Tried and tested approaches
At the People & Places Partnership, we recommend and apply the following tried and tested steps towards giving local people a central role in helping our public spaces, neighbourhoods and towns to blossom.
1. Work across issues and policies: People and places don’t operate in silos; nor should the way we work with them. As the revitalising town centre toolkit that we created for the English Local Government Association demonstrates, we believe it’s essential to take a joined-up approach to boosting pride in place.
2. Put partnerships in place: To enable a joined-up approach and make use of all available talents and resources we have long advocated and assisted in putting partnerships in place. We love the conclusion in the Institute of Place Management’s (IPM) guidance on making the most of high street investment, that such partnerships should be seen as “engines to drive a set of short, medium and long term actions that individually and collectively work to repurpose places”.
3. Involve, empower and co-create: People will feel prouder of places when they have a voice in shaping change in-line with local needs. For us, engagement begins by gauging local stakeholders’ perceptions, interactions and priorities for places like town and city centres. This is backed-up by ongoing involvement and empowerment including key community groups having a seating as equals around the partnership table.
4. Improve the journey into town: At People & Places we know that a big barrier to people experiencing and enjoying places is the perception that they are challenging to travel to. We help overcome this by linking parking and place and through our signage and access audits of the journey into and around town.
5. Create public spaces for people: Our approach to ‘transforming public spaces’starts and ends with stakeholder engagement, and as in our recent post on ‘making the most of urban green spaces’, our guidance is to be aware of the accessibility, quality and appeal of such spaces to different types of users.
Chris Wade, Director
chris.wade@people-places.net
07788278126
Boosting pride in place
6. Diversify the business mix: We are acutely aware from our own baseline studies of towns and cities that the changing mix of businesses and services can have a major impact the pride people feel for the places that matter to them. We direct place partnerships to use the tried and tested approach to ‘tackling high street vacancy’ of “audit, engage, encourage and promote”.
7. Create community-owned enterprises: As our extensive article on ‘getting ready for the right to buy’ demonstrates, we have long been advocates of the role of community-owned, town centre businesses in bringing, often-iconic buildings back into a suitable use, providing important services that draw people into town and as acting as locally-accountable ‘anchor organisations’ that can be a focus of local engagement and delivery.
8. Embrace heritage and culture: As the checklist in this extended and ever-popular blog on ‘reviving historic town centres’ shows, we have long advocated embracing heritage as a key part of the revitalisation of town centres that distinguishes from other places. We have begun a deeper dive into positively portraying cultural by providing guidance on telling ‘a city’s culinary cultural story’, alongside an extensive account of Stockport’s ‘Foodie Friday Story’.
9. Change the narrative and build the brand: We provide a strong voice nationally and internationally for combining how we ‘make and market’ places. In our extensive guidance on ‘promoting pride in place through progress’ , we recognise the need to capture a holistic view of place identity, that involves working from ‘the inside out’ and helping to influence and communicate new narratives about the ways places are evolving.
10. Manage, monitor and share success: In all our work, a ‘golden thread’ links our identification of issues, co-creation of solutions and monitoring success. This holds good for boosting pride in place where it is important to demonstrate delivery of local priorities, with an added focus on understanding changing sentiments as this post on ‘monitoring pride in place’ in relation to the changing business mix shows.
Next Steps
We’d be delighted to help work out how we might support those local councils and place partners that want to boost pride in place in neighbourhoods, towns and city centres that are importannt to them. One of the most effective next steps, is for us to work through an audit of where places are against these 10 steps for boosting pride in place and agree a way forward that combines local knowledge and priorities with our broad expertise.
For starters
You don’t have to have technical know-how or even a track record to make a start in planning to turn-around the place where you live and boost local pride in place. You will need tenacity, the occasional spark of inspiration, passion, an ability to build local trust and a team of similarly committed but differently talented people to work with. If you’ve brought these qualities together, here at the People & Places Partnership we can share tried and tested recipes to help build a better place. The LGA handbook and associated on-line toolkit for Revitalising Town Centres provides a template that we can help you to use in taking things forward.
Self-help services
In seeking to help boost pride in place, the focus our of work remains on helping communities to work with councils and other partners to help themselves in creating long-term solutions. We do this by focusing on growing the talent and commitment from within. This involves getting local people in gathering facts, testing opinions and identifying issues to tackle. The LGA toolkit on Revitalising Town Centres provides self-assessment Town Centre Checklist to help get started and then gauge future progress.
We have also created a ‘free and fast’ online course on boosting pride in place with our international partners at Placemaking.Education. Take a look, tell us what you think and share the learning.
Our specialities
Our specialities are all about building firm foundations for the long-term revitalisation of communities. Through these specialities we focus on helping you understand the place by gathering evidence; building people in to talented teams; dealing with pressing problems to do with travel into town; promoting product & place including digitally; and creating a long-term action plan for boosting pride in place by improving people’s experiences and preceptions of places that matter to them.
Delivering local solutions
Our work to nurture locally-led solutions has two broad strands that we believe are essential in effectively delivering long-term change. These are nurturing talented teams with a clear forward plan for coordinating and communicating a town-wide response; and devising and delivering an action plan to bring about change on the ground. We help bring these together in a Forward Framework.
Roundtable reviews
Throughout all our work, we see the value of getting people together regularly for a chat; usually over a tea or coffee, though increasingly virtually. We believe that effective community engagement and coordination between partners including effective communication, is key to making progress and changing perceptions. Check-out our postcards from section for examples of how we are achieving this with communities to develop local pride in place.
Recipes for success
If you’d like a free diagnostic chat about our ‘recipes’ for boosting pride in place by developing effective local partnerships and delivering successful town action plans, just drop us a line at services@people-places.net