Global ideas, strategies and case studies on what makes places work — and what makes people stay.
The Government has announced £301m to transform town centre high streets into mixed-use spaces with new homes, health services and community hubs. Place practitioners have known this is the answer for years. The question is whether the funding structure is built to actually deliver it.
Fitchburg, Massachusetts has converted a former middle school into affordable artist housing as part of a deliberate economic recovery strategy. The creative class is being treated as infrastructure, not ornament — and the places getting there first are the ones nobody expected.
New Mexico became the first US state to offer universal free childcare — and the ripple effects on workforce participation and inward relocation are turning heads. This is no longer a welfare argument. It is a place competitiveness argument.
South Korea's urban regeneration programme selects old downtown districts through a public competition, then funds companies to anchor those places. It is performance-managed, explicitly anti-demolition and resident-participatory. The evidence is quietly accumulating that it works.
El Salvador has issued the world's first parametric insurance policy for a surf break. The methodology behind it — Surfonomics — quantifies what a wave is worth to a local economy. If you can insure a wave, what else in the place economy is undervalued and underprotected?
By reclaiming streets from cars and returning them to residents, Copenhagen's superblock experiment has cut pollution, reduced crime and built bonds no developer can manufacture.
Remote Norwegian communities are offering cash incentives, free land and co-working spaces — and it's working. What can UK towns learn from this?
The Guggenheim effect is well-documented. Less told is the story of the community infrastructure that made the transformation stick.
Anne Hidalgo's Paris is betting that walkable neighbourhoods with local services beat commuter culture every time. Early data suggests she's right.
From East London to rural Devon, community land trusts are demonstrating that permanent affordability and genuine community ownership can coexist.
Over 1,400 urban farms now operate across Detroit — turning the city's post-industrial vacancy crisis into a green infrastructure story unlike anywhere else.
Shrewsbury, Harrogate, Frome. The towns benefiting from remote work migration share a common thread: intentional community investment.
Tourists who stay longer, spend more and leave a smaller footprint. Why slow travel is the most valuable market segment most destinations are ignoring.
Singapore's HDB new towns aren't just housing estates — they're carefully engineered communities. The design principles behind them translate surprisingly well to the UK context.