Belize City: if you’re not from here, you probably know it as the murder capital of the country. Couple the crime problem, with its tendency to flood, its squalid slums, the old buildings, and its disorderly growth, and you get the picture…Belize City is...how can we put it?: A beautiful struggle. Charming, but  – not the kind of thing that exactly inspires confidence.

But, the City Council wants to turn that prejudice on its head. For the last few months, they have been working with branding experts from the Inter-American Development Bank. Today, after much planning and design, they unveiled a new logo, which will be the flagship icon to re-cast perceptions of this battered City by the sea.

We met the Mayor out on a parade to make a soft launch of this rebranding effort:

Darrell Bradley, Mayor - Belize City
"This is an activity that was really birthed by the IDB. We've been working with them over the last year on a branding campaign for Belize City and this week is actually the soft launch. They actually - IDB funded a consultant to come into Belize City and they actually designed a brand in collaboration with local stakeholders and having done a short consultation session with members of the private sector, members of civil society and young people. So what we're doing this week here is we're launching a brand, it's a soft launch so there will be formal activities in relation to promoting the brand but we want to have it be something that impacts the community so we decided to do a walkthrough of Belize City which is very quick. We have a brand kind of like a float that we launch in the September celebrations Independence Day parade likewise we have our councillors out here and we asked certain of the schools to just come out and we're giving them some treats with a bag of sweets with the brand on it. We're giving away t-shirts and we're trying to promote the brand so that people can take ownership of it. It's something that we wanted to be something that reflects the highest values of Belize City so that we're not only trying to sell something; we're trying to actually promote an idea. If you look at the brand itself it's a series of interlocking discs and one of the things that speaks to me about is it's celebrates the idea of Belize City as a diverse place; hands and hearts working together. Some people say it look like a coconut tree so that could reflect the fact that we have an environment we can be very proud of. Belize City is kind of easy and lazy and laid back; it can also represent the water. Some people were actually saying it looks like a carnival mass, a part of the branding exercise or the walk through this morning is that we've invited one of the carnival bands just to come out with us and try to get some energy throughout Belize City. The idea with the brand and this activity is that we want members of the public to be engaged. The brand isn't something we want to just stay in an office or to be on magazines or something like that, we want people to actually engage with it, take ownership of it and really be proud of the city that they live in."