Nantes, France - "The Most Bizarre City"

Bizarre City...a good thing? Yes. Nantes was a slowing dying city with dwindling industry, unemployment, falling tourism ... enter the arts! Daring city leaders invited musicians

first, then public artists to re-create Nantes as a destination:
"First came a summer of musical and theatrical performances from groups all over Europe, intended to break the air of sadness and defeat that came from the cities' industrial decline," writes Browning. "Next, as the town moved toward plastic arts, more and more outsiders came, further boosting local confidence, leading finally to still riskier bids financed jointly by public (local, regional, national) sponsorship and corporate collaborations."
Now, the city's outdoor spaces are riddled with enormous, startling installations of contemporary art, from houses half-submerged in the river to a four-story mechanical elephant. Drawing some 200,000 tourists each summer, Nantes quite rightfully bills itself as France's most "bizarre" city. For the past 23 years, artistic director Jean Blaise has been curating works by artists from across the globe, using the city as his gallery space.
"From the beginning France's conservative UMP party... was a consistent doubter that such public investment in 'culture' could generate any real returns. So far, however, the mixture of serious art created by world-class artists, many from China and Japan, seems to have been proved a solid formula for rebirth."

IT worked! The city is now branded as "bizarre" and it seems we all want to see just what bizarre is!