Alphabet city: orthographic differentiation and branding in late capitalist cities

ABSTRACT

This article examines the emergence and design of letter-based city logos in order to discuss what they reveal about writing and cities, and the dynamics between them. Developing a political economic and social semiotic analysis, I suggest that these letter-based logos respond to an increased competition for attention in society—strongly linked to new media technology and patterns of mobility in late capitalist economies. I further argue that they illustrate globalizing linguistic processes such as the truncation, commodification and adaptation of language to global audiences and technologies, and thereby contribute to mask the social and material reality of the branded cities. The article contributes to the broader examination of the ways in which cities and writing interact by drawing attention to the continued spread of abstract and standardized register forms for representing institutional power and distinction within globalized markets, and by discussing their local socio-economic embedding.

KEYWORDS:

• (New) writing
• letters
• orthography
• city logos
• city branding
• standardization

1. Introduction

The city is inaccessible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified. (Strauss 1961, 8)

However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave … without having discovered it. (Calvino 1974 [1972], 14)

In the beginning was the M … Well, perhaps not. Nevertheless, the global spread and ubiquity of McDonalds’ Golden Arches within contemporary cityscapes illustrates the symbolic and economic value-potential of a single letter as a styling resource. While private companies have long used visually salient single letters and acronyms to brand themselves and their products and services, this is relatively new among cities. Most of them still rely primarily on symbols developed within heraldic culture, mixed with visual representations of famous landmarks. However, a shift can be observed, where more and more cities, through their PR-agencies, turn to the graphic and visual forms of written language as prime semiotic resources for re-presenting themselves to “the world.”

This paper departs from this observation and develops a discussion of the dynamics between writing and cities in contemporary society, focusing on the emergence, role and function of what I call letter-based city logos. That is, logos that substitute the city name with the initial letter of the name or give visual prominence to this letter through graphic work. Milton Glaser’s “I Love NY” from 1977 is the most well-known example and has since been adapted in innumerable ways and places.¹ However, already in the 1960s, the German cities of Gelsenkirchen and Wuppertal began using letter-based logos in order to differentiate themselves from competing cities. Within a few decades, a complete alphabet of city logos has emerged (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Alphabet of letter-based city logos. The alphabet is made by the author and has nothing to do with the represented cities.

The appearance of letter-based city logos thus coincided with the industrial and financial crisis in the USA and Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, and the establishment during the 1980s and 1990s of neoliberalism as the predominant ideology in many countries around the world (Harvey 2010). Consequently, cities faced severely reduced state support and their only solution to sustained development was to attract private and foreign investors and capital. This explains the sudden profusion of city branding and the mantra of competition: cities were, and still are supposed to compete with one another for visitors’ and investors’ attention and capital. One of the means to achieve attention is a fine mixture of distinction and recognition. At the same time, I do not claim that all city governments the world over have been responding to these large scale social and economic processes alike, and that the ones who have commissioned new logos did it all for the same reasons. These are all empirical questions that I cannot address within the scope of this paper, but I do wish to offer this fairly consistent and wide-spread textual practice for initial comment and critique.

As argued by Giorgia Aiello (This issue), many cities’ aspiration to a “world class” status results in the deployment in their cityscapes of certain conventionalized branding tropes (e.g. banners, public sculpture), and the adoption of architectural and urban design choices (e.g. juxtaposition of contemporary and traditional architectural detail). Letter-based city logos may be seen as another, globally enregistered discursive resource embodying cities’ orientation, or ethos, to be seen as “players” on the world stage. Besides, they appear to bear a number of formal features corresponding to Adam Jaworski’s (2015a) notion of globalese, a verbal-visual register indexing places as “global.” In Jaworski’s examples drawn from a range of commercial and cultural domains, logos and brand names indexing particular places as “global”, adopt a range of typographic and orthographic features de-linking them from specific ethno-national languages. Likewise, in the city logos analysed here, letters of the alphabet become recontextualized and transformed in a way that “removes” them from the traditional typographic and orthographic contexts of their “source” city names. These acts of visual styling combining letters of the (Latin) alphabet, diacritics, colour, and graphics, result in multimodal signs that emerge as emblems of the “global semioscape” (Thurlow and Aiello 2007), a globalised and globalising aesthetic for spatial differentiation and branding. We encounter them on posters, flyers and brochures in tourist fairs and offices, public transport and cleaning vehicles, municipal signage and websites, recontextualized as sculptures, used in furniture design, and much more.

In their form, the letter-based logos are what Ella Chmielewska (2005) has described as “minimal texts:” truncated bits of language that paradoxically, given the place branding ambition, distance themselves from the culture and history of a place. Similar to how the “logoization” of the imperial maps made individual colonies appear “like a detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle,” as “pure sign, no longer compass to the world” (Anderson 2006, 179), the reduction from name to letter seems to “free” these city logos from their specific and traditional linguistic contexts. In this sense, they are part of a larger repertoire of resources deployed by urban bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who seek to create unique senses of place, but risk falling into the production of “a ‘recursive’ and ‘serial’ monotony, producing from already known patterns or moulds places almost identical in ambience from city to city” (Harvey 1989a, 295).

To a certain degree, I will discuss the logos in this paper at a locally contextualized level, where they do specific semiotic work such as attracting visitors and provoking debate. The focus will however be at a more abstract level, where I approach them as part of a broader move towards “new writing” (Van Leeuwen 2008), in the sense of their multimodality, standardization and regulation of public organizations’ communication. With Giorgia Aiello’s (2013, 1) words, city logos are “hyper-mediatized,” that is, “imagined and imaged for key lifestyle publics via top-down multimodal discourses.” In order to achieve an efficient hyper-mediatization, the forms need to be unique and distinctive at the same time that they are flexible, adaptable and transferable to all kinds of media, genres, texts, places, and languages. This idea is clearly illustrated in the promotional video of the new logo for the Indian city Agra “City branding Agra,” https://vimeo.com/125246261, produced by the Dutch agency Fabrique. If possible, take a minute to watch the video before reading the rest of the paper.

Through focusing on city logos, the paper aims to contribute to the broader examination of the ways in which cities and writing interact in two ways. First, by considering how cities are “written” and draw on the status of (new) writing for their economic and symbolic branding, and second, by applying a historical perspective. The first concern contributes to the current rethinking of “language materiality” (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2017) by drawing attention to the continued spread of abstract and standardized register forms for representing institutional power and distinction within globalized markets, and by discussing their local socio-economic embedding. The latter shows how the interaction of writing and cities has changed in political economic terms, and how the letter-based city logos are linked to a historical dynamic of literacy, power and resistance.

