Speakers
Description
In the cities of today, place branding has evolved from a communication tool aimed at attracting tourists and investment into a strategic governance mechanism that integrates territorial identity, public policy, and sustainable development. However, most approaches to “sustainable” place branding remain grounded in output-based frameworks, such as triple bottom line indicators, and tend to overlook the relational infrastructures that connect actors, resources, and narratives over time. This paper introduces the concept of relational sustainability in place branding. It compares two types of institutional intermediaries that contribute to it: a film office and a major international theatre festival.
Grounded in participatory place branding, territorial sustainability and Service-Dominant Logic, relational sustainability is defined as a territory’s capacity to generate shared value through transparent, equitable and trust-based interactions among stakeholders. Empirically, the paper adopts a comparative case study design. The first case is Malaga Film Office (Spain), an intermediary between local government and the audiovisual industry that implements a Sustainable Production Seal and eco-friendly filming guidelines, aligning creative economy growth with environmental objectives and the city brand “Malaga, la ciudad redonda”. The second case is the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (Romania) and the related Sibiu Culture Factory, where the municipality has strategically used culture and the reuse of industrial spaces as drivers of urban regeneration, tourism development, and international city branding, following the 2007 European Capital of Culture and integrating culture as a core pillar of the Integrated Urban Development Strategy 2021-2030.
Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining documentary analysis, secondary quantitative data, and qualitative insights. The documentary analysis includes strategic plans, sustainability protocols, and EU-funded project reports, enabling an understanding of policy frameworks and institutional priorities. This is complemented by secondary quantitative evidence on economic and tourism-related impacts, providing contextual indicators of territorial performance.
The paper aims to make the following contributions:
- it advances sustainable place branding theory by shifting attention from isolated outputs (e.g. green projects, visitor numbers) to relational capabilities such as participation, transparency, coordination and fair distribution of benefits.
- it proposes an initial typology of intermediary organisations in sustainable place branding, showing convergences and differences between film offices and cultural festivals as governance nodes.
Keywords: Place branding; relational sustainability; film offices; cultural festivals; urban regeneration; creative industries; territorial governance; sustainable development.
