How does the power of ‘place’ influence economic prosperity and social wellbeing, resulting in greater impact from economic development strategies and practice?

This was the priority question explored by 300 economic development professionals, experts and partner organisations at Economic Development Australia’s (EDA) national conference for 2024. This has kicked off a year-long look at how the active ingredients of place-based policies and practice can be applied by skilled economic development professionals to achieve lasting social and economic progress desired by local communities, regions and nations.

Firstly, the power of ‘place’ lies in its broad definition. Place is often defined as a specific geographical location, precinct, town, buildings or area with a natural agglomeration of population and/or characteristics, problems or activities in common. Place can also refer to a position in an organisation, system or competition. Further, ‘place’ can have a more intangible definition, being a sense of belonging, a home, something in its correct position, or being in a community of interest with like-minded fellow travellers.

Each of these aspects of place—and others only more recently defined, like digital or virtual space—provide new angles on both economic development initiatives and their success factors.

Key Insights

Some significant new angles on the power of place emerged from the hard-won knowledge and experience energetically shared by participants at the EDA national economic development conference. While still a work in progress, the key insights connecting place and prosperity include:

• Proximity has changed. Once, physical proximity was key to activating local communities and neighbourhoods, business collaborations, industry clusters and local employment lands and other urban renewal and land use planning schemes. The terminology used was ‘local and regional economic development’. This has changed with the widespread access and mobilization of social media, resulting in online communities of interest, often self-organising and operating globally. While geographically close communities remain significant, there are more choices available for design and operation of economic development projects using smart technology.

• Digital space adds to demand and to new enterprise capabilities. The most productive attribute of working in digital or virtual space and using smart online technologies is that it opens up and aggregates new sources of potential customers. Usually, specialty businesses find it difficult and costly to sell to customers who are spread thinly internationally, e.g. Leyland P76 car enthusiasts, followers of minor sports, practitioners of heritage needlework crafts. Use of digital technologies brings this scattered potential demand into a single market, which is feasible to engage and serve and to experiment with innovative and profitable business models. In addition, radical advances in use of digital technologies can create and deliver transformative capabilities and products and services.

• Join up economic prosperity with social wellbeing, community with capital, and earning a living with quality of life. Typically, economic development functions are clearly identified as separate from community development functions, both operationally and structurally, especially in local government. This may be a lost opportunity. Such a quarantine makes it difficult for these two disciplines to understand and adapt best practice experience from each other.

Blurred boundaries: connecting economic and community development  

The answer is to connect both economic and community development practitioners so that they can realise the added value and enhanced impact of initiatives that intersect both approaches. (For example, high-performing business enterprises strong in technical skills, like science and engineering, rarely succeed without creativity and business acumen. These in turn depend on proficiency in arts, humanities and social science skills, such as marketing, critical thinking, analysis and communication. Similarly, for-purpose social enterprises are adept at deeply understanding consumer needs and tailoring services accordingly. There are lessons here for the for-profit sector in their operation of customer relationship management programs.) Capitalising on these cross-overs and blurred boundaries will enhance the power of place.

Wellbeing Economy

Place-based opportunities also emerge from action on a Wellbeing Economy, measured beyond just financial and economic indicators like GDP to include population health, housing affordability, transport and IT access, rule of law, pollution levels, loneliness, and many more. Significant research and enquiries are underway to ensure Australia performs well on social and sustainability wellbeing indicators. More than metrics alone, economic development professionals need to understand and act on the goals underlying specific wellbeing measures. Notable are publications by the Federal Treasury, research by the Centre for Policy Development and the Cities and Regions Wellbeing Index by SGS Economics and Planning.  EDA Chair, Jason Macfarlane, summarised the substance of this work in his conference wrap-up in one question: what is a prosperous life?

• Empower community-led change. We are witnessing the comeback of community, after decades of the conventional wisdom that we operate in an economy not a society. This is evident in the above developments on the wellbeing economy and the intersection between community and economic development. Further, the importance of community is reinforced in one key insight highlighted by several of the expert presenters in redefining both ‘place’ and ‘impact’ of economic development initiatives— the essential role of fostering community-led change.