2. The creation of an alphabet: notes on method and data

Jane Jacobs (1993, 831) describes how the study of cities within the social sciences has developed towards more qualitative and semiotic approaches, “moving away from privileging the built environment as the source of meaning and turning to an approach which takes account of social, political and material contexts.” As a consequence, Jacobs (1993, 833) contends “the challenge [for the researcher of cities] is to maintain a grasp of the politics of production, reproduction and consumption while being alert to the poetics of discursive formations.” By creating an alphabet of city logos and then critically discussing the ideological, technological, economic, and sociolinguistic aspects of their production, reproduction and consumption, I attempt to meet this challenge.

Inspired by artists such as Claude Closky, Lisa Rienermann, Eric Tabuchi, Ben Eine and Evan Roth, who have created alphabets out of different kinds of urban forms,² I have put together an alphabet of city logos that give salience to a single letter or letter combination (Figure 1). The artistic alphabets present half-playful, half-critical visual meditations on urban life and consumer societies, and I would like to see my own alphabet in a similar way: as a playful method to draw attention to and critically discuss grave socio-economic processes and related sociolinguistic challenges. Similar to the artistic alphabets, the one that I am discussing in this paper is based on a collection, reordering and repurposing of existing cultural visual forms.³

Most of the data collection for this study was done online between June 2017 and May 2018, using search strings such as “letter-based city logos” and “single-letter city logos” in English, Spanish, German, French and Swedish. I used the alphabet as a structuring principle in the sense that I aimed to find at least one logo for each letter of the alphabet of these languages. When left without hits, I made an additional systematic search via Wikipedia’s list over “towns and cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants/cityname.”

Some letters are clearly more popular than others (see Appendix). For instance, there are many As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Hs, and Ms, but few Is, Js, Us, Ys, and Zs. I could only find three Fs (Falkenberg, Feldafing and Forth Worth), two Qs (Quedlinburg and Quilmes), one X (Mexico City), and no Å, Ä or Ñ (the Å being Swedish, the Ä Swedish or German, and the Ñ Spanish). This distributional pattern raises salient questions that extend beyond the scope of this paper. Still, it is probably a combination of availability (in the five surveyed languages there are few cities with initial Ñ, Q, X, Z, Å and Ä), graphic potential (letters like B and M lend themselves to visual creation and play), and social taste (the letter A comes first and rates best in social interaction, while the F is marked with obscenity and failure (Firmage 1993; Sacks 2003)). At the same time, letters like X, Q, K and Z, that are rare in this alphabet, are ubiquitous in the global semioscape of commerce because of their visual extravagancy and salience (Sacks 2003, 362; Jaworski 2019).

When a city decides to change or introduce a new logo, it is customary for it to run a competition, sometimes open to both professional designers and citizens at large, but is mostly reserved for professionals (e.g. Burghausen, Mexico City, and Saga). Therefore, many logos on the internet have never been in formal use. However, all the logos analysed in this article have been or are currently being used by cities in their public communication (ranging from websites and print brochures to street signage). Moreover, many cities operate with two logos, one relatively formal and traditional for the city council, and one relatively informal and playful for the convention bureau or tourist board. At the same time, there is a clear tendency towards single uniform logos for both entities (and all other branches of a city) (Järlehed 2017). For this reason, the alphabet includes both kinds of logos, with a majority though being from the city councils (100 of 114 in my sample).

The final list (see Appendix) includes logos from 23 countries and 5 continents, indicating that they are widely used. In addition to my own data collection, I included logos from the collection presented in Beyrow and Vogt (2014) where the authors include the logos of all the German cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants. A considerable portion of them has opted for primarily letter-based logos. Additionally, I profited from graphic designer Achim Schaffrinna’s dt-NEWS, a newsletter consisting of professional comments on new logos and brands for cities and companies from around the world.

For the analysis of the process of production and social reception of these logos, I consulted the cities’ webpages and wrote e-mails to their communications officers. I also searched the internet for media coverage and interviews with their commissioners and designers. For the more detailed interpretation of the A Coruña logo (see below), I draw on fieldwork undertaken between 2015–2016, when I interviewed the designer of the A Coruña logo, two civil servants responsible for the city’s visual communication, a high civil servant responsible for the Galician government’s cultural politics, and a Galician expert in cultural branding. In the spring of 2017, I also conducted an internet survey and received 104 survey answers to questions on bilingual signage in Galicia, including one question on people’s interpretation of the “CeEñe.”

The method of analysis developed and employed, which provides an account of these city logos, draws on both social semiotics and the political economy of cities. The logos are thus seen as specific semiotic resources and my aim is to explain why they appear, how they are produced, consumed and circulated, and what they reveal about writing (in) the city.

3. The political economy and semiotics of writing (in) cities

The development of late capitalism and globalization has underlined the importance of looking at language and writing as resources within the political economy of place (Logan and Molotch 2007 [1976]). Del Percio, Flubacher, and Duchêne (2017, 55) explain political economy as “the technologies and processes governing the valuation of resources as well as their production, circulation, and consumption within a given place and at a specific moment in time.” As they say, language is a “resource that, under certain political-economic conditions, can be exchanged for other symbolic or material resources” (ibid.). In alignment with social semiotic theorization, the notion of language is in this paper seen as including writing, letters and graphemes.

In late capitalism, the initial letters of the city names have emerged as prime tools for branding (Sebba 2015) and are exchanged for attention, recognition and competitiveness. However, the production, circulation, consumption and valuing of writing vary over time and space, and as argued by Jan Blommaert (2013), this variation depends on a range of socio-economic, technological, and cultural conditions. In his words, writing is “a complex of specific resources subject to patterns of distribution, of availability and accessibility” (Blommaert 2013, 1). As illustrated by the alphabet discussed in this paper, the letter-based city logos are widely distributed around the world. As a result of the historical spread and prestige of Western cultures and languages, the letters of the Latin alphabet are extensively available as resources for branding of places and commodities. Nevertheless, as will be shown in the analysis, the symbolic and economic potential of these resources are variously accessible to different social actors.

One the one hand, ever more writing is today produced, circulated and consumed in cities. Adam Jaworski (2015b) has used the term “word cities” to comment on this, and Paula Geyh (2006) describes a fundamental shift in the US during the twentieth century from “the city of objects to the city of signs.” According to her, this shift implied that “the emphasis of the actual economies of major cities largely shifted from the production of goods to the production of signs, including advertising. Most crucially, the consumption of commodities, while never without some semiotic function, became primarily the consumption of signs” (Geyh 2006, 414; cf. Baudrillard 1998 [1970]).

This evolution of the political economy of US cities was paralleled in Europe with profound effects. Crucially, Henri Lefebvre (1996, 115) observes how “the ideology of consumption [ … ] becomes itself the ideology of society; each ‘object’, each ‘good’ splits itself into a reality and an image, this being an essential part of consumption.” The city logos live from this “split” into reality and image: they abstract an excerpt of the complex reality which is then reproduced and consumed by tourists and visitors, possibly affecting their interaction with the “real” city in place, and eventually also the social and economic reality of the city as it unfolds day after day.

