Emma Björner

• Doctor of Business Administration
• Researcher at University of Gothenburg

The Elgar Encyclopedia of City and Place Branding comprehensively explores how places like cities, regions, and countries create and manage their identities. It looks at how branding can shape how people see a place, whether for tourism, investment, or cultural influence. The book brings together insights from experts across the globe, covering eve...

Increasingly, place branding is regarded as stakeholder-centric, participatory and inclusive. However, a central assumption permeates the place-branding literature that there is a dominant organisation of some sort working strategically to organise the place-branding process. In this article we question this assumption and explore how multiple ‘aut...

Participation and citizen engagement are fundamental elements in urban regeneration and in the deployment of nature-based solutions (NBS) to advance sustainable urban development. Various limitations inherent to participatory processes concerning NBS for inclusive urban regeneration have been addressed, and lessons have been learnt. This paper inve...

This article aims to explore the digitization of festival engagement due to the emergence of social media and the associated consequences this development brings for festivals and place brands. This is done by drawing on a study of eight festivals that took place in Sweden during the summer of 2015. In total, a material of 77,034 user-generated con...

This chapter sets out to analyze urban development and branding strategies for emerging global cities in China. It takes as its starting point that there has been a shift from a focus on economic dimensions toward a global city discourse in which various dimensions are at play, including economic, cultural, social, and environmental. The empirical...

Cities, regions, nations and other places have in recent decades become active participants in the global competitive economy, and now operate in a global marketplace, competing with other places all over the world for investors, tourists, residents and workforce. As a result, places use marketing and brand- ing strategies and practices to gain rep...

During the last two decades, China has started to leave its closed-door policies in the international arena behind, and has shown signs of participating in the global economy. Politically and economically, China has been developing further relations with the rest of the world. The country points to its mega-cities in its official 5-year plans to fa...

This interdisciplinary book details the economic, cultural and social background of the development of Chinese mega-cities, as well as presenting the mechanisms of governance and urban growth strategies. Therein, the main discussion centres on the contemporary practice of city branding and development in China in relation to the rest of the world....

The purpose of this introductory chapter – as the title says – is to set the scene for the coming chapters: providing definitions of some of the more central concepts, and a description of the overall structure of the book and how the different chapters relate to each other. However, we would like to start the chapter with some general comments on...

Purpose – The aim of the present study is to add to the existing research on online city branding by studying how metropolitan cities are internationally positioned using the internet and online branding. The focus is on objectives and strategies, method and expression (including five illustrations), and challenges in online city branding. Design/...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the underlying rationale for why companies participate in mega‐events in general, and in mega‐events in emerging economies – such as the 2010 Shanghai Expo – in particular. Of particular interest are the ways that companies use an event to advance their own purposes, and how...