Pike Place Market is an open place for the public in which artisans, merchants and local producers meet.

The city is very lively and it has high standards of quality that are shown in their lifestyle and also in their respect for the environment.

The Green Seattle Partnership is a partnership between the City of Seattle, Forterra, nonprofit community groups, businesses, schools and a large number of volunteers working together to restore and maintain the tree parks of city.

Seattle Parks

In fact, Forterra stands out for its environmental commitment that beyond the conservation of forests and urban green spaces, it also recognizes the need to safeguard the land, not as a museum piece, but as a useful element in each of the functions that the soil can have: wild lands, lands of work or simply open spaces for the health and welfare of the whole community.

Apart from Seattle, which is the city where it is based, Forterra is present throughout the State of Washington being there the leader in the awareness and the preservation of nature, also emphasizing its divulgation in Ellensburg and Tacoma.

The Green Seattle Partnership seeks, however, to leave a natural legacy for future generations and, in the short term, to conserve the urban forests as they improve the quality of life and give a cleaner environment and the possibility of everybody to enjoy nature close at hand.

The parks help clean the urban air in a very simple way. All trees can capture carbon dioxide and thus help remove soot and other pollutants, highlighting the role of Seattle conifers that grow year-round and that on average capture more than 13 tons of carbon dioxide per acre of trees.

On a mental level, the citizen who has near trees can see reduced stress, increased creativity and memory and it has been shown that spending time close by nature leads to an increase in empathy capacity making us more generous and decreasing the aggresiveness. This is a green weapon within reach of any city that Seattle has been able to use very well.

Washington State has many open spaces between cities and its metropolitan areas have large parks that for many residents without means (including time) are their main contact with nature, but this requires the collaboration of social, public and private actors for their proper protection.

This colorful green does not go unnoticed with respect to the rest of the country that sees Seattle as a North American lung.

Nature and origins that define the present urban shield.

Formerly Seattle was known as the Queen City although currently it is known as the Emerald City as a reference to all its number of green forests in its metropolitan area. Also its slogan for many decades was the City of Goodwill that would give place in 1990 to the second edition in this city of the Games of the Friendship, more internationally known like the Goodwill Games, just after its inauguration in Moscow, which was a multi-sport event created to seek good relations with the disappeared Soviet Union in the Cold War with the participation of 54 countries and the message of “Uniting the world’s best”. Thanks to the Goodwill Games Seattle not only gave an image of a bridge city between two worlds right at the beginning of the global era we now live, but at the local level there were a number of singular urban adaptations such as the King County Aquatic Center or the Husky Stadium.

Medal of Historical Goodwill Games.

Apart from the sports competitions, cultural activities also took place under the umbrella of the Goodwill Games Arts Festival where there was an exchange of art, entertainment, dance and science between the two economic blocks of the moment.

This event can be understood thanks to the openness of Seattle as one of its main values.

As for the visual, if Seattle has always standed out is for its unique skyline.

The city branding has always used – when it was possible –  internationally recognized monuments or buildings that in the case of Seattle has been and is the Needle Space adapted in all its urban iconography. It has been crowning Seattle for 50 years and it is 184 meters tall, and due to its location outside the center skyscrapers makes it stand out prominently in most promotional snapshots.

Seattle Space Needle in the city panorama.

In the middle of the digital era, the city of Seattle shows a renewed corporate brand. That has been the clear intention of Visit Seattle that presents a clean aesthetic, without any pretensions, with the emerald green color as the main emblem of the city and with a slight game of letters reminiscent of the mountains and architecture of the city but escaping from commercial clichés that have used other brands that are limited to using the beauty of its panorama as logos to explode.

Renovated corporate image of Visit Seattle.

Seattle is flora, it is a commitment to dialogue between cultures and it is respect for life and the citizen. One of the best cities to live in the United States and a key location for North American development and today for good neighborliness with Canada and the Pacific, and by extension, with the whole world.

