Whatif…Place First is not a slogan. It is an economic model.
When the Prime Minister called for “a place-first rather than party-first approach”, IPM Senior Fellow Paul Wright reflected back nearly a decade.
At NewRiver REIT, I was trying to articulate a growing frustration: the governance of our towns is fundamentally fragmented.
Property is separated from health and culture. Health is divided between councils and the NHS. Skills programmes are disconnected from the local economies expected to support them. Public money is judged through one system, private investment through another.
Almost nobody is responsible for pulling it all together over the long term.
Professor Cathy Parker of Manchester Metropolitan University and the Institute of Place Management suggested a name for the framework I was developing: Place First Economics – PFE.
We have since developed it into a practical model for bringing public, private and third-sector interests together around the long-term stewardship of town centres. It starts with one question: What is best for this place? Not every place. This place – because there is no silver bullet.
PFE treats the social, physical and economic systems of a place as one connected investment ecosystem:
Better place > healthier and more confident people > greater participation > stronger local economy > improved investment performance > greater capacity to reinvest.
This is not anti-growth or anti-profit. Quite the opposite. At Whatif… our DNA is ethical capitalism. Stronger communities create stronger economies. Stronger economies support more valuable property. More valuable property creates investment capacity—and, if some of that value is retained locally, it can fund the next stage of improvement. The decline of traditional retail does not make town centres redundant. It makes their next purpose more important.
Surplus retail space is latent civic infrastructure. It can accommodate health and prevention, education and skills, childcare, culture, enterprise, leisure, housing, public services and places where people can simply meet. The suppressed retail values in many towns have created the opportunity of a lifetime to put things back in the right place. But this requires stewardship – not a succession of short-term interventions.
Places do not operate in funding cycles and they are never finished. PFE creates Investment Partnerships capable of aligning assets, investment and expertise around a long-term plan, capturing the value created and reinvesting part of it back into the place. The public sector does not surrender sovereignty. The private sector does not surrender commercial discipline. Communities do not become passive consultees.
Each contributes something the others cannot provide alone.
Understand the place. Align the interests. Invest for the long term. Capture the value created. Reinvest in the place. Repeat.
Place First Economics in action.
