A new marketing campagne for the Amsterdam City Archive - with the help of the mayor of Amsterdam Job Cohen. Unfortunately for the non-Dutch readers here it is only in Dutch. The campaign can also be found on posters in the streets. The goal is to make people wonder about the history of their city by telling stories and asking if they are true or false.

This is a more thoughtful and subtle approach to city marketing than that of ´i amsterdam´.

True or false?

The Klein Matterhorn (photograph: Johanna Huber)

If Heidi were alive today, the likelihood is she would no longer be skipping in the mountains with grandpa’s goats, but taking a lift to a cabin-pressurised viewing tower and conference centre in the Alps.

The once untouchable Alps are being turned into a huge and haughty playground for the rich, featuring luxury tower blocks, pyramids, and revolving hotels, as Switzerland’s cantons seek to produce ever bigger and better tourist attractions in a bid to outdo each other.

The latest project involves “stocking up” the Klein Matterhorn. Already home to the highest cable car in Europe, the smaller neighbour to the Matterhorn is soon to be topped with a 117 metre steel and glass pyramid which will take it to a height of 4,000 metres.

A so-called “four-thousander” is considered by alpinists to be the magic height for a mountain - because it marks a level most mere mortals will never reach. There are currently 76 of them in the Alps. Klein Matterhorn is set to become the 77th and tourist chiefs hope it will lure the visitors attracted by the hitherto distant prospect of conquering a four-thousander - albeit a manmade one.

Read full article (Guardian, September 20, 2007)

The Tate’s place as one of the great cultural success stories of the past decade has been confirmed by a set of extraordinary visitor figures: 7.7 million people passed through the doors of its four English galleries between April 2006 and April 2007.

Tate Modern was the real star: 5.2 million of those visitors went to the gallery on London’s Bankside, and three quarters of a million of them slid down Carsten Höller’s helter-skelters, last autumn’s wildly popular Turbine Hall commission. Tate Modern became the second-most visited tourist attraction in Britain, after Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

Three times as many visited Tate Modern as Tate Britain. “It is partly because of the excitement of the building itself,” said Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, “and partly its position in London by the Millennium Bridge. And clearly there is a huge interest in new developments in art all round the world. But what’s remarkable is that we’ve also had a steady increase in visitors and new audiences to Tate Britain.” Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, said there were “no long faces at Tate Britain”, pointing out that last year’s Holbein in England was the second-most visited exhibition in its history.

Read full article (The Guardian, September 21, 2007)