Re-thinking place branding from a political perspective: Urban governança, public diplomacy and sustainable policy-making

Abstract

Place branding is a relatively new transdisciplinary academic discipline. It is an evolution of what some researchers understood as "place or city marketing," "place selling," and "place promotion." The three concepts analyze the need that territories have to position themselves in order to compete in the global markets through an eminently economic perspective. However, place branding rejects the corporate world to address, as positioning axes, the tangible and intangible values of a specific region and, therefore, its identity. Furthermore, public administrations have had to adopt strategies that link residents when designing place brands that can guarantee long-term narratives and become effective mechanisms for spatial planning, urban governance, local development, or economic promotion. Citizens' engagement, at the grassroots level, has become a key element for the successful conceptualization and implementation of place brands. The current discipline of place branding is therefore totally linked to the political order. Public administrations become key actors in the development of place branding campaigns, not only in the local context but also at the national and international levels. The aim of this article is to present a theoretical evolution of place branding in order to find the most common links with the political order, as well as to design a conceptual framework to fit this discipline into the context of political science. This theoretical evolution will be conceived taking into account the results of previous empirical research that the authors conducted for different Catalan public administrations. The results of this article show clear synergies between four basic concepts: the place brand, its aim to contribute to sustainable planning, its influence on public governance decisions and, finally, its capacity to be central in the definition of public diplomacy programs outside the usual state-centric domain. Therefore, place branding led by public administrations-this is what we can understand as "public branding"-has a major and inevitable political focus.