Research project Geographies of place branding
Researching through small and medium-sized cities.
Place branding is commonly portrayed with examples from well-known and big cities, such as London, New York and Singapore. In contrast to this perspective are small and medium-sized cities in focus in this thesis, which aims to study place branding from a geographical perspective.
Project description
The starting point of the thesis is a debate on the theoretical and empirical understanding of place branding; what it is and how it is affecting the places where it is introduce. The thesis develops and argues for a perspective of territoriality and relationality to place branding discussing concepts, methods and empirical approaches for how to carry out place branding research using a geographical perspective. Empirically, this thesis focuses on in-depth studies of place branding in small and medium-sized cities in Sweden. The research has a longitudinal approach, collecting empirical accounts of place branding over time by relying on a combination of primary and secondary research data. By analyzing the development of place branding over the course of time, nuances and aspects of both territorial and relational origin emerge, situating place branding practices in a wider spatial contextualization.
Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complex and continuously interchangeable spatial structures that create and re-produce the geographies of place branding. Here, research models and methodological examples have been presented to illustrate how place branding can be studied from a geographical perspective.
More about this project
Researcher
Ida Andersson