Designing the City Identity: Strategic and Product Design for New Experiential Ways of Living, Enabling and Interacting with the Urban Context.

The city identity design is a very complex task, but it is indispensable to be recognized in a competitive market and to attract investments, companies and people in economic, cultural and educational sectors. This complexity comes from many factors, including the delicate relationship between identity and reputation, being and being perceived. For this purpose, besides the consolidation of the Place Branding and City Branding disciplines, some investigation methods have been perfected over the last few years. Their aim is to measure the satisfaction index and the reputation of countries and cities, by creating very interesting rankings for the institutions. Today, the diffusion of digital technologies and social networks is contributing to increase and spread some actions of bottom-up participation, crowdsourcing, collective creation of urban identity, which can interpret the social changes under way faster. In the age of open-source cities, what is the relationship between top-down identity processes and innovative visions, animating the territories' physical and virtual networks? How can we build a shared, strong image of the city, including and conveying new emerging narrations and innovative proposals of urban use and valorization?