As global cities, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing operate in international economic networks; however, they are also each firmly embedded within a regional context and are surrounded by less populous and less internationally recognized neighbors. Together they form so-called mega-city regions referred to as the Greater Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Bohai Rim, each encompassing a dozen or so cities. In the wake of staggering economic growth and threatening pollution, these cities are compelled to respond to the challenge of ecological modernization (EM): aim for higher economic value added at lower environmental cost. Cities have particular industrial and regional profiles; consequently they follow different developmental pathways. In order to attract coveted investors, green and high-tech corporations, well-endowed residents and talented workforce, these cities engage in city branding practices. In this contribution, a typology of EM developmental pathways is presented and the 41 cities in the three Chinese mega-city regions are analyzed in terms of their respective pathways and city branding practices. We argue that different industrial and regional profiles allow for different developmental pathways making different city branding strategies likely. Most cities brand themselves in comformity with what their pathway would lead us to predict, except cities with a strongly manufacturing oriented profile; the brands of the latter type deviate markedly from their current reality. Cities adopting branding strategies that contrast sharply with their historical legacy and current profile risk promoting themselves in ways that the outside world is likely to perceive as lacking in credibility.@en

Against the background of globalization, city branding has become a useful strategy utilized by decision-makers in cities to promote their cities in the race for limited resources. Urban transformation factors, i.e., economic development stage and geographic position play an important role in city branding choices. We argue that city branding choices of a city can be affected by other cities through city interactions and networking. The effects of city interactions can spread across cities either through spatial proximity-referring physical or geographic connections, or logical proximity-representing city interconnectivity caused by collaboration activities. To test our argument, we develop a two-layer network model using the generalized modeling framework (GEMF) to model city branding choices, based on empirical data of sustainable brand developmental pathways from the three economic regions in China. We examine the general evolution pattern of city branding practices and construct different scenarios to analyze the impact of city interactions. The results indicate that taking city interactions as an additional factor to urban transformation allows for a better prediction on city branding choices. Policy-makers and urban planners need to consider infrastructure and economic development policies in designing city branding strategies.@en

Recently, place branding has received increasing attention from both academic and policy circles. As place branding is an interdisciplinary field, scholars from different backgrounds have contributed to the research. Previous literature review studies have summarized the key disciplines in place branding fields, including urban studies, marketing, tourism, and public management. The goal of this work is to examine the impact of influencing factors on the case selection pattern in place branding literature from 2014 to 2018. First, we raise seven hypotheses about the case selection mechanism from perspectives of branding strategies (public management field), marketing strategies (marketing field), urban characteristics (urban studies), tourism attraction (tourism field), and scholar proximity (other factors), respectively. Second, we test the proposed hypotheses in aggregated cases and comparative cases using Poisson regression and qualitative comparative analysis. We found that the previous focus of city branding study was on Europe, and more attention has started to be paid to North America, Asia, and Oceania in the last 5 years. As for influencing factors, we observe that the scholar proximity is significantly related to the case selection, while urban characteristics, branding strategies, marketing strategies, and tourist attractions are less influential.@en