Community power and the everyday economy

More than community consultation or engagement, the imperative is to give communities the opportunity to shape and lead the transformation they seek. This applies particularly to those not usually involved in direct decision-making in their community and/or those likely to become casualties of economic disruption. It involves making sense of economic development plans and what success looks like in the community’s eyes. It also means giving agency to the community to take practical action and see results. This involves taking the initiative to both question and listen deeply to the community in all its diversity and contradictions. Therefore, the performance of the everyday economy and what financial journalist, Martin Sandbu, terms ‘the economics of belonging’arerelevant to successful place-based economic development. The everyday economy, referring to the essential work and workers providing the goods and services that sustain our daily lives, is often overlooked. So strategic action in this regard adds to the power of place by unlocking the untapped potential of communities. Community-led change, with its focus on caring and social cohesion, can be an antidote to the rise of popularism, alienation and mistrust of politics and politicians.

Examples of community-led change being put into action in Australia currently are Community Wealth Building and Place-Based Capital initiatives. These aim to empower local people and places to maximise the financial and other resources being channeled back into their communities. These programs seek to foster wealth creation, ownership and investment by local people in local enterprises, infrastructure and problem-solving.

• Community identity, through branding, is a powerful asset. Distinctive community attributes, effectively communicated and authentically branded, are fundamental to the power of place. This is a strong potential success factor for economic development activities in both physical and digital spaces. Skillful application of a unique or well-recognised community identity makes it possible for small communities to reach and serve large global markets or to collaborate in supply chains or joint ventures with much larger partners.

Authentic and eccentric branding

Brand Tasmania was one case example featured at the national economic development conference. As for the previous action on community-led change, the first step was to ask the community and to probe beyond the obvious answers for a simple, compelling and unified expression of brand strategy that is uniquely Tasmanian. Tasmania has pioneered business offerings that are small, special and valuable—high quality wine, new whiskey varieties and the innovative and edgy Museum of Old and New Art. Their branding strategy was chosen to mirror the character of Tasmania, which was described as “hardships, left off the map, but do it well despite the odds”. A statement about culture, it is used to inform product branding, but also to shape the collaborations to help other businesses. Brand Tasmania responds positively to requests for help, but with conditions that offerings use Tasmanian ingredients, focus on quality and if others ask for your help, you give it.

Another illustration is the response to the question if the NSW Northern Rivers region was a person, how would you describe it?  The reply is: colourful, full of life, values-driven, leaning to left-field and keen on creative industries. This off-centre community identity was even more strongly expressed by Austin Texas, USA firstly in its mainstream tagline “how a honkey tonk town became a global tech hub” and then in a slogan reflecting authentic interests and lifestyle and a maverick pride, “Keep Austin Weird”. This slogan aimed at maintaining Austin’s off-beat counterculture community identity given the development of the tech hub and the accusation that Austin was becoming a ‘tech bro’ theme park.

These examples show that the intangible concept of community identity can have a transformative effect on real place-making.

Conclusion

In summary, there is a common thread running through these new insights on place and prosperity interpreted from the EDA conference. It points to the importance of taking a broader focus on what constitutes economic development and pursuing the wider and blended variety of economic development activities available to advance economic prosperity and social wellbeing.

Among the new directions warranting further investigation and real-world testing are:

• Working on place-based programs that incorporate both physical locality and digital space.
• Action at the intersection of economic and community development, and on the mix of social and economic challenges and solutions.
• Experiment with establishing community-led change projects.
• Learn about and pilot community wealth building and place-based capital programs.
• Priority to listening deeply to the community, starting with perspectives on distinctive community identity.

Authored by Narelle Kennedy AM as a commentary on the presentations and discussions at Economic Development Australia’s 2024 national economic  development conference. Narelle Kennedy is the Managing Director of her own business research and consulting company, The Kennedy Company Pty Ltd, and a member of Economic Development Australia.