The Dutch province of Limburg has a notable history. In its capital city, Maastricht, the treaty that created the European Union was signed back in 1992. Limburg is also home to the laboratory that invented the world’s first synthetic hamburger, and the mountainous smugglers’ maze that helped saved valuable Dutch artwork from the Nazis during …
Manifesto for place branding and citizen governance
My training is in public administration, yet I study place branding and marketing. When attending conferences, this usually leads to people looking at me funny and asking me some variant of this question: “So how is that public administration?” Perhaps a brief introduction to my background will help answer that – and help put it …
Building ‘Brand Morocco’
Malcolm Allan discusses a recent conference on building Brand Morocco By Malcolm Allan On 27 May in Casablanca, the Ministry of Industry, Trade, Investment and the Digital Economy of the Kingdom of Morocco, Maroc Export and the Amadeus Institute held the first annual conference on developing a strategy for Brand Morocco. As MD of Placematters, …
Tolerance wins in London
We live in an increasingly intolerant era defined by the rise of Donald Trump and his ilk. Far-right parties are cropping up across Europe like an especially virulent rash. Much of popular sentiment towards refugees is inhumanly negative, as evidenced both in the press and in social media comments sections. But happily, there is at …
Panama Papers: Reputation and Misconceptions
If you’d asked people a couple of weeks ago where Panama was located, they would probably say it’s somewhere on the American continent, but not be entirely sure where. They might have heard of the Panama Canal, but just like the one in Suez, we’ve all heard of it, but most can’t really point to …