Place branding and nonstandard regionalization in Europe

Abstract

Place branding might, could, and maybe even should play a central role in urban and regional governance. The vantage point of this chapter is that every place is a brand and that the processes of nonstandard regionalization that can be witnessed all over Europe create new places and, thus, new place brands. When employing place branding to these new types of regions, however, the traditional meta-geographies cannot be ignored. In this chapter, the aim is to take a first step to bring some order into the chaos. To this end, three categories of nonstandard regionalization are proposed and compared concerning place branding.