Smart City Branding: What Can Smart Cities Really Change?
What can smart cities really change?
This question has stayed with me throughout my doctoral journey—not because it has a single answer, but because it keeps unfolding as cities adapt to technology, or are increasingly reshaped by it. Discussions around smart cities often emphasize efficiency, data, and innovation.
Yet what remained with me most strongly is a simple insight:
“Smart technologies are not neutral infrastructures. They actively participate in shaping how cities define themselves, how they are perceived, and how they position their futures.“
Technology-driven change rarely arrives with all its implications fully understood. Digital systems and platforms usually enter urban life first; governance models, ethical debates, and social reflections tend to follow later.
Cities are no exception. Smart technologies begin reorganizing everyday urban experiences long before their broader social and communicative consequences are fully visible. From this perspective, smart cities cannot be reduced to technical systems alone.
“They are better understood as communication ecosystems spaces where technology intersects with governance, institutions, citizens, visitors, and global audiences. What matters is not only which technologies are implemented, but how they are communicated, governed, and experienced.”
This is where smart city branding becomes particularly visible. City branding is often associated with logos, slogans, or promotional campaigns. In reality, it is shaped by everyday experiences, narratives, and meanings that unfold over time.
Smart technologies inevitably become part of these narratives. They influence what a city stands for, what it prioritizes, and how it imagines its future. Rather than emerging through isolated technological projects, smart city branding takes shape through a set of interrelated components.
Smart Communication
Smart communication plays a central role in how cities translate technological change into meaning. In cities like Seoul, digital technologies are not only functional tools but part of everyday urban life and cultural production. The integration of smart services with global cultural industries such as K-pop allows the city to project a dynamic, future-oriented identity where technology and culture reinforce each other.
Stakeholders
The way smart technologies shape city branding is closely linked to stakeholder involvement. Amsterdam demonstrates how collaboration between public institutions, start-ups, researchers, and citizens enables smart city initiatives to move beyond symbolic participation. Here, technology becomes a shared project rather than a top-down agenda, strengthening both governance and brand credibility.
Smart Governance
Governance models determine whether smart technologies enhance transparency or remain abstract promises. Cities such as Berlin and London reflect hybrid approaches, where digital innovation intersects with creative industries and cultural heritage. These cities negotiate continuity and change, producing multi-layered identities shaped by openness, creativity, and institutional complexity.
Sustainability
In some cities, sustainability provides the primary narrative through which smart technologies gain legitimacy. Copenhagen consistently positions itself as a carbon-neutral city, embedding digital solutions into long-term climate goals and quality-of-life narratives. Here, smart technologies reinforce a value-based brand identity rather than standing out as isolated innovations.
Digital Infrastructure
Digital infrastructure shapes who can participate in urban life and whose experiences are made visible. In contrast, Istanbul presents a strong cultural and historical narrative but remains in a transitional phase when it comes to integrating smart city technologies into its branding. Digital communication continues to foreground heritage and aesthetics, while technological infrastructures remain less visible within the city’s brand narrative.
Smart Tourism
Smart tourism mediates how cities present themselves to global audiences. In hybrid and transitional contexts, tourism communication often becomes the dominant branding channel, amplifying heritage and aesthetics while leaving smart infrastructures in the background.
Taken together, these observations suggest that smart city branding is not about adopting the same technologies, but about how cities translate technology into meaning. The question is no longer whether a city is smart, but how smart technologies are aligned with values, governance, and everyday experience.
This post opens the Smart Cities Series. In the next piece, I will move closer to smart city cases and tech-oriented updates, focusing on current developments, country examples, and emerging discussions shaping urban futures.
Acknowledgement
This reflection is informed by conversations and interviews conducted as part of my doctoral research. I am sincerely grateful to the city branding and smart city experts who generously shared their time, insights, and experiences.
Şeyma Filiz 
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