Full Text Available
Note: Clicking the button above will open the full text document at the original institutional repository in a new window.
Exploring street graphics: Strategies and challenges for city branding in Kumasi, Ghana
Street graphics are the main feature of urban areas providing opportunities for advertising, wayfinding, visual stimulation, and other activities while adding to the quality of the urban area. Street graphics can potentially affect a city’s overall brand and appeal. Many cities are experiencing visu...
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Taylor and Francis
2024
|
| Tags: |
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Street graphics are the main feature of urban areas providing opportunities
for advertising, wayfinding, visual stimulation, and other activities while
adding to the quality of the urban area. Street graphics can potentially affect a city’s
overall brand and appeal. Many cities are experiencing visual pollution as a byproduct
of unregulated street graphics. Due to its unique categorisation as
a historical and commercial centre, Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana,
provided the opportunity to investigate the use of street graphics for branding. The
study through a constructivist-interpretive perspective approach, utilised visual
survey and philology to gather data and analyse the street’s graphic composition
and establish the reasons for its presence. It became obvious through the results of
the study that the clatter of the street graphics has affected the process of identifying
and agreeing upon a relevant set of city brand attributes Kumasi require. The
mixture of street graphics which is strongly skewed towards Funerals, Religious
programs, and Herbal Medicine, suggest that Kumasi may want to be identified with
that but that is not the core objective of the City of Greater Kumasi Area. Kumasi
does not seem to have a clear identity, although it is home to wonderful tangible
and intangible cultural heritages (the Golden Stool and the Ashanti Kingdom).
Although the city has seen significant structural development and modernization
without any direction for identity, the managers of the city have not sought to
define the identity of the city, and the street graphics have also compounded the
identity crisis. An assessment criterion was developed to compare the various street
graphics on the streets with recommendations regarding the type of street graphics
employed and their overall effect on the host street that can have significant impact
on its branding. |
|---|