Find your Greatness is Europe’s first strategic brand-building program for smart cities. This project will encourage small and medium-sized cities to communicate their potential in terms of attractiveness for people, such as students, tourists, and investors while leveraging their societal advantages over larger cities that don’t face the same budgetary constraints when it comes to promoting their potential for development.
The Find Your Greatness URBACT project builds upon the inter-city cooperation contributing to the EU’s cohesion policy.
Cities are competing for people, resources, and business, so a unified city strategy is required. While capital cities enjoy the advantages of more financial resources, smaller cities are struggling to attract international attention, to make them recognizable as competitive on the global market. 43% of the global population live in cities with less than 300,000 inhabitants. Nearly half of the cities in Europe have 50,000–100,000 inhabitants.
City branding with marketing and communication strategy works in tandem with the strategic development and urban planning, contributing significantly to the visibility, attractiveness and competitiveness of cities, thus making them appealing for visitors, investment, business development, and inhabitants.
Limerick City and County Council’s role is in designing and monitoring the city branding strategy but also managing its strategic and operational communication. Limerick as a smart sustainable city with its advanced use of ICT, e-solutions, and smart city e-platform My Point, ensures that public spaces and services serve the city, citizens are more integrated into city planning, and policy decisions and the development strategies are focused on green, sustainable principles. Whatever the vision of a city, it must be communicated to the business community, to visitors, and especially to the citizens. It is important not to neglect the opinion of citizens on what kind of city they would like to live and work in, what would make them proud, and what message they would like to convey to the outside world.
Limerick City and County has made giant leaps in its journey to become a community of the future, a city capital to a strong Mid-West region and increase its population. Under the Limerick 2030 plan, the city wants to take advantage of digital technologies, transform the way people work, and enable better citizen engagement through digital channels. To double the number of digital start-ups in Limerick, and SMEs trading online, increase the use of data to accelerate the development of a Sustainable Smarter Limerick for all inhabitants.
Limerick has developed a strategic vision of the city and county together with its positioning on the edge of Europe. It aims to put Limerick on a global map as a leader and development trendsetter of the future, as a place connecting traditional, historic, and cultural values with new horizons, new technology, and a new way of life on an international scene.
Limerick has a significantly large amount of young inhabitants (46.9% are under 35 years old) and a relatively small share of older inhabitants (14.1% are over 65 years old) who love Limerick and want to be offered the opportunity to remain here after graduation.
The new “place proposition” for ensuring a consistency of message about the city. It embodies the cultural essence of Limerick as:
- An authentic place of substance with an impressive industrial and historic heritage
- A place of authentic and innovative people – genuine, natural, real, welcoming, friendly, leaders and achievers
- A place that has an innovative, progressive outlook to knowledge and innovation – look at our education and business assets
- A place that continues to exploit its natural resources with innovative and progressive ambition – low carbon economy, energy generation, enhancing its green credentials
