What if a city’s brand was built not through slogans, but through safer streets and better everyday walking experiences for children? This PhD explores that question in Ho Chi Minh City.

Child-friendly walkability and traffic safety remain critical challenges in rapidly growing, motorcycle-dependent cities. In Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), children are frequently exposed to high traffic risks, fragmented pedestrian infrastructure, and street environments that discourage independent walking. These challenges are not only mobility-related issues, but also key contributors to a poor everyday city brand experience, as indicated by previous studies on city brand experience in HCMC. Daily encounters with unsafe crossings, uncomfortable sidewalks, and traffic conflicts directly shape how residents, especially families with children, perceive and experience the city.

At the same time, city branding practices in HCMC have largely focused on short-term promotional activities targeting tourism and foreign investment, often lacking a coherent long-term strategy or a strong identity rooted in everyday urban life. This contrast raises a critical question: rather than building a symbolic or image-driven city brand that risks remaining disconnected from lived reality, can city branding be used as a tool to address pressing urban challenges and, in doing so, create a more credible and inclusive city brand experience?

This PhD research re-conceptualises city branding as an implementation-oriented governance mechanism rather than a communication or marketing exercise. It develops and applies an Integrated Implementation-Oriented City Branding Framework (IICBF) that links urban context and challenges to city identity, coordinated implementation, lived urban experience, and continuous evaluation.

Using child-friendly walkability and traffic safety in downtown HCMC as a case study, the research adopts a mixed-method approach across four phases. It combines large-scale surveys with children and parents, objective street audits, spatial analysis, qualitative interviews, and participatory evaluation supported by a web-based 3D simulation platform. The findings show that children’s walking intentions are strongly shaped by parental behaviour and subjective perceptions of walkability and traffic safety, particularly unsafe crossings, convenience, and conviviality.

The study develops and evaluates three intervention scenarios reflecting different planning logics and implementation horizons.

• Scenario 1 focuses on crossing safety through tactical spatial interventions.
• Scenario 2 prioritises walkability by enhancing convenience and conviviality, including sidewalk continuity, shading, seating, and everyday comfort.
• Scenario 3 integrates safety and walkability within the IICBF, framing the area as a Child-Friendly Safe Walking Zone through coordinated spatial, social, economic, communication, and governance actions. 

Participatory evaluation reveals clear differences across scenarios: Scenario 1 delivers rapid safety gains but has limited long-term impact; Scenario 2 improves everyday walking quality but faces operational constraints; and Scenario 3 receives the strongest overall support by aligning safety, lived experience, and place identity, while requiring greater institutional coordination.

The research demonstrates how city branding can guide integrated, multi-dimensional interventions across spatial, social, economic, communication, and governance domains. It proposes a staged and actionable pathway for developing Child-Friendly Safe Walking Zones and validates the IICBF as an adaptive framework for aligning urban problem-solving with credible, experience-based city identity-building in dense, fast-growing cities.