Essay Example: Designing a New City and City Branding

The concept of designing a new city is often a complex one due to the items of requirements that are needed in the process. One of the fundamental problems in building a new city is the existence of pompous architects, bureaucratic impedimenta and vainglorious dictators who locks up the process of decision making. However, despite these impediments, research has shown a number of elements that are fundamental to the development of any city in the world. In particular, the presence of a constant water supply is fundamental. For instance, history credits the failure to kick off immediately after completion, the city of Mughal emperor Akbar to lack of water supply. This is perhaps one of the constantly ignored elements in the historical city development prospects but has proved to be an essential component of city development mechanism.

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Another critical element is the presence of reliable money. In particular, the existence of liquid money supply is fundamental to the running of a city. The establishment of heavy capital structures is important but should not drain off the liquid cash of a new city. The organization and designs of a city infrastructure must accommodate structures and facilities that can be supported by the current economic climate and subject to possible progressive expansion. There are numerous sources that the money in circulation within the context of a city precinct should be considered. For instance in Rawabi is a new city comprising of some Palestinian families. Some individuals have rebuked it based on its composition by population and occupation. Rawabi is the initial planned city developed for the people of Palestine for the people of Palestine. However, it has been faulted for normalizing the Israeli occupation while some Israelis claim that it has been subject to enhancing the prospects of tourist activities drawing from its approximately £640million investment from the private partners of Palestinian and Qatar origins.

Another critical area of consideration is the ability of the city to create job opportunities. In order to achieve economic sustainability, any city needs new job positions that should also rise progressively with the projected population growth. For instance, Cairo, the capital of Egypt has a better opportunity for success due to its fateful development on the basis of ability to host a wide range of government offices that will definitely create a pool of work placement for the population and provide a progressive capacity for job creation through stimulation of the private sectors and direct pubic initiatives. In many other instances, evidence has pointed at successful cities as a product of prior planning.

Most planned cities in the world emerged to be the capitals of their respective countries. Examples includes: Abuja, Canberra, Brasilia and New Delhi among others. Despite the challenges facing planned cities, their potential to generate employment opportunities and the economic roles as national administrative hubs has boosted their positions in their respective economies besides promoting their sustainability in the long-run. Another critical attributes of successful cities is the inclusion of locals in virtually all planning, execution and development of the city. The inclusion of local participants in city development is fundamental to the development of strong cities with maximized support from the locals. The support offered by locals is essential for sustained growth since locals are deemed loyal to their city and therefore determined to manipulate both resources and goodwill in tapping into the potential of their city to grow hence achieving sustainability.

City Branding

Nation branding is one of the most important aspect of national identity in the contemporary development. In order to develop competitive national markets, many countries have invested extremely huge capitals into establishing concrete brands. The idea of city branding posits the power of either implicit or explicit geographical indication supplementing potential appeal of a city’s product or services. This aspect is created in order to establish price premium on the commodities besides stimulating customers’ loyalty towards the product or services.

City branding as a concept rests on observations that it leverages more than a city’s exported products making a major difference in the perception of a city. The essential quality, reliability and performance elements are basically, the main factors constituting of costs of modern market places. Hence, brand has grown to become very essential factors in trade. Whether tangible or intangible, the role of intellectual capital is paramount in value addition to the product without subject to attractive and distinctive brand. In the context of individual companies, most of our current companies have been able to increase and sustain their employees, customer loyalty and overall business processes through the development of strong brands which both customers and employees identify with.

This principle of individual companies also applies to countries. Without a consolidated and powerful positive reputation commonly referred to as the ‘nation-brand’ no city can effectively compete for consumers, investors as well as respect of other countries globally. Subsequently, city brand leverages every aspect pertaining to international engagement hence playing a critical role in the social, economic and political progress of the city. Resulting from clear leadership in the central government, all the stakeholders share a unique vision of the identity of a city hence achieving certain extent of harmonization in their activities and communications. This cites a huge opportunity for such a city’s image to present fair and positive present reality. In essence, the international audience is also prescribed to a higher probability of forming a coherent and positive view of the city in case majority of the information they receive from the city in regard are widely aligned.

City brand is also perceived as an important summation of intangible competitive asset of a city. The city’s vision, genius or citizens and its position in the market place are also defined by effective endorsement of a city or nation brand. There are certain factors that when aligned to a prospective strategy provides a sustainable competitive advantage with solid capacity to charge a consistent premium and the consent of customers to not only innovate but also extend the series of products on offer. Market capitalization in many states often attaches values to their brands which is often bigger than the tangible assets. There are numerous reasons that have been suggested as to why the intangible assets of poorer counties have been unable to work well for the nations particularly to spearhead economic growth and prosperity. However, brand theory indicates a major reason behind this scenario citing inadequacy or complete lack of strong strategic deployment of resources productively and in a harmonized manner. These aspects create an inter-state disparity due to the differentiated strategy of undertaking international business processes.

City branding has been recognized as a major aspect that can promote economic progress of a state. In many instances, countries have developed very ideal strategies towards luring the international community for the investment in foreign states. This aspect has led to increased Foreign Direct Investment particularly in developing countries that have opened up for foreign investments. In this regard, City Branding has been established on the basis of proactive foreign policy development that has seen the growth in investments from the international perspectives. In return, this has promoted the local economies of the destination countries through improved employment levels and other economic activities that have promoted the overall well-being of the communities’ economies involved.

From the international perspective, Japan is ranked sixth best performing countries in nation branding as at 2015 although the city had been enjoying the best placed for quite some times in the past. Indeed, Japan have been making tremendous efforts to boost its economy though its reputation globally has been on the rise for quite a long time and continues to perform well in the international image perspectives. There are different analysis that has been made to establish the global ranking of the countries. These analyses use different but correlated elements to define interstate score on nation branding. With the Anholt-GfK Nations Brand IndexSM, Japan is ranked sixth.