Linking Smart City Strategies, Urban Brand Identity, and Territorial Attractiveness: An Integrative Conceptual Framework

Smart city strategies are increasingly used not only to improve urban services but also to shape intercity positioning, place reputation, and territorial attractiveness. However, the mechanisms through which digital and governance capabilities become credible and socially recognized urban brand assets remain insufficiently specified. This review develops an integrative conceptual framework linking smart city capability portfolios, stakeholder-experienced urban value, institutional urban brand identity, symbolic capital, territorial attractiveness, and durable urban competitiveness. A structured narrative review and concept-centric framework-building design synthesizes 77 substantive scientific and institutional sources; three additional methodological references support the review design. The revised framework specifies a serial but non-deterministic pathway from capability to experienced value, institutional identity and identity congruence, symbolic recognition, attraction, and resource embedding, while also allowing direct experienced-value effects. The synthesis groups the evidence into five capability domains, four forms of stakeholder-experienced value, and three symbolic-capital formation processes and assigns inclusion, co-creation, communication credibility, contextual fit, and multi-level governance to specific conversion paths. The reviewed literature suggests that technology does not create brand value automatically: smart-city capabilities are more likely to support identity and attractiveness when they generate useful, inclusive, visible, and contextually relevant experiences and when identity claims remain consistent with independently observable performance. The contribution therefore lies not in asserting a previously unknown link between smart cities and place branding but in specifying construct boundaries, conversion mechanisms, and empirically testable path-specific propositions.