It is the capital of South Australia and a key point of sophisticated Australian culture. Known in its origins as the “City of Churches“, it always stood out for its open character and free colonization of convicts, a status that helped to forge an idea of peaceful, constructive community and proud to found a new social group in the antipodes of Europe when this territory was the end of the planet.

More than 75% of the inhabitants of the Federal State live in Adelaide, which is extreme- even for Australia – , and its social cohesion and services have made it one of the most livable cities on the planet, specifically the 6th in the last classification of 2016.

Adelaide is recognized in Australia for its vibrant cultural and leisure agenda

 Adelaide is internationally recognized for its art, wine and sport festivals. A self-made city that knew how to get out of the industrial crisis and create new attractive proposals for residents, visitors and companies that want to invest in the city.

A city that welcomes people of all kinds of race, origin and religion, as we said, it comes from the origins of the founders of South Australia whose vision of religious tolerance forged a new attractive colony for a great diversity of religious practitioners, starting with English dissidents who had suffered religious persecution in England.

The first escapees were the Cornish Methodists, the Unitarians, particularly some intellectuals like Catherine Henen Spence or Robert Kay, and also Prussian Lutherans.

Seventh-day Adventists and Christadelphians, who were minorities even in America, also came to Adelaide later, although the greatest diversity, such as Australia’s own multiculturalism, came hand-in-hand with waves of immigrants: from the Mediterranean and Eastern European countries gave rise to new Orthodox creeds, Catholics and also Eastern religions by the Chinese community.

Something extraordinary about this city is that in the last decades the faith has not only diversified, but some practices have been merged and new ones have been created, represented for example by the Multi-Faith Association, Queer spirituality conference or modern societies that go beyond religion such as the Pagan Society, the Humanist Society and the Atheist Society of South Australia.

Moseley Square, Adelaide

The city of churches, on the other hand, did not turn Adelaide into a pilgrimage center for worship services. Its city branding revolves around melting pot and progress within diversity. The communities of citizens of Adelaide do not concentrate on ghettos of religion, but quite the opposite, and that also helped to the technological and social advances that enriched the Australian development.

From the technological point of view, another attraction is the city’s digital agenda. An agreement between the State Government of South Australia and the City of Adelaide deployed a comprehensive public WiFi network throughout the city.

It was then when Cisco came in with the help of the authorities, they began to consider how it was possible that digitization could improve the provision of services to citizens: monitored smart parking or smart lighting to replace halogen bulbs and with sensors that adjust the light to factors such as the time of day and the movement nearby.

There are many other projects that Adelaide wants to focus on but the City Council and Cisco are clear that to be successful, all smart city projects need to be driven to meet the needs of residents and visitors. Apart from improving everyday actions these projects may also reduce our ecological footprint in the city.

Adelaide Oval

However, it should be noted that Adelaide can become an ideal smart city for two reasons. On the one hand, the association between the state government and the municipal council that commits the authorities to collaborate effectively to promote the common good of the entire community; and on the other hand, the size of the city in relation to the level of innovation of the parties involved, ideal to be able to realize today the transition from analog city to digital city.

Today we can speak of a good example of a collaborative city with the aim of having “zero residues”, great goal, but with solutions in place so that it does not remain in a simple statement of good intentions.

An example of this, and to create a more concise and efficient city, Share N Save was born, a platform to visualize neighborhood to neighborhood, all activities available in the city to share, save, exchange, repair and connect with local communities. It is a way of mapping a city and uniting its citizens, initiative of Green Industries SA.

This public company under the state government of South Australia helps to develop a green economy in response to the demand of clean and ecological products by the citizens and thus, be able to reduce emissions to the air, water and soil of heavy industry. In short, Green Industries promotes the most efficient use of resources and also the conservation and recovery of scarce resources.

Cleland Wildlife Park, Adelaide Hills

All this explanation of Adelaide is finally summed up in a simple logo with an open door which is a traditional symbol of hope or opportunity, a simple way of welcome. This is the logo of the state of South Australia, which also represents Adelaide as it concentrates practically all its population and services.

