Municipal Place Branding and Immigrant Integration Amid the Pandemic
“Despite vacillating national discourses on immigration policy and complications of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a growing number of cities continue affiliating with the international ‘welcoming movement.’ The welcoming movement consists of a transnational network of municipalities in partnership with nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and other sectors of society that are implementing receptivity plans, policies, practices, and branding initiatives,” begins the abstract of our chapter, “Place Branding for Immigrant and Refugee Integration and Receptivity Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses of U.S. Cities in the Welcoming America Network,” recently published in the book, COVID-19 and a World of Ad Hoc Geographies, edited by Stanley D. Brunn and Donna Gilbreath, from Springer publishing.
In this chapter, we ask the question, “Within this context, how are welcoming cities responding to the COVID-19 pandemic as one example of their place branding practices?” As the abstract description of the chapter continues, “Through a qualitative scan of municipalities’ primary documents, policies, plans, websites, and municipal leaders’ public pronouncements, this study contributes to understanding of immigrant receptivity processes and intersections with municipal place branding practices amid a pandemic by assessing their pandemic responses within a nationwide network of Welcoming Cities in the United States. Although there are burgeoning welcoming cities networks in other immigrant-receiving societies, this network was selected because they are the first, most established and comprehensive national network of cities with over 100 municipal affiliates. The findings offer scholarly and applied insights regarding place branding practices for immigrant and refugee integration and receptivity.”
The overall book, COVID-19 and a World of Ad Hoc Geographies, is described as follows: “This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of the causes and impacts of COVID-19 on populations, economies, politics, institutions and environments from all world regions. The book maps the causes, effects and impacts of the virus and describes the impact of the virus on among others health care, teaching and learning, travel, tourism, daily life, local and regional economies, media impacts, elections, and indigenous populations and much more. Contributions to this book come from the humanities, social and policy science disciplines as well as from emerging transdisciplinary fields including climate change, sustainability, health care and epidemiology, security, art, visualization, economic and social well-being, law and borderland studies. As such, this book will be a rich source of information to all those geographers, social scientists and urban and regional planners working in this field.”
