This project explored the potential for Glasgow’s city brand, ‘People Make Glasgow’ (PMG), to move towards a participatory and inclusive place brand.

A city brand represents all the residents, so city branding strategies are now shifting from a purely top-down approach to a more participatory and democratic one. This shift focuses on local social responsibility rather than just economic benefits and external marketing. It’s about creating a sense of belonging, pride and ownership for local residents, which goes hand in hand with urban development. In this way, city branding can truly shape the city’s image from the inside out and fulfil its role.

This project reconsiders PMG’s role in Glasgow and the ways in which it can continue to operate and be effective. Based on operator interview, online conversations, and street engagements, the project comprehensively understood PMG from both an ‘upstream’ perspective—its current operations, strategies, and positioning—and a ‘downstream’ perspective—the attitudes and interactions of residents with the city brand. PMG invites people to freely use it, prompting residents to reflect on their relationship with the city, whether positive or negative, and inspiring a sense of ownership and city proposals.

Referring to the views of the participatory democracy experts, and the developed participatory place branding model of the inclusive place branding experts, my final design concept was for a variety of communities and organisations in Glasgow City to become ‘PMG ambassadors’. These groups can register through Glasgow Life Official Website to have accessible workshops, in which participants will co-create PMG posters reflecting their groups’ unique style, visually narrating how their community ‘Make Glasgow’ and ‘Hope Glasgow’. Through this Playful process, interest in participating in the city’s democratic process is encouraged, and the voices of different communities are heard and considered as well. The posters will eventually be placed in public places and streets to show this process to residents and visitors in the city, showing the contributions of different communities. I ran the workshop at Wing Hong Elderly Group and took their output posters to other stakeholders in the city for evaluation.

Glasgow is an inclusive and democratic city, the friendliest city in the world – and that’s what the People Make Glasgow city brand wants to demonstrate. The hope is that by empowering PMG through participation and inclusivity, it will help to build connections between people and Glasgow, enhance local pride, sense of belonging and ownership, and demonstrate that it is the people making Glasgow that are the essence of Glasgow.