While cities on a global scale embrace smartness as a roadmap for efficient urban governance, disparities persist in the domain of digital accessibility, literacy, and skills, with manifestations of digital exclusion, ageism, and ableism prevalent in most digital urban experiences. Despite their commitment to bridging the digital divide, governments lack comprehensive frameworks to inform policymaking and action for inclusion in smart cities. This review paper aims to deepen the understanding of the multifaceted challenges confronting the governance of inclusion in smart cities. Drawing from a review of research encompassing digital inclusion, digital transitions, smart cities, and urban governance, we discuss who is included and excluded in the governance of smart cities; what are the necessary conditions to be met for smart cities to be considered inclusive; and how can smart city governance deliver public value and equal benefits for all. As a novel contribution, this paper outlines a reflective framework to inform citizen inclusion in the governance of smart cities. This framework is meant to act as a starting point in the design of inclusive digital urban policies, and can also be employed to assess the directions taken to date in public organizations towards more inclusive urban practices.

Purpose: This study aims to explore whether adopting a sustainability narrative in city branding and urban development strategies results in more inclusive governance arrangements (process) and a more pluralistic approach to generating sustainability value (outcome), in line with the triple bottom line approach advocated by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The authors argue that a necessary step to enable meaningful sustainable urban development is to rethink the way in which “value” and “value creation” are being interpreted in urban development policies and city branding narratives. Design/methodology/approach: Mixed-methods case study of New York City’s (NYC) urban development and city branding strategies (2007–2019) combining analysis of academic and grey literature on NYC’s urban development and city branding, value hierarchies in NYC urban development strategic plans and local media reports covering NYC’s development and branding processes. Findings: Despite claiming commitment to urban sustainability, NYC’s urban development and branding narratives reveal a clear dominance of interpreting “value” primarily as “exchange value”, thus prioritising economic growth. Research limitations/implications: In the authors’ view, a systemic, systematic and structured approach to generating “sustainability value” is necessary if city branding is to become a governance tool to support sustainable urban development. A “tetravaluation” approach is recommended as a practical, structured framework that can bridge across the ideas of “sustainability value” and “pluralistic governance”, ensuring effective implementation. Further investigation in additional urban contexts is required. Originality/value: The research contributes to current scholarly debates towards more balanced and pluralistic conceptions of “value” and place branding as a more holistic, participatory and democratic governance model for sustainable urban development.

Research in both public administration and place development has identified a need to develop more participatory approaches to governing cities and regions. Scholars have identified place branding as one of several potential policy instruments to enable more participatory place development. Recently, academics working in diverse disciplines, including political studies, public administration, and regional development have suggested that an alternative, bottom-up, more participatory approach to place branding could be employed. Such an interdisciplinary approach would use iterative communication exchanges within a network of diverse stakeholders including residents to better foster stakeholder participation, contribute to sustainable development, and deliver substantive social justice and increased citizen satisfaction. Building on this research and using an exploratory, qualitative, case-study methodology, our aim was to observe and analyze such interactions and communicative exchanges in practice. Drawing on the experience of the Australian state of Tasmania, we studied stakeholder reactions to the participatory place branding approach. We found that although participants were initially skeptical and identified many barriers to implementing participatory place branding, they simultaneously became excited by its possibilities and able to identify how many of the barriers could be transcended.

Rail trail developments involve converting disused railway corridors into multi-use spaces for leisure, tourism, and sustainable mobility. The transformation of disused railway corridors into successful rail trail developments in the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom has contributed to a resurgence in community, government and business interest in developing rail trails in other countries. As evident from several jurisdictions, rail trail development has the potential to spark debates around fundamental issues related to prudent use of dormant public assets, namely railway corridors. This exploratory systematic review examined peer-reviewed studies of rail trails published in English language academic journals to examine the substance, extent and research gaps of this distinct subset of the broader literature on trails. A fledgling, fragmented body of knowledge was identified, spanning themes from planning, management and user experience to social, economic and environmental impacts of rail trails. Directions for future research are provided.

Both scholars and practitioners agree that stakeholder participation in place branding processes is important for enhancing their support, often referred to as Brand Citizenship Behaviour (BCB). Stakeholder participation can be varied and is often linked to the different roles that place stakeholders can adopt in the place branding process. The literature suggests a link between different stakeholder roles taken along the branding process (from decision-making to implementation) and their voluntary and active supportive behaviours towards the brand project. Despite this recognition, many aspects related to place stakeholders’ roles and BCB remain underexplored, particularly what leads stakeholder to adopt certain roles and engage in behaviours associated with such roles. This study aims to fill this gap by using role theory as a theoretical lens to conceptually explore the different roles actors adopt in the place branding process, their motivations to adopting a certain role and the behavioural expectations that come with such roles. Given the complexity of places and interactive nature of place branding, we also reflect on the fluid and interrelated nature of such roles as they are constantly (re)shaped in the interactions between place stakeholders.

Purpose: This paper aims to report on the insights from an international workshop entitled Co-creating place brands: sharing research insights and practical experiences towards more inclusive cities and regions hosted by the Erasmus University Rotterdam. The authors outline their collective reflection and the learnings for place branding theory and practice. Additionally, this paper discusses the need to build practitioner-scholar relationships in a co-creative style, to co-develop more inclusive models for co-creating place brands. Design/methodology/approach: The report details key learnings of a whole-day interactive workshop featuring academic and practitioner presentations and discussions around inclusive approaches to co-creating place brands. The report is structured around key emerging themes and their associated learnings. Findings: The workshop yielded six important learnings: 1) a key obstacle to co-creating place brands is that co-creation is often misunderstood among decision-makers; 2) all place stakeholders need to be taken seriously if co-creation is to shape a place’s identity and foster cohesion; 3) broad stakeholder inclusion in place branding can be problematic, but it is a necessary condition to the practice of place brand co-creation; 4) co-creating place brands requires going beyond marketing tools and deep into the levels of community life and place’s social and cultural construction; 5) co-creation at all stages of the branding process from conceptual development to performance measurement and sometimes unconsciously; 6) politics of place must be observed (this is crucial yet easily overlooked in co-creating place brands). Originality/value: The micro-format of the workshop facilitated valuable interactions between academics and practitioners, effectively blending practical, “on the ground”-knowledge with academic ideas, concepts and models. This approach not only generated key learnings with the possibility to advance the field but also highlighted important future research directions.