Arcadia Spain

Last weekend, we took the BUSP370 Brand Barcelona students to Valencia as part of the embedded excursion of the course. Valencia is located in the east coast of Spain in the Comunidad Valenciana region and is the third biggest city in Spain after Madrid and Barcelona

We set ourselves a couple of tasks, first to see how Valencia promotes itself as a center for knowledge-based industries and second to examine what we took to calling the 'shadow side' of the brand. We were helped in the first objective by an interesting talk by a representative of Valencia Activa- the Town Hall's agency for promoting economic growth in the city and we were helped with the second by learning about some of the recent and on-going corruption scandals in the city and how they are related to the building of the Valencia city 'brand'. The students also had a few hours to research and explore an aspect of the city's re-branding and transformation. They carried out this field-work in groups but it was postponed to the morning of the second day due to the torrential rain on the first day. On the afternoon of the first day we inspected the notorious City of the Sciences and Arts. This was a project that was a center-piece of Valencia's re-branding strategy and is never far from controversy! At the end of the final class we had lunch together and took the opportunity to have a very productive round table discussion about all the themes that we had explored, both collectively and in groups.