International Place Branding Yearbook 2012—Managing Smart Growth & Sustainability

The International Place Branding Yearbook 2012: Managing Smart Growth and Sustainability is the third annual volume in the Yearbook series and looks at the case for applying brand and marketing strategies to the economic, social, political and cultural development of cities, towns and regions around the world to help them compete in global, national and local markets. This edition focuses on sustainability, smart growth and place branding. It uses the definition of smart growth as the capability of, first, making appropriate judgments according to the relevant performance measures, which lie in the overlap of three factors: efficiency (doing things right), equity (doing the right things) and effectiveness (doing the right things right); and, second, to configure the variables appropriately i.e., to 'getting it all together' in a balanced-centric manner, a priority for future city branding

This volume provides various disciplinary perspectives for mapping ways to lead place branding toward the smart growth paradigm designed to build performance, guided by sustainable values, cultural identity and social inclusive strategies. This Yearbook also underlines the importance of cities not only as the source of around 80 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, but importantly as ecologically-rejuvenated brands.

The International Place Branding Yearbook 2012:

‧ will improve understanding of place branding not only as multi-actor and multi-sector, but increasingly as a multi-layered process;
‧ provides a city typology affording the potential development path for defining brand value propositioning;

‧ interprets the critiques about production and consumption entangled in place brands, including accusations questioning their usefulness and viability.

FRANK GO is a professor of Tourism Marketing at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, The Netherlands; Academic Director of the Master of Science, Hospitality Management, jointly offered with Hotel School The Hague; and visiting professor at the Open University Business School, U.K., Rikkyo University, Tokyo, and the University of Gerona, Spain.



ROBERT GOVERS is an independent policy advisor and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and a visiting scholar at the Rotterdam School of Management, The Netherlands, IULM University Milano, Italy, and several institutes in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.