Communicating the city from below: urban creative subculture (Skena) communities and participatory city branding in Bandung, Indonesia

Urban branding scholarship has increasingly emphasized participatory approaches grounded in everyday cultural practices rather than top-down promotional strategies. This study examines how urban creative subculture (Skena) communities contribute to the construction of participatory city branding narratives in Bandung, Indonesia. Drawing on narrative branding and participatory city branding perspectives, the study adopts a constructivist paradigm and employs a qualitative single holistic case study. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with fourteen key informants, participatory observation of community activities, and analysis of documents and digital content. The findings show that Skena communities function as active narrators of the city by producing urban meaning through cultural practices, articulating narratives via symbolic expressions embedded in urban spaces, and circulating these narratives through interconnected offline and digital communication networks. Participatory city branding in Bandung emerges as an ecological and layered process driven by horizontal, nonhierarchical community networks rather than institutional control. The study contributes to communication and city branding scholarship by highlighting grassroots cultural communication as a central mechanism in shaping urban identity in Global South contexts.