On the other hand, as Ángel Rama (1996) shows in his book on the role of writing in the colonization of South America, writing has always been closely linked to cities and to urban elites. Throughout history and around the world, writing has served as a tool for both authority and liberty, and it has therefore been subjected to constant disputes over power. The letter-based city logos should thus not just be discussed as a commercial register and branding resource but also as an expression of and tool for hegemony, as something that may contribute to spreading and establishing the elites’ values as norm.

Scholars of literacy point out that more people than ever before are literate today and have access to writing (Barton and Papen 2010), yet, elites are constantly attempting to restrict the accessibility to power through writing, by minimizing some of the most privileged forms of writing. For instance, acronyms have become frequent in traditional spheres of societal power such as administration, business, science, military and politics, but they are also common in recent subcultural expressions such as graffiti tags and online youth slang. They abbreviate words and names for reasons of economy and power: they are an effective means of creating inclusion and exclusion. Minimal, and to those who are not part of the intended audience, cryptic forms of writing are also deployed in commercial signage in gentrification processes, where they serve socio-economic distinction-making and contribute to redistribution of people and goods within urban spaces (Trinch and Snajdr 2017; Järlehed, Nielsen, and Rosendal 2018).

Adam Jaworski (2015b, 76) comments on the “‘thingification’ of words and the ‘wordification’ of things—the way words are materialized and the way objects are semioticized.” Together with other increasingly ubiquitous genres of writing (in) the city, such as fonts exclusively designed for particular cities (Järlehed and Fanny 2021), skylines and city names printed on commodities, the letter-based city logos are part and expression of these two interrelated processes. Cities are increasingly semioticized and mediatized and thus subjected to “wordification” or “alphabetification,” and single letters are “thingified” through their materialization in a range of objects, texts, genres and media.

An example of the former is the extensive production of detailed brand manuals that verbally and visually describe and regulate the usage of these logos and related elements of the city branding repertoire. An example of the latter is that several of the examined cities have fabricated “language objects” (Jaworski 2015b; Gonçalves 2019) in the shape of sculptural letters and letter-furniture, which are then placed in the cities to further familiarize the inhabitants with the new image of the city (e.g. Cottbus in Germany and Ieper in Belgium). The Lithuanian city of Klaipėda even stages two letter-sky-scrapers, the K- and D-towers, referring to the initial letters of the city and the river Danė that runs through it, thus unsettling the boundaries between writing/letter, image, place and architecture.

Importantly for the sociolinguistic analysis in this article, as language objects, letter-based city logos are “instances of linguistic performances with complex trajectories of appropriation and recontextualization of prior cultural and linguistic material” (Jaworski 2015b, 82). This means that we need to pay attention to the social embedding of the logos and that we can expect to find contestation and counter-versions to these processes of sociolinguistic change (see Medway and Warnaby 2014). This is by no means an extraordinary phenomenon since the city logo is an extreme simplification of social, cultural, economic and historical complexity. In Jon Goss’ words (1997, 183), city logos are “fragmented and decontextualized elements of the historical city,” which contribute to mask the real city and its multitudinous biographies and multi-layered history.

I conclude this section by teasing out the connections between letter-based city logos and what Theo Van Leeuwen (2008) has referred to as “new writing” (also Ledin and Machin 2019). Van Leeuwen (2008) identifies the emergence of new forms of writing in online media technologies, computer software, and digitalization. A central feature of new writing is the dissolution of clear boundaries between separate modes, such as orthographic writing, images, typography and colour. Although individual modes can still operate on their own, within new writing the semiotic work of the separate modes is increasingly intertwined and interdependent. New “writing is at once more visual than the old ‘page’ media, and less pictorial than the old ‘screen’ media such as television and film, in which the written word only played a minor role” (Van Leeuwen 2008, 132). In letter-based city logos, the letters become visually salient as they take on pictorial functions incorporating in their design local landmarks and emblems such as historical buildings, local means of transport, mountains and rivers. At the same time, these “iconic” elements assume alphabetic shapes and functions. Ledin and Machin (2019, 168) argue that new writing “goes hand in hand with technologization and the drive to increase control over communication,” and that it builds on and contributes to standardization and commodification of semiotic resources and practices. Complexity tends to be eradicated and “causality become abstracted” (ibid.). We become attracted to new writing both by its seeming functional simplicity and by its affect.

The following analysis builds on these thoughts as it approaches the letter-based city logos as expression of late capitalist intents to raise profits out of increased inter-urban competitiveness. To this end, the logos need to be simultaneously distinctive, easily recognizable, localized and globally mobilizable, and thus ideally embraced by both local populations and foreign capital. The first section of the analysis centres on the form and content of the logos, the second addresses issues of representation and resistance, the third attends to the spread of global English, and the last section discusses the ambiguities and tensions inherent in minimal forms of new writing.

4. Analysis: the politics and semiotics of orthographic differentiation in city branding

City logos normally contain the name of the city and some visuals representing well-known and central features of the city’s history and landscape. A review of the letter-based logos analysed in this article shows that while some of them contain straightforwardly recognizable visual place-markers (e.g. the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Burlington Skyway Bridge in Hamilton, and the Wuppertal Suspension Railway), most of them do not. In addition to the initial letter of the place name, place anchoring is achieved with more subtle, typographic, chromatic and symbolic means, typical of new writing.

According to the designer Claus Koch (http://www.clauskoch.com/tuebingen/) and the city’s communication office (personal communication), the Tübingen “t” represents the city’s most famous building, the Hölderlinturm, where the poet Friedrich Hölderlin resided for four decades. Once you are aware of this background context, you can see how the “t” nicely forms the left half of the building with its pointed roof formation (though the revised and current logo from 2017 uses a bolder and angular slab serif font, which presents less similarity to the built form than the old-style “t” in the original logo). The choice of a classical text-font further expresses the academic and intellectual fame of the city, underlined by the designation Universitätsstadt (University city) that complements the toponym Tübingen in the logo.

Many logos display variants of the red heart in Milton Glaser’s iconic “I love NY” logo, often by graphic play with the letter B, as in Belfast (IR) and Barrow (UK). The Galician city of Vigo instead displays a heart-shaped white V on red background. The rest of the city name however, “-igo” is written with the typeface customized for the Galician nation-brand, thus balancing the globalese (Jaworski 2015a) with a cultural and geographic link to Galicia (Järlehed 2017).

