You don't want to take care of normalizing your data in a view - what if the user changes the data that gets submitted? Instead you could take care of it in the model using the before_save (or the before_validation) callback. Here's an example of the relevant code for a model like yours:
class Place < ActiveRecord::Base before_save do |place| place.city = place.city.downcase.titleize place.country = place.country.downcase.titleize end end You can also check out the Ruby on Rails guide for more info.
To answer you question more directly, something like this would work:
<%= f.text_field :city, :value => (f.object.city ? f.object.city.titlecase : '') %> This just means if f.object.city exists, display the titlecase version of it, and if it doesn't display a blank string.