Branding Strategies for Cultural Landscape Promotion: Organizing Real and Virtual Place Networks

Abstract

Neoteric Western civilization refers to the historic past of the ancient Greek city of Sparta proclaiming it as an initial paradigm of up-standing, virtuous governance and political formation. It was the acknowledgment of the previous correlation between neoteric references and Hellenic classical antiquity that drove the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), in collaboration with the University of Peloponnese, to undertake a research program concerning the development of a ‘place branding’ strategy for the promotion of the cultural landscape of the territory of contemporary municipality of Sparta. The research proposal that will be presented insists on the creation of landscape visitors’ networks, connecting important focal places of historic importance in the interior of the urban structure, as well as in the surroundings of the contemporary city, with exceptional interest for the zone of river Eurotas. However the most important concern of the proposal is associated not with the real landscape treatment, but rather with the interrelation of material landscape networks to virtual space narrative references, attempting to bring visitors in immediate contact with libraries, museums and galleries of the world, where the mythological and historic past of the real, contemporary landscape of Sparta is treasured up.