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A potentially attractive way for cities to maintain economic growth while reducing environmental harm is to let their production structures undergo industrial transformation, a process otherwise known as ecological modernization. This attraction lies mainly in the fact that residents, visitors and corporations prefer clean air, water and soil as a milieu to invest their resources in. Municipal governments can use city branding as an important instrument to force off such a transformation, if it is taken as a point of departure for the adoption of a strategy to which they are deeply committed and for the benefit of which they are willing to deploy their various policy instruments. In the literature on ecological modernization, five different pathways for industrial transformation in cities have been identified and these have been matched with city branding practices. In this contribution, the abovementioned conceptual framework is further detailed and specified to account for a variety in types of secondary and tertiary sector industries. In the empirical sections, all cities in the Chinese provinces Hubei and Hunan, where the transition from manufacturing to services is typically most pressing, are examined in terms of their industrial structures, pathways to industrial transformation and city branding choices. The results indicate, inter alia, that further subdivision of the secondary and tertiary economic sectors is useful in understanding key features of the transformation, and that different sub-pathways affect tradeoffs between economic expansion and ecological preservation differently. Branding practices among Hubei and Hunan cities also indicate that some industries are more easily embraced and utilized than others in establishing brand identities and adopting popular city labels.
Meiling Han; Martin De Jong; Minghui Jiang. City Branding and Industrial Transformation from Manufacturing to Services: Which Pathways do Cities in Central China Follow? Sustainability 2019, 11, 5992 .
AMA StyleMeiling Han, Martin De Jong, Minghui Jiang. City Branding and Industrial Transformation from Manufacturing to Services: Which Pathways do Cities in Central China Follow? Sustainability. 2019; 11 (21):5992.
Chicago/Turabian StyleMeiling Han; Martin De Jong; Minghui Jiang. 2019. "City Branding and Industrial Transformation from Manufacturing to Services: Which Pathways do Cities in Central China Follow?" Sustainability 11, no. 21: 5992.
The past decade has seen a surge in the use of city branding, which is used to attract specific target groups of investors, high-tech green firms and talented workforce and reflects a desired shift from old, polluting manufacturing industries to new, clean service industries. Previous studies in the Chinese mega-city regions Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Jing-Jin-Ji (region around Beijing and Tianjin) have shown that branding practices of primarily service and innovation oriented cities are largely in line with existing industrial profiles while those which are predominantly manufacturing oriented wish to present themselves as more service and innovation driven. In this contribution, city branding practices are studied in China’s three Northeastern provinces Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning which face structural decline because of the presence of many outdated resource-based and heavy industries. The gap between existing profile and branding choices appears not systematic as in China’s leading economic regions. Northeastern cities focus more on combining primary, secondary and tertiary industrial patterns than on displacing manufacturing with services. The tertiary sector in these provinces is more administrative and public sector oriented and generates lower value added; it is therefore not significantly more attractive than the primary and secondary ones.
Meiling Han; Martin De Jong; Zhuqing Cui; Limin Xu; Haiyan Lu; Baiqing Sun. City Branding in China’s Northeastern Region: How Do Cities Reposition Themselves When Facing Industrial Decline and Ecological Modernization? Sustainability 2018, 10, 102 .
AMA StyleMeiling Han, Martin De Jong, Zhuqing Cui, Limin Xu, Haiyan Lu, Baiqing Sun. City Branding in China’s Northeastern Region: How Do Cities Reposition Themselves When Facing Industrial Decline and Ecological Modernization? Sustainability. 2018; 10 (2):102.
Chicago/Turabian StyleMeiling Han; Martin De Jong; Zhuqing Cui; Limin Xu; Haiyan Lu; Baiqing Sun. 2018. "City Branding in China’s Northeastern Region: How Do Cities Reposition Themselves When Facing Industrial Decline and Ecological Modernization?" Sustainability 10, no. 2: 102.