ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Social-Ecological Urban Systems
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1575303
City brand and urban environmental sanitation: Evidence from the National Civilized City in China
Provisionally accepted
Junyan Li1*
Lei Xu2- 1Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China
- 2Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha Shi, Hunan Province, China
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The role of urban brand as a key indicator of a city's soft power has become increasingly prominent in modern urban development research. Based on panel data from 285 prefecture-level cities during 2001-2023, this study employs the acquisition of National Civilized City (NCC) brand as a quasi-natural experiment and utilizes a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, with municipal solid waste collection and treatment as metrics for urban environmental sanitation, to investigate the impact and underlying mechanisms of city brand on environmental sanitation. The findings reveal that: First, cities that achieved the NCC brand demonstrated significant improvements in environmental sanitation metrics, including increased municipal solid waste collection volume, harmless treatment volume, harmless treatment rate, and harmless treatment capacity. This improvement does not stem from short-term behaviors during the NCC evaluation period, but rather persists after obtaining the brand certification. Second, our mechanism analysis reveals that the NCC brand enhances urban environmental sanitation through three channels: improved sanitation infrastructure, increased governmental environmental attention, and heightened public environmental attention. Third, our heterogeneity analysis shows that the environmental impact varies across different urban contexts, with stronger effects observed in ordinary cities compared to higher-tier administrative centers, and more pronounced improvements in cities outside urban agglomerations versus those within urban agglomerations. This study broadens the research scope of city brand and enriches the environmental research framework within the Chinese context, while providing practical insights for policymakers seeking to enhance both city brand development and environmental management efficiency.
Keywords: City brand, national civilized cities, environmental sanitation, Municipal solid waste, Difference-in-differences
Received: 12 Feb 2025; Accepted: 29 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Junyan Li, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China
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