As part of the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Hub work, we are collaborating with partners working on areas covered by the LPIP themes. For the Felt Experiences theme, we are collaborating with the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Place Programme, based at the University of Glasgow. The programme, led by Professor Rebecca Madgin, a member of the LPIP Hub Board, has developed a suite of reports looking at this thematic area.
This report, Advancing People-Centred, Place-Based Approaches, sets out a direction of travel for people-centred, place-based policies, practices and research – it provides insights into what we know and what we have achieved but also shows where we need to get to.
The report is in four connected areas and outlines:
1. How a distinction between place- and space-based is established in theory and is evolving in policy/practice
2. How centring felt experiences can secure a range of socio-economic outcomes for people, place, and economy
3. Three approaches to people-centred, place-based work that can secure socio-economic outcomes
4. Three barriers that need to be overcome in order to achieve people-centred, place-based approaches.
Finally, the report outlines a suggested people-centred, place-based framework to ensure that future policies and practices can be tailored to meets the needs of place, person, and context in ways that secure positive socio-economic outcomes.
The report is a call to work together across the place sector to ensure people-centred, place-based approaches can become embedded in our work. These approaches should not been seen as ‘nice-to-haves’ but rather they should be seen as a central aspect of how we can deliver improved socio-economic outcomes for people and place.
Meet the Authors
Professor Rebecca Madgin
Rebecca re-joined Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow in January 2014 following an earlier period as an Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellow. Her research examines the emotional and economic values of heritage in the context of urban development and management. Her ESRC funded PhD focused on the role of industrial heritage in the process of place making and in particular how decisions concerning the demolition or re-use of historic buildings were made. Central to this was an understanding of how historic places were ascribed meaning and value during the process of urban regeneration from the 1970s to the early 2000s, and involved an in-depth analysis of community attachments to threatened historic spaces, a sense of place, and place marketing.
Dr Michael Howcroft
Michael is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Division of Urban Studies and Social Policy. The four-year Civic Imaginary Partnerships project works closely with local and national policy partners, community organisations and creative practitioners to develop long-term ethnographic understandings of how communities collectively reimagine and reinvent their places. It explores the concept and method of the civic imaginary, its international reach and applications, and its potential as a broker between local authorities and communities. The project builds on earlier projects, especially his PhD (Human Geography at the University of Hull, 2021), which, through the framework of the civic imaginary, explored some of the political and cultural behaviours of Hull.