Sustainable and Green City Brand. An Exploratory Review

Although city branding is not new, the importance of sustainability and environmental demands is placing an enormous challenge in city/place branding activities. As such, the aim of this article is to analyze how sustainable/green city/place branding is understood and what its main idiosyncrasies are. For that an exploratory literature review was implemented and 32 articles were analyzed. It is possible to conclude that there are three main strands covering the topic related to green, sustainable, and slow city (cittaslow) or place branding. Moreover, green resources are dealt with seeking to improve the image of the city, the quality of urban life, and the green spaces supporting the city as a tourism destination. Complementarily, sustainability embraces also economic and social aspects, which are not fully covered in the previous strand. Finally, the cittaslow perspective follows a sustainable perspective more closely than the green/environmental one. The three strands are very segmented and the stage of development is still in a growing up stage. The stakeholders play an important role in disclosing the natural resources, the environmental challenges for a city/place to develop a positive sustainable reputation. Finally, there is an important role from the public policy perspective to position the city as a green, sustainable place destination.