Landscape and Branding

Auteur

Nicole Porter received her PhD (landscape) and MArch from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has worked in academia, private practice and the public sector, merging diverse interests in urban design, landscape, architecture, art and environment. Nicole is currently a lecturer in architecture and landscape at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Texte du rabat

This book tests the hypothesis that place branding, a powerful marketing and management practice, increasingly blurs the distinction between the promotion of landscape and its production in design terms.

Résumé

Landscape and branding explores the way landscape is conceptualised, conceived, represented and designed by professionals in a brand-driven age.

Landscape - incorporating tangible physical space as well as intangible concepts, narratives, images, and experiences of place - is constructed by a number of creative industries. This book tests the hypothesis that place branding, a powerful marketing and management practice, increasingly blurs the distinction between the promotion of landscape and its production in design terms. Place branding involves the strategic and systematic composition of single-minded, experiential and market-friendly place identities which are consistently communicated across various media, including physical space. How does this implicate or transform notions of place, nature, landscape experience, and the qualitative value of landscape itself? How does this affect the role of landscape architecture?

To answer these questions, place branding theory and practice is critically examined alongside an in depth case study of one specific landscape - the Blue Mountains (Australia). Projects undertaken between 1995 and 2015, including a branding strategy for the region, media campaigns, television, cinema, and several landscape architectural works in the public and private domain are comparatively analysed, focusing on the discourse, conventions and values informing their production, and the landscape narratives they convey.

Contenu

Preamble 1. Landscape discourse and the intangible value of landscape-as-brand Interlude - Striding toward branded landscape identities: national park promotion and production worldwide 2. Form follows focus group: Understanding place branding Interlude - Walking tracks 3. 'Repositioning' Mountains: The Brand Blue Mountains framework Interlude Walkabout 4. Calculated aesthetics: promoting the landscape on surfaces and screens **Interlude - 'Morning walks through silvered leaves in whispering groves' 5. The public realm: place branding and place making 6. Private landscape attractions as hyperreal promotional objects 7. Mass-mediating the landscape: surfaces, screens and sites at Echo Point Lookout Interlude Amble 8. Beyond branding?