The frequent play with the New York logo—repeatedly commented on in interviews with designers and in academic papers on city branding (e.g. Design Rush 2018 and Bendel 2011)—comes as no surprise since, as Adam Jaworski (2015b, 228) says, “The ‘heart’ [ … ] is arguably one of the most common, graphic elements of the global semioscape linking commerce with affect.” At another level, the intertextual reference to New York is symptomatic to this whole alphabet since, to a large degree, the branding of late capitalist cities builds on the New York lesson. The severe socio-economic and financial crisis of the 1970s was countered with a combination of financial deregulation, redirection of economic investments from social welfare to real estate and business, and aesthetic and rhetoric measures aiming at a new, and more positive public image (Thörn 2014, 255–57).

As a communicative genre, city logos have become more corporatized over the years. Figure 2 illustrates how their forms have changed from detailed heraldry to simple minimalist displays. Even though corporatization is pervasive, the heraldic tradition is still viable in many cities where the logos include stylized elements of the old coat of arms, such as the shield-shaped mono-coloured backgrounds of the Gavà G and the Bilbao B (Spain), and the stylized lion head inside the Uppsala U (Sweden).⁴ While corporate logos are not primarily indexing a place but a set of qualities associated with a product or brand, city logos index a place and a set of qualities associated with this place from a historical perspective. Yet, the difference is not absolute. While most companies start off on small scales and begin operating locally, the local anchoring tends to dissolve when business operations turn international. Similarly, through history, new meanings that are not linked to the original city-as-place are ascribed to globally known cities and their logos, and the reduction from name to letter in the logos most definitely present an opportunity for city marketers and other powerful social actors to expand “their” cities’ sphere of resonance and take on new meanings, just as Bayerische Motoren Werke did when they began operating under the now globally recognized acronym “BMW.”

Figure 2. From heraldic coats of arms to corporate logos.

As illustrated by the declarations that accompanied the launch of the Covington C⁵, these meanings are often contained in terms such as “diversity,” “sustainability,” and “creativity.” These are all keywords in late capitalist discourse (Leary 2019) and tend to be used by most contemporary cities in their branding work. Parallel to them, another set of meanings are rather expressing a cultural heritage discourse, as they attempt to link the letters to specific traits of the city’s history and citizenry. For instance, the Belgian branding agency Lemento that developed the new logo for the Belgian city of Ypres/Ieper states that: “The concept is based on the Roman numeral I, referring both to World War I and to the first letter of the city’s name in Dutch (Ieper).” The two sets of meanings are often indexed in the same texts, as when Lemento continues: “The ‘I’ also represents the characteristics of this Belgian city (Intriguing, Inspiring, International, Intensive, Intimate, Innovating, Interesting [ … ])” (Lemento 2009, 3).

4.1. Representation, anchoring and resistance

City logos are commissioned by municipal governments and paid with tax money. It is therefore understandable that new city logos often provoke public debate about economic costs as well as visual and linguistic content. People ask: “What do we get for our money? Whom do the logos represent? Who owns them?” For instance, the Melbourne M was created by Landor Associates in 2009 and sold to the city for AUS$240.000 (Desktop Magazine 2012). Although local opinion was initially very negative, according to the former Landor creative director Jason Little (ibid.), positive international reactions eventually made most people accept it. The popularity of the design is demonstrated by straightforward imitations, such as the M appropriated for the Fantasia MIC Plaza shopping centre in Shenzhen, China in 2011 (ibid.), and the adaptation of the design and colour scheme for the Arnsberg A in Germany in 2014 (https://www.arnsberg.de/). Consequently, discussions of copying and plagiarism are common within the competitive world of city branding: some examples include Bucharest vs. Taipei, Auckland vs. Triangle Television, Ciudad de México (CDMX) vs. Neural FX, and Valladolid vs. Vigo.⁶

Local critique shows the importance of balancing detachment and anchoring. Düsseldorf’s happy letter-emoticon-logo⁷, a colon followed by a D, “:D”, was heavily criticized for not saying anything “about” the city (Middeldorf 2013). Since the city was already represented by four different logos, the new logo added confusion rather than simplicity and coherence to an already fragmented public image.

The Düsseldorf “:D” points out a challenge for all corporate logos. As most trademarks or branding devices, logos operate in a market and aim at increasing profits for the business or city that they apparently represent. However, “the more easily marketable such items become the less unique and special they appear” (Harvey 2002, 95). The smiley-like “:D” was just too easily marketable and replicable, and hence lost its uniqueness, where the city of Düsseldorf could not claim any “special qualities” through this sign.

Yet, there are ways for assuring local anchoring for an original and innovative logo. The most efficient way seems to be to combine the letter(s) with visual symbols representing some built or natural landmark (e.g. Agra, Hamilton, Tübingen, Wuppertal, Figure 1). When there are no such symbols present in the logo, the letter(s) need other forms of anchoring. One practice that according to Matthias Beyrow (personal communication) is used in Germany is to build on people’s knowledge of the 1–3 letter number plate codes (e.g. Aachen > AA, Hildesheim > HI, Pirmasens > PS). Another practice is to build on the IATA airport code, an internationally recognized system with unique three-letter codes designating airports, often named after the nearest city. Examples include the cities of Valencia (Spain) and Philadelphia (USA) that have recently developed three-letter logos for their destination brands: “VLC” and “PHL”. In the marketing of these brands, allusions are made to more well-known cities and abbreviations such as “NYC” for New York City. Similar references were made in the small Swedish town Falkenberg in 2015, when the new logo “FGB” (Figure 1) was released after two years of place-branding research and design work: “FBG for me is like a big city. As CPH for Copenhagen or NYC for New York City. It suggests cheekiness” (Bo Albertsson, strategist from consulting firm Up).⁸ However, local audiences were not so easily convinced and made sarcastic comments about “FBG” referring to internet slang standing for Fat Bottomed Girl.⁹

As indicated by the Falkenberg example, the multiple meaning potentials of single letters and letter-combinations pave the way for critique and resistance. Acronyms are open to linguistic play and punning, perhaps more so than ordinary names. An important reason for this may lie in the nontransparent and formal character of the acronyms. Many readers will remember playing with acronyms as a child, often not knowing the official meaning of the letter combination (or even inspired by this fact). International companies are frequently the target for such play, both for reasons of entertainment and for serious criticism.

As I have shown elsewhere (Järlehed 2017; Järlehed 2020), the large-scale urban revitalization process and international marketing of the Basque city of Bilbao have been met with local critique. Figure 3 shows two pictures that illustrate this criticism, and at the same time creatively reuse the city’s new letter-based logo (Figure 2). To the left, the local T-shirt designer BBBabybooom borrows a title, colors, fonts and the spectacular violence from Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill, to mix it with the Basque name of the city, Bilbo (which is also the name of Tolkien’s world-famous hobbit), and then lets bullets perforate the new city logo and blood stain the city’s emblematic pavement tile. The result is a playful criticism of the urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 1989b) that governs the development of ever more cities. The second picture shows a poster from 2014, inviting viewers to a protest meeting against this type of urban development in an occupied house in Bilbao’s old town center. The house is located on the street of Erribera at number 13, and the city’s logo is appropriated to create the occupants’ symbol: a Jolly Roger where the skull is replaced by number 13 written in such a way as to look like the Bilbao B.