Adelaide logo under the South Australian brand

Its values and attributes focus on creativity, innovation and industriousness, three attributes that define the essence of South Australia and Adelaide and which seek to be a claim for investment from outside Australia, from the island itself and that link all its residents.

Crossed by the Han River, the conurbanization of Seoul, Goyang and also Incheon has been the central axis of the Korean economic miracle since 1953 until today: its strong industrialization process and the great development of the new leading technologies have raised the quality of life of all South Koreans and also create this megacity, becoming a developed economy.

South Korea’s urban growth

It is therefore important to speak of the Metropolitan Government of Seoul which covers the entire region, and it is in charge of managing its already recognized urban brand. We have to go back to the 2002 World Cup in which this institution first introduced the concept of urban marketing.

Over the years and after rigorous studies, the city of Seoul brought out in 2007 its first promotional campaign with the goal of attracting 12 million foreign tourists and thus reach the ranking of the 10 main city brandings.

Since then Seoul’s growth and popularity has continued to grow and is expected to reach 20 million foreign tourists and become the third global destination of fair cities (MICE).

Attractions of a visit in Seoul

Anyway, Seoul is a large city with its urban environment that has had different campaigns and slogans over the last few years, but maintaining the values and meaning of the brand of the metropolitan area, previously developed in 1996.

Emblem of the great metropolitan area of Seoul

This logo is based on the Korean letters of the word Seoul using a mountain, the sun and the Han River, seeking to create a humanoid figure that shows joy and represents the spirit of its own citizens.

These elements also represent the respect for the environment with the mountain, the blue of the Han river represents history and vitality, and finally the sun in the central part symbolizes the vision of the city that looks to the future.

This symbol is used consistently as the flag of Seoul, in public buildings, signs, corporate material and official documents, and we should not confuse it with the promotional campaigns that complement it.

Seoul always wanted to see other examples of large metropolis representing its own nation states and without which these countries would not have the global recognition they now enjoy.

In 2015, the Seoul Metropolitan Government went further. They had to renew the previous image of Hi Seoul, which had been so successful, and this time they wanted to turn the decision of the winning logo into a participatory process in which the citizenship itself proposed the image and the public would vote it.

In fact, online voting ultimately accounted for 50% of the election, the other face-to-face vote 25% and the valuation of a professional committee, the other 25%.

Eventually I Seoul U won, which is very reminiscent of other successful city brandings using a mix of the city’s own name like I love New York, I Amsterdam or Be Berlin.

Winning application

 “Between people, there is Seoul”, that was the original idea that summarized the message of this new commercial logo of the South Korean capital

Between “you” and “I,” among citizens, and among people all around the world Seoul is at the center of all relationships.  Seoul is a city where diverse nationalities and generations, mountains and rivers, ancient palaces and skyscrapers, and all disparate elements coexist in harmony.

In the Seoul logo it fills the space of two points that represent the passion and the relaxion, and even being the game of words in English, there is an integration between the Korean “ㅇ” and the western “O”. Unambiguously it gives this coexistence with the rest of the world while the Koreans take pride in their cultural particularities.

And in this decade, moreover, if something is characterized by Seoul is to be able to bring technology to the world, being one of the smartest cities on the planet.

Seoul is a constantly changing city

The interconnectedness of the city, the openness of its institutions and the improvement of all its limited resources have made the metropolis a benchmark of everything that can be done in this 21st century: streets that recharge electric vehicles when they are circulating through them, free internet access throughout the city, sensors that measure and improve the environment and commercial services in the canopies of urban buses.

If something can be done with a mobile, it is sure to have been tested in Seoul. If something can be communicated under a city idea, you will surely see it in Seoul.

This small town on the banks of the Alps did not suffered completely the ethnic conflict of the Yugoslav disintegration and could benefit from the launch of the European Union.

Art Nouveau Façade

The wounds of history and its passage by different empires are part of its urban personality. The medieval plot continues to dominate the planning of a typical Central European city, which also breathes a magnificent art nouveau influenced by the Austro-Hungarian Empire that made it to be called the Vienna of the Balkans.

