Abstract:

With emotions becoming an important asset for city branding, the meaning-making process of non-marketer interventions is increasingly valued. However, current practical and theoretical research on city branding largely acquiesces to the secondary status of residents' participation in policy-driven contexts and lacks sufficient consideration of how residents' bottom-up actions shape city branding. In contrast, this paper offered a new perspective for city branding research by interpreting the emotional nature of space from the residents' perspective. Using case studies and semi-structured interviews and taking the phenomenon of the African community and its meaning production in Guangzhou as an example, the research examined how residents' emotions occur influenced by media and life experience, explored the role of residents' emotions on city branding of immigrants, and preliminarily dissected the operational mechanism of residents' emotion-driven city branding. The research shows that although the local government does not utilize the African ethnicity gathering phenomenon and its cultural landscape to construct a branding narrative, residents perceive, imagine, and identify with the meaning of place based on the human-place emotional relationship, which in turn invisibly shapes the open and inclusive city brand meaning of Guangzhou. However, residents' emotions are not a continuous, unified whole either; the organic development within the city makes residents interact with places in a differentiated emotional way. Under the influence of media representation and individual life experience, residents' positive and negative emotions toward the African ethnicity play constructive and destructive roles in the city branding of immigrants, respectively. The research calls attention to the significance of residents' bottom-up emotional expression on city branding, to provide a realistic reference for city image management.

Key words: city branding, emotion, African community, Guangzhou, city immigrants

摘要：

随着情感成为城市品牌的重要资产，非营销人员介入的意义创造过程日益受到重视，从居民的角度解读情感的空间性为城市品牌研究提供了一个新的视角。运用案例研究和半结构式访谈的方法，以广州非裔聚居现象及其意义生产为例，探讨居民情感的发生如何受到媒体和生活经历的影响，审视居民情感对城市移民品牌塑造的作用，初步剖析居民情感驱动的城市移民品牌化的运作机制。研究表明，尽管地方政府并没有利用非裔聚居现象及其文化景观构建品牌叙事，但居民基于人地情感关系，感知、想象和认同地方的意义，进而无形地塑造着广州开放、包容的城市品牌。然而，居民情感也并非连续、统一的整体，城市内部的有机发展使居民与地方产生差异化的情感互动。在媒体表征与个体生活经历的影响下，居民对非裔群体的积极和消极情感分别对城市移民品牌化起到建设性和破坏性的作用。研究呼吁关注居民自下而上的情感表达对城市品牌构建的意义，以期为城市形象管理提供现实参考。

关键词: 城市品牌, 情感, 非裔聚居区, 广州, 城市移民