Figure 3. Creative and playful appropriations of letter-based city logos for expressing resistance.

Obviously, it is not the same to design, produce and sell a T-shirt displaying a witty criticism of globalized schemes for urban regeneration and branding, as it is to design, produce and distribute a poster calling for mobilization against such schemes. Or, is it? Heidi Sohn, Robles-Duran, and Kaminer (2011) comment on the double role of urban social protests as both symptoms of the post-industrial crisis and contributors to urban socio-economic change. They contend that the social movements that started out in many cities as radical house occupations often ended up by “saving” centrally located neighbourhoods and turning them into more attractive areas for business investments and high-income inhabitants, thus contributing to gentrification processes. It is thus not clear that the activists’ appropriation of the Bilbao logo and their intent to reclaim the(ir) right to the city will end up the way they may have hoped.

4.2. Graphic global English in Swedish city branding

A central sociolinguistic concern is how these logos relate to sociolinguistic change, and how they produce socially meaningful linguistic differentiation. Ella Chmielewska (2005, 352–353) describes two central “globalizing linguistic processes” that currently affect the linguistic, graphic and visual design of logos: “One is the practice of clipping and truncating the linguistic signs into minimal texts, that is, word chunks and rounded-off fragments that roll off the (global) tongue and are remembered easily. The other is the forced presence of English syntax in forming new (globalized) local languages.” While the practice of clipping and truncating is obvious in many of the single-letter city logos, it is less clear how English is forced upon all of them. In Sweden, there are however, two examples of city logos that may be seen as adaptations to Global English. Figure 4.

Figure 4. Graphic global English in Örebro and Göteborg, Sweden.

The last letter of my alphabet, the Ö of the Swedish city Örebro, presents an interesting case. Ö is also the last letter of the Swedish alphabet, and since it only exists in a few other languages in the world (e.g. Estonian, Finnish, German and Turkish) it has immense potential for distinction-making and “orthographic branding” (Sebba 2015). In Örebro, they rely on the public recognition of the toponym’s word-image and take out the circle O from the letter Ö, leaving only the two dots above. The empty space can then be filled with all kinds of visuals (e.g. the rainbow/LGBTQ+ pride pin in Figure 1), creating a flexible design that can be deployed for promoting a wide range of activities taking place in Örebro, and thus contributing to the branding of the city as a diverse, creative and dynamic place.

In my hometown, Göteborg, or Gothenburg, similar graphic work was done to the tourist logo in 2009. For SEK965.000, the branding agency Happy F & B tilted the lower case ö 90 degrees to the right, resulting in Go:teborg. The technical affordances of this operation included choosing a font that included an ‘o’ that was a perfect circle (Adam Jaworski, personal communication). The aim was, according to the former chair of the municipal council, Göran Johansson, to make the city name less foreign to international tourists and visitors (Cederberg 2009). By tilting the language- and place-specific letter Ö to the right, a new word form is created that unsettles the meaning of both the word/name and the second letter—is it an O followed by a colon or is it a (tilted) Ö? The resulting ambiguity gives rise to numerous ways in which this could be read and interpreted. According to the graphic manual, the ambition is to appeal both to international audiences—“go as in the English go”, and to local audiences—go is Gothenburg dialect for good (Göteborg & Co 2019, 5). The “go:teborg” logo is therefore restricted to the Scandinavian and German markets, where the play with the local dialect is expected to be recognized and can add local flavour to the brand. For other markets, an alternative “English-only” logo is used that only writes the English name of the city with the same font as in the logo above: “gothenburg” (ibid., 6).

4.3. Bivalency and the ambiguities of visual symbolism and acoustic registers

The new logo for the Galician city A Coruña in northwestern Spain consists in a single letter: a (light blue) C crowned by a tilde (Figure 1). The designer Alfonso Molinelli and the city council call it CeEñe, a neologism that joins the Spanish and Galician names of two letters: the C and the Ñ. While the latter exists in both Spanish and Galician, in the last two decades it has emerged as a visual-graphic icon of Spanishness. Technically, the tilde is a bivalent form: it has in Kathryn Woolard’s (1998, 6) words a “simultaneous membership [ … ] in more than one linguistic system,” here Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. However, the full letter, the C with the tilde, does not exist in these, or any other languages. The question of membership becomes more of a social one rather than a linguistic one, where the logo and new letter must be confirmed by public reception. A majority of my informants, both interviewed and surveyed, express negative opinions and interpret the “CeEñe” as an articulation of Spanish centralising ideology. However, when placed within this alphabet and looked at more dispassionately or without knowledge of the Galician sociolinguistic situation, the new letter emerges as “just” another instance of globalese (Jaworski 2015a), that is, as an expression of a writing register that indexes its users as worldly and globalized.

Elsewhere (Järlehed 2020), I have discussed how the new A Coruña logo deviates attention from two public debates entangled with the language ideologies currently at play in Galicia. While one of the debates centered on the article of the city name—should it be written with the Spanish La or the Galician A?—the other debate, less mediatized and overt, was concerned with the spelling of the palatal nasal [ɲ] with  < ñ> or  < nh>. While  < ñ> is standard Galician, the  < nh> is Portuguese or reintegrationist Galician.

Interestingly, both debates centered on the graphic level and on visual symbolism. However, independently of ideological and glottopolitical stances (Screti 2018), in spoken language people generally drop the article and refer to the city in the same way: [ko.ˈɾu.ɲa]. Moreover, no one I interviewed and surveyed commented on the fact that the new name for the new letter/logo is CeEñe. Yet, the logo does not contain any  < ñ>; it is composed of a C and a tilde. The absent reaction can be explained by the fact that the tilde in both popular Spanish and Galician is called eñe, while the formal name is tilde in Spanish and til in Galician. Still, the established naming practice highlights the use of the tilde above the letter n  < ñ>—which is used in both Spanish and standard Galician—and downplays the Portuguese Galician exclusive usage of the tilde above the nasal vocals a  < ã> and o  < õ> (see Álvarez-Cáccamo and Herreiro Valeiro 1996, 148–149).

We can compare A Coruña’s CeEñe with Gavà’s G with the grave accent (Figure 2). Like the tilde, the grave accent exists in many linguistic systems and can be used for creating bivalency. However, within the geographic context where this logo is produced and circulated—Catalonia in Spain, the grave accent is only used in Catalan (and Valencian), where it is deployed to mark stressed vowels. Since Spanish only has an acute accent and due to the political and linguistic conflict between Spain and Catalonia, the grave accent has a strong differentiating and indexical potential in this context¹⁰, and the Gavà G does not provoke any reactions due to bivalency.