View of Houston

The Southern America’s largest city is known for its fusion of TexMex and the huge number of flavors that have brought the migrations of workers.

It has always been reknowned as a city for intrepid entrepreneurs, engineers, technicians and executives. Houston is the energy capital of the world thanks to its industrial base, the center of manufacturing, aeronautics and its port, the country’s first in tonnage, but is also home for 25 of the 500 companies with more capital of the world and, on average, the adult people with a university degree in this city of Texas earn 10% more than their teammates elsewhere in the United States and thus Houston ranks as first in the top cities for recent graduates.

And not all the time is invested in exploiting energy but there are also a large number of cultural activities with its museums, theaters and other attractions. Without going any further, Houston has up to 83 museums and cultural centers, and offers outdoor performances in Cullen Park and George Bush Park, a unique place and one of the largest urban parks throughout America. One of the most unknown of global Houston is just its own museum district which hosts an exclusive collection of exhibits in a neighborhood made by and for culture.

Houston, avant-garde city, offers a high quality of life

Houston attracts talent, both in the medical and in the aerospace fields, which are just the identifying values of its urban brand.

Texas Medical Center (TMC) is the largest medical center in the world and it has one of the highest densities of clinical facilities for patient care -with more than 5 million annual national visitors and 10,000 international – and research health. There is a total of 47 institutions involved in medicine, 13 hospitals and two medical schools that grouped all these facilities.

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center was the first member of the group that makes up the TMC and it is a world reference in their fight against cancer and research.

But apart from its economic weight and health, or because of it, Houston is known worldwide and the essence of its urban brand is always accompanied by NASA.

In the collective imagination we misquote “Houston, we have a problem” enunciated by Swigert in the mission of Apollo 13 and now often used colloquially when someone is in trouble.

The city branding of this city has a unique storytelling and beyond the myth, truth of the story is that Houston served as head, hands and eyes of all projects in the US space race. Example of this golden age, and open to everyone, is now the Johnson Space Center. For over 50 years, this center has played a vital role through technological innovations and scientific discoveries.

In its early days, the center led the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab projects and currently serves as the control center for NASA operations of the International Space Station, for many advanced human exploration projects and also plays an important role in commercial crew programs of the organization.

With it, the Houston metropolitan area has become an aerospace center with its own innovation identity.

Houston shows past and future of aerospace exploration

In this context, a major attraction that Houston has now is the Space Center that emphasizes science and education in a fun way and it seeks to inspire admiration for the space explorations to the visitors.

This center is designed for all ages and it has an incredible variety of exhibitions, the world’s largest collection of moon rocks and samples of our satellite. It is, in short,  the home of Mission Control at NASA and the basis for training of astronauts that visitors can see when they discover just over Houston.

Current image of Space Center

How to create a good image, modern and contemporary, for such a spacial and special city?

As we have said, Houston has an emblem that brings together all urban facets : “City with no limits”

The mission of the Greater Houston Partnership, which is the organization that includes the Chamber of Commerce of Houston, the Houston Economic Development Council and the Houston World Trade Association, is to show as Houston the best place to live, work and do business. Houston has had an incredible growth and it is partly due to this association which has a large private investment, playing  an important role in creating jobs and maintaining a healthy environment for developing business relations.

This new brand comes from two communication agencies, the Agency MMI Houston and Avalanche Consulting of Austin. The final work embodies the pride and history of the space city, a city that has dreamers, entrepreneurs and free spirit people, and this is the reason why the “H” logo looks like a space rocket.

The city with no limits applications

This logo design can be easily modified and may represent multiple ideals and city projects.

For all these applications the web thecitywithnolimits.com helps us to see the city without limits.

Houston is an incredible city with a great future. It should not surprise us to play a key role in the United States and in the world, thanks to its technological potential. Its brand image, newly renovated, will help us to position as the technology capital of the Western world, key to be competitive in this new global era.