Today, it is also an edgy, modern and green city, responding to urban challenges of the XXI century.

Ljubljana replaces Bristol as European Green Capital in 2016. The Slovenian capital is proud to have come to get this award reaching the final and beating Essen, Nijmegen, Oslo and Umeå.

Panorama of the city of Ljubljana

This year, then, it is the capital city and serves as a model of green action, sharing their best practices with other cities. Is the European Commission which recognizes and rewards cities that best dealing with the environment and the common life of its inhabitants, being an expert jury which evaluates each city depending on twelve different environmental criteria, ranging from sustainable uses until waste management.

It is not the first award in the environmental category and in 2015 it received the Tourism for Tomorrow Award on the meeting of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) as the destination more sustainable approach. The city has specialized, in addition to cultural tourism, in a range of environmental tourism closely linked with nature.

With regard to transportation, since 2013 Ljubljana radically changed its system from being a city dominated by cars, to be a town where you can walk with a more limited traffic, promoting public transport. It has its own public bike system that is compatible with the urban bus system, known as BicikeLJ. Although really the Kavalir is the most curious system and it makes Ljubljana a town unique and exclusive with an electric vehicle traveling in the pedestrian streets and main streets with traffic restrictions that can be used not only by tourists but citizens from Ljubljana with reduced mobility who can not walk.

Bicyclists and users of Kavalir in the center of Ljubljana

We are talking about the Slovenian capital is also the European city with the highest percentage of separate waste. Another milestone is the fact that Ljubljana want, thanks to its Zero Waste program, to be the first European city to achieve not have urban waste and specifically reach 2025 with at least ¾ of the waste were separated. The project is likewise based on the reuse of objects for citizens to give them a second chance to those materials that used to throw.

With them we arrive to the challenge of Ljubljana 2025, which is based all cultural and environmental activities of local administration: “Vision 2025“.

This new view of the city, besides being a great urban brand, it shows what is the city to its own residents and expectations they have on their future.

Urban brand of Ljubljana promotion

A city, as the organizers say, who will be manageable and comfortable in its historical legacy shared with the green spaces that characterize it: The well-groomed image of public spaces and beautiful architecture will remain its major urban values.

This implies, therefore, protect and redesign as necessary the historic center while the modern city will be encouraged to change in order to improve innovation. Both facets of the city is not demarcated to compete but rather to complement.

As for the social cohesion of the city it will also be taken into account in the proposed creation of a vanguard city where civil society uses forms of self-organization to deal with public affairs and to open new channels of participation that also include NGOs in solving urban issues that a current council does not always come. It is a way to improve the conviviality while the decentralization of activities is encouraged, bearing in mind that this project also aims not only to make Ljubljana a more livable city in the next decade, but also be a new magnet that attracts young people and foreign population to slow aging population.

Ljubljana parks are for people and culture

The principles governing this project are summarized as follows:

• The city will be manageable and comfortable, belonging always last residents.
• The historic city will be protected and restored as needed requiring the historical district.
• The old city renewed will receive young residents and workforce to stem the loss of population in some neighborhoods.
• The parks and public gardens also remade according to the new streetscape design.
• In line with the anticipated aging population, a network of apartments and day centers will be created to offer different services to this sector of the population.

Ljubljana has already advanced in many ways, for example, in its green areas covering three quarters of its municipal territory and has been preserved by planting more than 2,000 trees and the construction of five new parks and restoring the banks of the rivers Sava and Ljublijanica.

And of course, we should mention the District Heating, an air conditioning system itself that gives even greater value to their energy efficiency and that is in a cogeneration system that distributes heating and gas into neighborhoods improving eco-efficiency: they have reduced sulfur dioxide emissions 40 times in the last two decades.

Visit Ljubljana and “Wow” campaign

Ljubljana is what it was and what its inhabitants have wanted it to be: a city in peace, full of live and exemplary for the rest of Europe and the world.