Commenting on the co-existence of various forms of writing in Galician, Mark Sebba (2009, 40) states that “these are not randomly distributed, but reflect an ideological stance on the part of the user, as to whether Galician is a kind of Portuguese, or a language different from Portuguese.” The political economic importance hence lies in the differentiating potential of these forms of writing. It is as important (and sometimes more important) what ideological stance they index as to what sound they contribute to the words.

This brings us to my last point. As argued by Ella Chmielewska (2005) and Crispin Thurlow (this issue), the full communicative force of minimal texts such as logos and posters can only be realized multi-modally. At the same time, specific modes—and perhaps particularly their inherited embodiment—act in a policing and regulating way: speech does not “allow” the pronunciation of logos as they are “written” and “displayed” or visually and graphically represented (e.g. the Gavà G—there is no way to pronounce a G with a grave accent), and writing does not allow “spelling” or graphically representing them the way they are visually represented (the new letters created for many of the logos of this alphabet cannot be typed on standard keyboards). Hence, each time these logos enter into discursive work and social interaction, the social actors that intend to write or talk about them confront particular material and technological affordances that favor some materializations at the expense of others, sometimes even contrary to the speakers and writers’ ideological stances and/or embodied repertoires.

5. Conclusion

This paper has been concerned with a trend in city branding: the emergence of letter-based city logos. By examining a number of such logos from around the world (see Appendix) and their context of production and consumption, I maintain that they are linked to three major socio-economic and technological processes, each one with important effects for writing and communication. The first is an increased competition for attention at the societal level, which has led to an emphasis of simplicity and uniqueness in communication. The second is the digitalization that has enhanced the need for flexibility and transferability of social, cultural and linguistic formats and forms. The third is an increased valuation of written forms as symbolic and economic goods, which underpins linguistic and cultural commodification.

Effects of these processes may be observed in a number of writing genres, ranging from street name signs to geographic top-level domain names (Järlehed 2020). While I believe that several of these processes have been described in the studies on new writing, more research is needed to better understand the political economic affordances of different genres of new writing and their relationship to the operations and effects of neoliberal governance (city branding is but one genre of this overarching form of governance).

The analysis has shown that under certain local political-economic conditions (Del Percio, Flubacher, and Duchêne 2017) letter-based logos can be exchanged for symbolic and economic value. At the same time, we saw that particular forms of writing are variously “accessible” (Blommaert 2013) to different groups of people. This is obvious in several of the Spanish cities in officially bilingual regions where competing language ideologies intersect in the production and consumption of letter-based city logos.

Still, the truncating practices and the spread of global English observed by Chmielewska (2005) seem to affect most of these forms of writing (in) the city. This leads us to the key semiotic operation dealt with in this paper, that is the reduction from name to letter. As I hope to have shown, it raises a series of questions and problems of relevance for the social semiotic study of writing (in) the city. First, the limited resources, that is the number of letters of the alphabet, leads to similarity of forms, and consequently to copying, legal disputes and questions of ownership. Second, the minimalist design causes an abstract and open indexicality, which sometimes result in solid and publicly recognized meanings (e.g. the Gelsenkirchen G), and sometimes in rather “empty” meaning (e.g. the ill-fated Düsseldorf smiley-like “:D”). Third, the letters can conceal language specificity and thus local sociolinguistic variation and language ideological stances (cf. the A Coruña “CeEñe”).

Finally, by creating letter-based city logos, one may potentially unsettle the direct link to a specific language, by using elements of globalese (Jaworski 2015a) and by appealing to a cosmopolitan identity that celebrates largescale internationalism. This movement away from linguistic and cultural roots and origins is the same as Chmielewska (2005) observed in Warsaw logos, and it points to an ideological shift linked to the shift from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 1989b). Woolard (2016) describes how the construction of linguistic authority in modern societies depends on two ideological frameworks: “authenticity” and “anonymity”. While minority languages ⁣⁣often gain authority by its speakers showing clear cultural and geographical roots—they speak as if they were “from somewhere” —, speakers of majority languages ⁣⁣create authority by instead speaking as anyone, as if they were “from nowhere.” Analogously, marketers of small and middle-large cities around the world attempt to disguise them as Big Cities. When competing for attention in a globalized market, they are striving to make them be viewed as equal players with other internationally known cities: to become just like any other (second-tier) city (see Aiello This issue). The stylized alphabetic register discussed in this paper presents the cities as speaking at the same time from “somewhere” and from “nowhere.” To the extent that it contributes to the production of the cities’ authority and competitiveness, it seems to rely on a fine balance, where the cultural authenticity of local places must walk hand in hand with the anonymity of the capital and the rootless cosmopolitan.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Adam Jaworski and Li Wei for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. The article has improved considerably thanks to their careful and critical editing. I am also very grateful for the critical comments that I received from the reviewer, Jürgen Spitzmüller, and for Kellie Gonçalves’ final language check.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Johan Järlehed is an Associate Professor in Spanish Linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is doing research on the interaction of language, images and space in processes of social change. His work can be read in journals such as Social Semiotics, Language & Communication, Linguistic Landscape and the International Journal of Multilingualism.

Notes

1 The “I Love NY” logo is a federally registered trademark owned by New York State. Legally, the logo does not represent New York City. However, people worldwide believe it does, and this arguably contributes to the promotion and branding of NYC.

2 http://ww.closky.info/?p=192, https://lisarienermann.com/post/74051720684/index-php-project-type-the-sky, https://www.erictabuchi.net/filter/Works/Alphabet-Truck, https://www.einesigns.com/, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/147174

3 With the exception of the four logos of Düsseldorf, Ljubljana, Oakville and Quilmes, all the logos in this article are reproduced with kind permission of the copyright holders. In the other four cases every effort has been made to contact copyright holders prior to publication.

4 https://varumarkesmanual.uppsala.se/tryck/grafisk-manual/logotyp/

5 http://www.covingtonky.gov/news/2014/12/17/-launch-of-the-new-city-of-covington-brand

6 https://www.schiebener.net/wordpress/neues-logo-der-stadt-arnsberg-ein-plagiat/; http://www.business-review.eu/news/bucharest-logo-competition-restarted-following-plagiarism-allegations-137199; https://elbigdata.mx/city/nuevo-logo-de-cdmx-podria-ser-plagio/; http://www.designtagebuch.de/auckland-city-council-streit-um-neues-logo/.

7 https://www.designtagebuch.de/der-neue-markenauftritt-der-stadt-duesseldorf-d/

8 https://www.hn.se/nyheter/falkenberg/en-kaxig-logga-eller-en-naken-kejsare-1.1886562

9 http://www.hn.se/%C3%A5sikter/ledare/h%C3%A5llplats-falkenberg-1.1888184

10 The design studio that created the Gavà brand not only stressed the symbolic value of the “Catalan” accent, but also developed the marketing campaign around the figurative meaning of the accent, emphatically marking different things of relevance for the city brand (https://www.mariscal.com/assets/uploads/projectes/gava_eng.pdf).

