Full Description
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.
Contents
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?
