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Brisbane is Australia's third largest city, and capital of the state of Queensland. It has a sprawling urban footprint and impending connections to neighbouring metropolises, said to create a '200 km city'. The governing body of Brisbane controls the largest municipality in Australia, with unrivalled opportunity to influence both urban planning and marketing for the CBD and suburbs. Brisbane is home to over one million people, and its population has grown rapidly over the past decades, doubling in the past 40 years. Brisbane represents the quintessential city with an emerging quest for urbanity, both in brand and physical form. The relationships between the city's urban planning and its branding is not well examined, despite clear entanglement between these two strategies. We use a case-study analysis of both Brisbane City (which is glossed as the Central Business District) and an outer-suburban area, Inala, to interrogate how urban identities and brand are being constructed in relation to their social settings and governance, with particular reference to the importance of city branding and its relationship to planning strategies. The manifestation of branding and relationship to place qualities at the core and on the periphery of Brisbane are examined, with relevance for other rapidly growing, ambitious cities. The focus of Brisbane's push for urbanity is on the city centre, and is not representative of the typical suburban condition, nor of many cities dominated by suburban forms. An analysis of place brand, planning strategies and resident's responses to place, from planning, architectural and anthropological perspectives are offered, as an alternative reading of place brand from the marketing dominated approach usually favoured in branding analysis. We make recommendations to incorporate a more complete version of place in the construction of a 'genuine' urbanity. We argue that the recognition of resident-centred place identity in place branding will produce more socially sustainable places, as well as more authentic city brands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]