Appendix: Cities with letter-based logos

Table

Letter	City (Country)	URL to logo	Designer	Years in use
A	Agra (IN)	https://www.fabrique.nl/nieuws/2015/4/city-branding-agra-india/	Fabrique (NL)	2015-
	Alençon (FR)	http://www.alencon.fr/, https://vimeo.com/234474283	Unknown	2017-
	Antwerp (BE)*^1	https://www.visitantwerpen.be/en/home	Unknown	2015-
	Arnsberg (DE)	https://www.arnsberg.de/stadtmarke/	Unknown	2014-
	Auckland (NZ)	https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10750480	Unknown	2008–2011
	Augsburg (DE)	https://www.augsburg.de/	Grafikbüro ay	1987-
B	Barcelona (ES)*	http://www.bcn.cat/publicacions/la_municipal/63/comunicacio.htm	Unknown	2000–2008
	Beckum (DE)	https://www.beckum.de/de/wirtschaft/stadtmarketing/beckum-logo.html	Goldmarie design	2013-
	Belfast (IR)	https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/belfast_lobes_you.php	Lloyd Northover (UK)	2008–2017
	Benidorm (ES)*	https://en.visitbenidorm.es/	Unknown	-2019-^2
	Bielefeld (DE)	http://mein.bielefeld.de/nutzungsbedingungen	Ardventure	2009-
	Bilbao (ES)	https://www.bilbao.eus/	Unknown	2004-
	Bologna (IT)*	https://www.bolognawelcome.com/en/	Unknown	-2020-
	Bordeaux (FR)*	https://www.bordeaux-tourism.co.uk/	Unknown	-2020-
	Boston (US)	https://www.boston.gov/departments/innovation-and-technology/brand-guidelines	IDEO	2016-
	Brüssel (BE)	https://www.brussels.be/	BBDO Brüssel	2016-
	Burghausen (DE)	https://www.burghausen.de/	Matern Creativbuero (AT)	2012-
	Burgos (ES)*	https://www.brandemia.org/burgos-presenta-su-nueva-marca-turistica/	Anuncian Tormenta	2012-
C	A Coruña (ES)	https://www.coruna.gal/	Alfonso Molinelli, TonyLeBrand (ES)	2014-
	Charleroi (BE)	https://www.charleroi.be/	Pam et Jenny	2015-
	Chemnitz (DE)	https://www.chemnitz.de/chemnitz/de/unsere-stadt/stadtmarketing/stadt-der-moderne/index.html	Simons&schreiber	2009-
	Cincinatti (US)	https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/cityofcincinnati/	Unknown	-2019-
	Conyers (US)	http://www.conyersga.com/	Unknown	-2019-
	Cottbus (DE)	https://cottbus-bist-du.de/	Designbüro Detering	2019-
	Covington (US)	http://www.covingtonky.gov/news/2014/12/17/-launch-of-the-new-city-of-covington-brand	Landor	2014-
	Crailsheim (DE)	https://xn–netzwerk-fachkrfte-ztb.de/?Q=Partner-Info&pa=13	Werbeagentur Salzer	2008–2016
D	Darmstadt (DE)*	https://www.darmstadt-tourismus.de/	Unknown	-2019-
	Denver (US)	https://www.denvergov.org/content/denvergov/en/denver-marketing-and-media-services/brand-guidelines/logo-seal.html	Unknown	-2018-
	Dinslaken (DE)	https://www.dinslaken.de/de/stadt-buergerservice/logo-und-stadtwappen/	Logoseal	2007-
	Düsseldorf (DE)	https://www.designtagebuch.de/der-neue-markenauftritt-der-stadt-duesseldorf-d/	Frank Lotze, BBDO Düsseldorf	2012–2017
E	Erlangen (DE)	https://www.erlangen.de/	Walter Tafelmeier	1997-
	Espelkamp (DE)	https://www.espelkamp.de/	Stolp und Friends	2008-
	Espoo (FI)	https://www.espoo.fi/en-US	Ilmo Valtonen	2007-
F	Falkenberg (SE)	https://www.falkenberg.se/	Destination Falkenberg & Up	2015-
	Feldafing (DE)	https://www.feldafing.de/	Peter Krüll	2007-
	Forth Worth (US)*	https://www.fortworth.com/	Unknown	-2018-
G	Garmisch-Partenkirchen (DE)	https://www.gapa.de/en	Thielker + Team	2009-
	Gavà (ES)	http://www.gavaciutat.cat/; https://www.mariscal.com/en/projects/70/Gava	Mariscal estudio	2000-
	Gelsenkirchen (DE)	https://www.gelsenkirchen.de/	Eberhard Hippler	1968-
	Goch (DE)	https://www.goch.de/	Raffelts atelier für visuelle kommunikation	2008-
	Grevenbroich (DE)	https://www.grevenbroich.de/	Dieter Patt	1988-
	Göttingen (DE)	https://www.goettingen.de/	Optex	2011-
H	Hamilton (CA)	https://www.hamilton.ca/	Jan Kelley Marketing	2002-
	Hannover (DE)	http://www.reneeremter.de/hp_html/4440_01.htm	Odeon Zwo	1995–2011
	Hattingen (DE)	https://www.hattingen.de/stadt_hattingen/	Serres design	2007-
	Henningsdorf (DE)	https://www.hennigsdorf.de/Rathaus/index.php?object=tx%7c2713.328.1&NavID=2713.2	Company Kommunkationsdesign	1998-
	Heilbronn (DE)	https://www.heilbronn.de/startseite.html	Creative team peer friedel	1994-
	Hildesheim (DE)	https://www.hildesheim.de/leben-in-hildesheim/hildesheim-marketing/presseportal/aktuelle-pressemitteilungen/2009-08-20/ein-neues-logo-fuer-hildesheim.html#	Formvermittlung	2010-
	Hünenberg (CH)	https://www.zg.ch/behoerden/gemeinden/hunenberg/de	Crea Factory	2008-
	Höxter (DE)	https://www.hoexter.de/	Jakobsmeyer	2001-
I	Idstein (DE)	https://www.idstein.de/	Grandpierre Design	1987-
	Ieper (BE)	https://www.ieper.be/	Lemento Branding & Communication (BE)	2009-
J	Jalgaon (IN)	http://www.jcmc.gov.in/english/	unknown	-2018-
	Johnson City (US)	https://www.johnsoncitytn.org/	unknown	-2018-
	Jūrmala (LT)	https://www.jurmala.lv/	Mikelis Bastiks, Asketic (LT)	2015-
K	Kaiserslauten (DE)	https://www.kaiserslautern.de/	Agentur Barth und Höhn Communcation Partners	2003-
	Kamp-Lintfort (DE)	https://www.kamp-lintfort.de/	Saskia Rühmkorf & Christoph Zeike	2012-
