The anatomy of place branding: relating place transformation to community identity

This paper is aimed to find a new framework for the theoretical structure of place branding concerning the role of the local community within it, based on the study from some places in two Indonesian cities. By the empirical study on those cases, the intention is to find the role of each element and its relationships between them, in the context of brand-management model to develop the competitive advantage of the city. The analytical process will be focused on the crucial role of the local community as the main player in city identity formation. The local community is the main user of the urban space who can make decisions over space, according to their inherited perception and belief, individually and communally. This qualitative research employed interviews and direct immersion with the urban community, to examine the anatomy of the place evolution in the two types of Indonesian cities: the heritage city of Surakarta and the cosmopolitan city of Semarang. The theoretical invention of the city authenticity’s DNA and its elements that have been formulated on a heritage city from the previous study is used as the basis for verification of the other cities. The research findings have proven that the uniqueness of the urban places is very much influenced by the decisions made by the local communities based on their interaction with their living environment. On the next stage, the interaction between the community and their place would be contributed to the sustainability of the city identity, which will become the main factor of the advancement of city branding and the increase of the competitive advantage of the city.