Citizen One S2:E5 – The Civic Brand: Reclaiming the Honest Soul of the City

What if cities stopped marketing themselves and started remembering who they are?

That’s the question at the heart of this week’s episode of Citizen One:Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series. This week, I have a conversation with Ryan Short, author of The Civic Brand and founder of CivicBrand — a firm reshaping how communities think about identity, engagement, and belonging.

We talk a lot about “smart cities,” but not enough about honest cities — places that understand their stories, their people, and their contradictions. Ryan’s work cuts through the noise of slogans and “Live-Work-Play” tropes to explore what happens when a city’s brand stops being a product and starts being a practice.

In our discussion, we look at how civic identity becomes the connective tissue between design, governance, and culture, and why authenticity is the only sustainable strategy in a time when sameness has become the default design language of the world.

The Soul Beneath the Brand

Ryan and I start with the idea that cities keep rebranding themselves without rediscovering themselves. From High Point, North Carolina’s transformation from “Furniture Capital” to “City of Makers,” to Austin’s self-invented cultural compass, “Keep Austin Weird,” to Santa Fe’s deep commitment to ethical authenticity — each case study reminds us that true identity is participatory, not performative.

“If your city looks like everyone else’s,” Ryan says, “you’ve already lost the plot.”

We also challenge the limits of the American conversation around place branding. The real test of civic identity isn’t just in neighborhood revitalization projects — it’s in how well a city adapts its story to a global stage without losing its soul.

The Global Conversation

As someone who lives and works in Barcelona — the city where Ildefons Cerdà coined the term urbanization — I couldn’t let this episode go by without addressing how The Civic Brand approaches overtourism. Too often, global cities like Barcelona get reduced to case studies in excess, when in truth they remain the birthplaces of civic literacy.

Barcelona’s story isn’t one of failure; it’s one of endurance and reinvention — a city that continues to lead the global conversation about livability, culture, and belonging.

Ryan’s notion of global civic literacy — cities learning from one another, not mimicking one another — hits a nerve here. Whether it’s Costa Rica’s “Pura Vida” as an organic brand shaped by lived values, or Detroit’s resurrection through creative resilience, each example reveals the same truth: civic identity thrives when rooted in people, not policy.

Why It Matters

This episode pushes us to see civic branding not as marketing, but as moral infrastructure — a way for cities to align their policies, design, and collective narrative around honesty and inclusion. It’s a conversation about power, participation, and the future of belonging in an age of AI, digital twins, and rapid urban change.

“The future of cities,” Ryan reminds us, “will be co-authored by citizens.”

Listen & Share

🎧 Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban FutureS2:E5 – Claiming the Soul of a Citywith Ryan Short, author of The Civic Brand

Available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and CitizenOne.world.

Doug’s Reflection

Cities are living organisms, not design systems. They remember what we forget. And every effort to brand a city is, at its best, an effort to listen — to hear what the city has been trying to say all along.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com