Green City Branding – How people respond to the built environment

Abstract: In the last decades, places such as cities, regions and nations have become active participants in the global competitive economy. They now operate in a global marketplace, competing with other places all over the world for tourists, investors, residents and workforce. As places use marketing strategies and practices to gain reputation and competitive advantage, city branding has become invaluable for cities around the world. Simultaneously, environmental awareness grows, leading to ideas about sustainability also affecting marketing and urban development. These changes are interacting as the number of cities in the world that have taken advantage of their ‘green’ or sustainable image of the purpose of city branding increases. According to Stephen R. Kellert, Professor of social ecology at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the green movement fails to achieve its goal of sustainability, because it falls short of nurturing the physical and mental benefits that create emotional attachment to place in the first place, and then motivates people to care for constructions and retain them over the long term. There seems to be a gap between the ones who design our living environments and those who use them. This could be related to the fact that residents and visitors of a city are rarely consulted about their preferences. The decision-making regarding exterior architecture falls to municipalities, builders and architects. Something that separates urban design from virtually all other products where companies are actively seeking to satisfy the end user. Further, a housing shortage means that there is a gap between demand and supply and therefore few incitements to create buildings that are perceived as more attractive than others. Within the industry, there seems to be a tendency to create hard products that will meet the functional requirements, where the psychological factors that create added value are overlooked. The purpose of this study was to create an increased understanding for how cities can use architectural aesthetics as a way of increasing their social, economic and environmental sustainability, and thereby their attractiveness in a global market. A number of aesthetic attributes that affect how an area is perceived was identified with the help of environmental psychology and marketing theory. The study also explores differences between architects and laymen preferences regarding external architecture. The conclusion is that it is possible to create added value through exterior architecture, and that this added value that could contribute to building an environmentally, socially, economically sustainable society. People´s general taste preferences were identified, and a number of attributes was listed. There were no significant differences between architects and laymen’s taste preferences. In general, both architects and laymen appreciate architectural aesthetics containing the identified attributes. However, architects tend to have conceptual or associative references, while laymen in general have visual references. Further, the two groups also have different views on what is authentic and what is not, where architects are more likely to perceive traditional architecture built in the modern age as non-authentic.