Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 29th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Panel: Cultural Policy Co-creation and Smart Dev. (Physical) Author(s) Primoz Pevcin University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Title What factors shape the particular branding of the cities? File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Primoz Pevcin Abstract Recently, the utilization of the smart city branding has become increasingly popular in scientific literature as well as in contemporary urban policy-making, where it has been popularized for the purpose of solving complex urban problems, but also value added to utilize this branding for political and marketing purposes of city administrations has been revealed. The scrutinisation process reveals that this concept has been indeed popularized in particular after 2015, overtaking in popularity, but often substituting, some other city-branding concepts, like e.g. sustainable city, creative city etc. This could be partly contributed to the logic of terminological neutrality, although city labels or branding are actually political and marketing concepts, that dynamically accommodate their eclectic meanings in time, and this change might not be entirely soundly explained. The important role for the promotion of the particular concept builds on the availability of funding, e.g. research, and thus policy driving features do matter. The question initiating from this is, whether the potential decrease in public funding on smart city related topic would decrease the volume of literature produced. The first signs of this are already starting to emerge, potentially indicating also a fatigue of smart city label, among others. Thus, city labelling can be taken a rather dynamic process, since some labels are gaining and other labels are losing their popularity in time. And new city labels might emerge also in the future, partially also to accommodate the potential necessity to achieve terminological innovativeness. This paper focuses on the review of the existing literature, following mainly manifest content analysis approach, where focus is given to the analysis of factors that shape specific city branding patterns. The purpose is to reveal how those factors shaped the city branding dynamics in the past, and how they might shape it in the future, in particular when acknowledging the emergence of the new context.
