 Transformative city branding for policy change: The case of Seoul’s participatory brandingYu-Min Joo and Bokyong Seo Environment and Planning C, 2018, vol. 36, issue 2, 239-257 Abstract: City branding has been widely adopted by entrepreneurial local governments to strengthen city identities and to attract global attention amid intensified intercity competition. Asian global cities, in particular, have competitively branded themselves to signal that they belong to the group of advanced global cities. This paper illustrates the transformative role of city branding in the making of a global city’s local identity, which has been hitherto underexplored in the literature. Specifically, it examines Seoul’s branding exercises, focusing on its unconventional projects that reflect the city’s recent efforts to become a “human-centered,†progressive city. We suggest adding a “transformative-enhancing†dimension to the existing “external–internal†city-branding framework, and argue that Seoul’s transformative city branding is, in fact, communicating the mayor’s new signature policies with citizens. When combined with a strong mayor’s efforts to cater to changing societal pressures, city branding is no longer solely a neoliberal marketing exercise, but a political project of policy change. Keywords: Asian global city; city branding; policy change; public participation; Seoul (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:36:y:2018:i:2:p:239-257 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Environment and Planning C |
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