ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the perspective on the relation between space and media which is surely well known to policy-makers at present, but which is also gaining more and more traction in the academic field, namely that of place branding. During roughly the last ten years, place branding has increased globally in an almost explosive fashion. Many nations, and also cities, have commissioned reports and branding campaigns. People have seen the rise of the 'Brand State', bringing the mediation of place to a new level. A 2005 report from the Nordic Council of Ministers on the Nordic region as a 'winning region' enthusiastically exclaimed that 'the Nordic region must be branded' not as a global production region competing on price, but on the basis of a 'higher value' connected to its products. The branded nation is closely linked to business interests, and this new vocabulary is partly just an enhanced rhetoric for what export promotion has done for decades.
