Place Branding as A Strategic Tool for Market-Oriented Urban Planning

in: Flexibility, H.K. Özdinç,S. Güzelsarı, Editor, IJOPEC, London, pp.169-196, 2013

In the last decade, place-branding has gained importance within the national and

local policy circles in Turkey. It is observed that the “branding discourse” is to a

large extent utilized for the legitimization of the rapid and intensive transformation

process that the Turkish cities are currently going through. This study proposes that

neo-liberal urbanization requires the re-organization of the urban planning regime

and its main objective is to elaborate on the nature of this re-organization by focusing

on the recent tourism development in Bursa. By sheding light on the urban

planning process behind this development, this paper identifies the centralization

of urban planning rights, the effective insertion of public land into the neo-liberal

urbanization project and the strategic use of popular discourses, such as placebranding,

as the main pillars of the re-organization of the existing urban planning

regime. The study concludes that this re-organization indicates a criticial diversion

of urban planning from its ontological roots since the balance that urban planning

is supposed to find between public and private interests over land is shifting in favor

of the latter by the very intervention of the neo-liberal state.

Keywords: neo-liberal urbanization, urban entrepreneurialism, place-branding, urban

planning, tourism development