Peter JORDAN, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Urban and Regional Research, Austria
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that place names can assume the quality of brands almost overnight: Wuhan in China as the origin of the virus and the first city massively affected by it, Bergamo in Italy, from where we saw pictures of overburdened hospitals and the army transporting the coffins of the passed away, or the ski resort Ischgl in Austria, from where the virus was spread over wider parts of Europe by returning tourists, are most recent examples for places names having assumed the quality of negative brands. Older examples of this kind are Chernobyl and Fukushima as the places of nuclear disasters. When politicians started quoting these names in a context like “We have to avoid a second Bergamo, Ischgl etc.” we knew that these names had indeed assumed this quality. But place names can of course, and do this even more frequently, also assume the quality of positive brands. The positive image of places is, e.g., transferred to others by providing them with the decorative epithet of the famous original. Amsterdam and Stockholm are called the “Venice of the North”, Dresden the “Florence on River Elbe”, Salzburg the “Rome north of the Alps” or Bucharest the “Little Paris” or the “Paris of the East”. This potential quality of place names as positive or negative brands is due to their symbolic power and their capacity to activate imaginations and emotions. Reading, hearing or memorizing the name Paris activates the entire concept we have of the place designed by the name and as received from the media, from literature and also by tourism advertising, if we have not been already there and constructed our own concept of the place.
The paper will at first enlarge on this topic in general and then discuss and explain some typical examples of positive and negative brands in Europe referring to their historical origin and metaphoric meaning.
Mots clés : place names|brands|Europe|symbolic power
A103230PJ