Developing a comprehensive conceptual framework for city branding based on urban planning theory: Meta-synthesis of the literature (1990–2020)

Even though city branding has recently been considered an urban policy, it remains a research area theoretically detached from urban planning theory and ethics. On this issue, there is still no theoretical link between the ideological and instrumental aspects, leading to a gap between theory and practice. Hence, this paper aimed to contribute to the academic discussion on city branding by extracting a comprehensive framework concerning both formal (instrumental and procedural) and informal (ideological and normative) dimensions. To this end, 534 scientific sources have been studied through a systematic review process, and 380 of them were analyzed using a meta-synthesis method. The findings indicated that city branding based on urban planning includes five categories: (1) the environments involving the planning system (22.5%), (2) ideological and policymaking field (22.2), (3) the field of planning (27.1%), (4) the field of implementation (6.2%), and (5) social feedback (22%). This framework illustrated that city branding is an ideological issue interlinked with different environments and fields institutionalizing a hegemonic ideology formally and informally.