To Grow Declining Cities, Sell Neighborhoods
When they lose jobs or tax base or when their downtowns lose sales, smart cities market themselves to businesses, shoppers, or tourists. But when cities lose residents, they paradoxically almost never market themselves to home buyers.
Yet residents are critical to a city's economic health.
No One Lives in a City
A fact cities frequently overlook is that no one lives in a city.
But plenty of people live in cities' neighborhoods. And neighborhoods are products in the marketplace that have competitors and have to be sold.
Cities lost residents because suburban home builders were successful in selling not cities but new neighborhoods.
That success, says community marketing specialist John Gann, is a model cities should learn from. Because cities' neighborhoods can sell even when their cities don't.
Cities need to sell themselves, John urged in Selling City Living, as places to live. In Cities of Villages he says that the best way to do that may be to sell their ""villages"--their neighborhoods.
And the more they offer the benefits of suburban villages and market those benefits, the more popular they can become.
John shows how doing that takes more than just another simplistic logos-and-slogans "branding" program. It includes taking actions to make city neighborhoods more marketable.
What You'll Know
Among the things Cities of Villages reviews are:
* 11 reasons why neighborhoods--often shortchanged in cities' revitalization
--are important: p. 5
* Why "branding" a neighborhood is not enough: p. 7
* Why city neighborhoods need "Got milk?" advertising: p. 22
* What most cities don't understand about what makes logos work: p. 26
* Why the best slogan for a neighborhood may be no slogan: p. 25
* How depopulated cities can "buy" residents: p, 34
* Why sidewalks don't make a neighborhood walkable: p. 23
* Why city parking lots should not be only downtown: p. 13