	Kansas City (US)	https://www.singlewing.co/the-city-of-kansas-city#kcmo; https://www.visitkc.com/	Emily Elmore, Single Wing Creative	2013-
	Kluczbork (PL)	https://www.facebook.com/pg/Kluczbork/posts/	Alicja Patelska	2019-
	Kufstein (DE)	https://www.kufstein.com/	Unknown	-2018-
L	Lahr (DE)	https://www.lahr.de/startseite.1.htm	Ronald Buck Design	2007-
	Langenfeld (DE)	https://www.langenfeld.de/	ZWO rundum Kommunikation	2008-
	Lancaster (US)	http://www.lancaster-tx.com/	Unknown	-2019-
	Liberec (CZ)	https://www.liberec.cz/cz/obcan/aktuality/zpravy-z-mesta/mesto-naslo-jednotny-vizualni-styl.html	Ondřej Zámiš	2017-
	Ljubljana (SL)*	https://www.visitljubljana.com/en/visitors/	Unknown	2016-
	Ludwigsburg (DE)	https://www.ludwigsburg.de/start.html	Wensauer & Partner	2007-
M	Maasdriel (NL)	https://www.maasdriel.nl/	The Cre8ion.Lab	2010-
	Magdeburg (DE)	https://www.magdeburg.de/	Scholz & Friends	2009-
	Manchester (UK)*	http://www.marketingmanchester.com/	Peter Saville	2007-
	Mechelen (BE)	https://www.mechelen.be/gebruik-van-het-stadslogo; https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/once_in_a_belgian_blue_moon.php	Unknown	2009-
	Melbourne (AU)	https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/	Landor Associates	2009-
	Merzig (DE)	https://www.merzig.de/	Klaus Aulitzky	2002-
	Metz (FR)	https://metz.fr/	Unknown	-2019-
N	Nantes (FR)	https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Nantes_logo.png	Dragon Rouge	2005-?^3
	New York (US)	https://www.iloveny.com/	Milton Glaser	1977-
	Newcastle (AU)	https://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.au/Council/News/Latest-News/New-logo-for-a-new-city	The city’s in-house design team + Headjam	2019-
	Norrköping (SE)	https://www.norrkoping.se/organisation/mal-for-norrkopings-kommun/norrkopings-kommuns-varumarke/grafisk-profilmanual/vara-profilelement/var-logotyp/logotyp.html	Curt Dahlén	1985-
O	Oakville (CA)	https://www.oakville.ca/	Unknown	-2018-
	Oldenburg (DE)	https://www.oldenburg.de/startseite.html	STOCKWERK2	2010-
	Oostrozebeke (BE)	https://www.oostrozebeke.be/	Unknown	-2011-
P	Paderborn (DE)	https://www.paderborn.de/tourismus-kultur/service/109010100000026649.php	TRUST Communcation	2003-
	Pau (FR)	https://www.sudouest.fr/2011/01/09/trois-lettres-tres-commentees-285203-649.php	Dragon Rouge	2011-?
	Philadelphia (US)*	https://www.discoverphl.com/	J2 Design	2013-
	Pirmasens (DE)	http://www.pirmasens.de/	Marketingverein Pirmasens	1998-
Q	Quedlinburg (DE)	https://www.quedlinburg-info.de/	Unknown	-2011-
	Quilmes (AR)	https://www.quilmes.gov.ar/	Mayra Ursino	2019-
R	Rapperswil-Jona (DE)	https://www.rapperswil-jona.ch/	Coande	2006-
	Regina (CA)	https://www.regina.ca/	McKim Cringan George	2010-
	Rennes (FR)	https://metropole.rennes.fr/	Unknown	-2019-
	Rotterdam (NL)	https://www.rotterdam.nl/	Studio Dumbar	-2019-
S	Saga (JP)	https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emblem_of_Saga,_Saga.svg	Unknown	2006-
	Schwelm (DE)	https://www.gsws-schwelm.de/	Unknown	2007-
	Seattle (US)	https://www.seattle.gov/	Unknown	-2018-
	Seelze (DE)	https://www.seelze.de/	Unknown	1992-
	City of Springfield (US)	https://www.springfieldmo.gov/DocumentCenter/View/10684/CITYCore-Brand-Guideline-Sheet?bidId=	Unknown	2013-
T	Thetford (CA)	https://www.villethetford.ca/; http://www.parallele.ca/fr/realisations/ville-de-thetford/	Parallèle	2018-
	Tilburg (NL)*	https://www.tilburg.nl/stad-bestuur/stad/t-stijl/	dESIGN_UC studio for design and sustainable communication	2003-
	Tübingen (DE)	https://www.tuebingen.de/	Claus Koch	2002-
U	Unna (DE)	http://www.unna.de/	Unknown	-2019-
	Uppsala (SE)	https://varumarkesmanual.uppsala.se/tryck/grafisk-manual/logotyp/	Identity Works	2019-
V	Venlo (NL)	https://www.venlo.nl/	braind Venlo	2005-
	Victoria (CA)	https://www.victoria.ca/#	Unnown	-2019-
	Victoria (US)	https://www.victoriatx.org/	Unknown	-2019-
	Vigo (ES)*	http://www.turismodevigo.org/en	Unknown	2004-
	Viersen (DE)	https://www.viersen.de/	Mirco Kurth, 28 LIMITED BRAND	2004-
W	Warstein (DE)	https://www.soester-anzeiger.de/lokales/warstein/stadt-warstein-will-neuem-logo-werben-9382051.html	Hans Rodenbröker	1987–2017
	Wels (AT)	https://www.wels.at/services/die-neue-marke-wels.html	CPLUSM	2017-
	Weyhe (DE)	https://www.weyhe.de/portal/startseite.html	Brasilhaus	2008-
	Wuppertal (DE)	https://www.wuppertal.de/	Albrecht Ade	1960s
X	Ciudad de México (MX)	https://www.cdmx.gob.mx/	Israel Hernández	2018-
Y	Ylöjärvi (FI)	https://www.ylojarvi.fi/	Timo Koljonen	2004-
Z	Zittau (DE)	https://zittau.de/de	Unknown	2013-
	Zossen (DE)	https://www.zossen.de/	Berti von der Damerau, CREATIV SERVICE	2007-
Ö	Örebro (SE)*	https://rebro.se/	Rewir	2014-

¹The cities marked with an * only use letter-based logos for their tourist office or Convention Bureau.

²When I have not been able to find out when the logo began being used, the year I first saw the logo is marked with a hyphen: -2018-.

³When the logos are not more in use and I have not been able to find out when they stopped being used, I mark it with a question mark.