NEGUŢ Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest


1. Foreword. We are currently living a truly image myth1). All our informa-


tion is comprised in images, emotions and feelings are the same, we sell and but images, we are worshipers of the cult of image….even war takes place today on TV.


Objective reality is substituted by mental reality, now more than ever,


“a second reality”, the mental one, the one shaped by human mind, which takes the form of images travelling rapidly across the Earth. The city could not have been an exception to the “new wave”, and the


recent challenges driven by globalization – accentuated competitiveness (the city no longer competes with other cities in the national space, it is simply a global fight for generating urban services “consumers” – residents, tourists, investors, etc.), for “survival” in the regional, continental or world urban net- work, the tertiary and informational phase reached by humankind, all these have made it absolutely justifiable the flourishing of “world trade” with urban images.


work for the manifestation of the new phenomena in the urban space2). 1) During a speech at the Club of Rome, Ten myths of the contemporary world, the aca-


Thus, academic society has had to set a coherent theoretical frame-


demician Mircea Maliţa, the first Romanian member of the distinguished organisation and a friend of its President, places on top of everything else „the myth of image”, among the ten myths that dominate the „spirituality” of the modernity, pulling an alarm for today’s generations which are the most vulnerable to the substitution of substance, of facts, of places with their image, images which are the starting point of judgements and decisions („We don’t have time to reflect. The political figure begins to be obsessed with the image he and his actions project. The consumer buys what he sees in the commercial. People are preoccupied with their image and the image of those around them. Social structures are focused on „perception”. It is not important what happens but what is perceived... Even wars are understood in the television innoculated sense.” said the scholar during a „Conversation” with Elena Solunca Moise, pub- lished in the national press.) 2) For example, a series of urban concepts come to complete the conceptual relations


between them and to give scientific coherence to today’s phenomenons. Thus, if we were to associate an idea to each urban concept that forms the „eyes” of the conceptual network which represents the frame of a city’s image, it would look like this: urban space organisation – to


90


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161