Puducherry offers an incredible confluence of the ancestral heritage and modern progress. The old French flavor is clearly visible in the well-laid gardens, magnificent churches, historical monuments, splendid mansions, and clean and wide roads, which still has French names.

French colonial architecture

This dual personality is its DNA and the city branding that make it special and unique within the Indian territory.

Puducherry has always absorbed different cultural and religious festivities. For example, the festival Kinni Radhothsavam in the Kamatchiamman Temple or  the International Yoga Festival. Since Puducherry is the former colony of France, the influence of French culture is evident in architecture, cuisine and lifestyle of the inhabitants of Puducherry. The influence of the neighboring states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala is mixed in this heterogeneous culture.

Yogafest official image

The union territory of Puducherry has a rich cosmopolitan culture. In this city, its inhabitants speak French and English, besides Tamil and Telugu. Its colonial past makes some of the schools in Puducherry use French as the lingua franca and an another interesting fact about the town of Puducherry is that half of the territory’s population has dual nationality both French and Indian.

Posters in French

Within the metropolitan area of Puducherry we highlight a unique and spiritual space called Auroville, several kilometers north of the city. This is a community that started in 1968 as an experimental population of “Mother” (a French woman named Mirra Alfassa, the first that came to the area in 1914) in order to realize human unity, or as Alfassa indicated, creating a “place in an international community life, where men and women learn to live in peace, harmony, beyond all beliefs, political opinions and nationalities.”

Auroville planned by Roger Anger

An inalienable place that does not belong to any nation and a place where all human beings can live freely as citizens of the world.

The original idea was presented at the UN and also at the Indian Government in 1965 and the guiding principles in this community were marked until today:

1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

This spirituality, which includes Auroville, and cultural events that we have exposed have made Puducherry a film reference.

Recently, the city was known to the world by the successful film “Life of Pi” (Ang Lee, 2012) which tells the story of young Pi Molitor Patel in an adventure that takes place initially in his town, Puducherry, which is the backdrop for many of the sequences of Life of Pi that were filmed in this city such as Pi’s childhood in the French quarter of Aayi Mandapam or scenes in the zoo run by the protagonist’s father, that really is the Garden Botanical city.

This film helps to show the colonial part of the city, the quiet life that was lived in the early 70’s and other delights in the middle of its urban nature, a showcase for breaking the Indian clichés, and we are sure that it has helped to promote Puducherry in Western cinema halls.

In addition Puducherry throughout its metropolitan complex with its exclaves in the rest of the Indian mainland formed a territorial union with other urban municipalities such as Oulgaret, Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam. They also have been nominated as Smart Cities for the Indian Government.

Exclaves of Puducherry including Yanam in the North, Mahe in the west coast of the subcontinent and Karaika, the nearest in the South.

At a federal level this urban territory carried out various improvements to enter into the optimum cities of the Indian Union such as the provision of sanitation of public water in homes, improvement that began in 2011, and also improving public accounts that are audited to improve urban transparency. For this civic accountability, the municipal corporation also began to show the public accounts of recent years so that any taxpayer can check how their taxes go, something new in the cities of India.

Gandhi monument

Specifically, in Puducherry we have to pay special attention to the municipal district of Oulgaret (Ozhukarai). In this town a pilot program has been planned to see voting the opinion of people regarding areas to promote within the smart city of Puducherry: urban waste management, TIC and e-government, monitoring the entrances and exits of the city, intelligent tourism, urban mobility, traffic management , monitoring of public transport by GPS and smart electricity meters and water supply.

Of all these, the points most voted by the majority will be included in the Smart City project carried out by the consulting firm Mahindra with the Country Planning Department of Puducherry in order to carry out a master plan pioneer in the history of this urban environment.

The city is renewed maintaining its charm to draw attention of the traveler. This year the Pondicherry Tourism Departament wanted to make a special and modern promotion of this urban brand that invites visitors of Pondy to forget everything, relax and discover the sensory pleasures of this part of India, under the message “Give time a break“.

A striking and unique place that awakens all the senses and brings spirituality, peace and history, as an example of intercultural coexistence.