This study aims to establish a theoretical and practical foundation for building a long-term urban brand legacy beyond short-term mega-event–oriented branding, in response to Busan’s designation as the 2028 World Design Capital (WDC). It focuses o...
This study aims to establish a theoretical and practical foundation for building a long-term urban brand legacy beyond short-term mega-event–oriented branding, in response to Busan’s designation as the 2028 World Design Capital (WDC). It focuses on emotional durability embedded in the relationship between cities and citizens and extends Jonathan Chapman’s concept of Emotionally Durable Design (EDD) to an urban identity framework. The study argues that urban brand legacy is accumulated through sustained emotional relationships among cities, citizens, and visitors, rather than through temporary visibility gains from events.
From this perspective, the study conceptualizes urban brand identity across three dimensions—Value, Visual, and Experience—and proposes the Emotionally Durable City Identity (EDCI) framework, integrating the seven EDD principles (narrativity, identity, attractiveness, ethicality, continuity, relationality, and functionality) as design logics for each dimension. To verify the framework’s conceptual validity, importance, measurability, and structural alignment, a three-round Delphi study was conducted with 15 experts from academia, practice, and public administration. The results confirmed the structural correspondence between EDD principles and the Value–Visual–Experience dimensions and established the EDCI framework, composed of intrinsic authenticity, aesthetic equity, and participatory operability. Based on this framework, nine WDC cities—Torino(2008), Seoul(2010), Helsinki(2012), Cape Town(2014), Taipei(2016), Mexico City(2018), Lille Métropole(2020), Valencia(2022), and San Diego–Tijuana(2024)—were analyzed. Three WDC strategy types were identified according to the relative emphasis of the EDCI concepts: ‘Experience Expansion Oriented Sustainability’, ‘Meaning Settlement Oriented Sustainability’, and ‘Value Internalization Oriented Sustainability’. These types demonstrate that WDC strategies prioritize different combinations of visual innovation, value-based identity formation, and citizen-centered trust building, providing a comparative and structural basis for defining Busan’s WDC strategy and legacy direction.
To examine the practical effects of these strategy types, an empirical experiment was conducted with 328 participants, including Busan residents, domestic non-residents, and foreign residents. Three sets of WDC promotional stimuli reflecting each strategy type were presented, and participants’ message comprehension, design meaning delivery, emotional attitude, city image (inclusiveness, future orientation, citizen-centeredness, trust, attractiveness, and distinctiveness), and behavioral intentions (residence, visit, recommendation, and investment) were measured. The results show that the Meaning Settlement Oriented strategy achieved the highest performance across all respondent groups in message comprehension, meaning delivery, emotional attitude, participation intention, and visit and residence intentions, confirming its suitability as the core strategy for WDC Busan 2028. In contrast, the Experience Expansion Oriented strategy showed relatively lower cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses among groups with limited prior awareness, indicating the need for complementary use. The Value Internalization Oriented strategy elicited the most positive responses among foreign participants, particularly in inclusiveness, trust, core value recognition, and investment intention, demonstrating its effectiveness for enhancing Busan’s global brand image and international credibility. Accordingly, the study suggests a multi-layered branding strategy centered on the Meaning Settlement Oriented approach, supplemented by the other two strategies.
In conclusion, this study develops the EDCI framework by integrating the Value–Visual–Experience structure of urban identity with EDD principles and empirically demonstrates the mechanism through which urban identity accumulates and expands through emotional durability via Delphi validation, case analysis, and experimentation. By identifying a multi-strategy configuration centered on meaning settlement as an effective approach for WDC Busan 2028, the study shows that international mega-events can function as platforms for the long-term structuring of core urban values rather than as one-off spectacles. The proposed EDCI framework offers policy and practical guidelines for coherent value visualization, integrated design of urban spaces and infrastructure, citizen-centered experience design, and global trust building, and can be widely applied to future urban branding policies, public design strategies, and mega-event legacy research.