With its 2012 agenda, Angers bets on the best

All the official documents of a city having more or less the same size than Angers are scarcely the result of chance. The new agenda 2012 released today by town hall is not an exception to that obvious fact. The front page and the last page of the agenda, which are the most seen by the users, sum up, maybe unvoluntarily the goals of Angers town hall wants to implant in the mind of Angers inhabitants.


"Pround to be Angevins" reads the 1st page. With that slogan, the city bets its citizens are its best ambassadors. The sentence could stimulate self confidence of people because their city doesn't lack valuable assets. But the last page is almost as important as the front page. Angers claims its desire to be linked by the recipents of the agenda to the Loire Valley landscapes classified by Unesco as a world heritage. So in the brand, "Angers Loire Valley", Angers is united to the historical river, which itself refers to the valley, also called "France's garden". Thus the city is wisely associated, thanks to an English word, to an historical "valley" and therefore is localizable and identifiable by English speaking people.

That invisible message is rather reassuring and establishes the mayor at the right place of the catalyst. Unfortunately, the text does not seem very different to those published in previous agendas and sounds more like a repetition than a demonstration. And, one more time, while Angers is surfing on an English brand, there is no a single word of English in the text. That makes the agenda rather uneasy to promote the city abroad.