Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Place Management and Development, Volume 6, Issue 2
Welcome to volume 6 issue 2 of the Journal of Place Management and Development. Once again, our papers represent an international and interdisciplinary perspective on place management.
Our first paper by Suzanne Leland and Dustin Read entitled “Representative bureaucracy, public-private partnerships, and urban development” takes the concept of representative bureaucracy and looks at how encouraging diversity in urban planning may help ensure a diversity of interests are taken into account in public-private urban development partnerships. Whilst the paper found some evidence to support the impact of diversity (in terms of gender, age and education, etc.) on attitudes, political ideology was found to have the most significant impact on planners’ attitudes, suggesting perspectives about the appropriate role of government may have a profound effect on the formation and implementation of public-private partnerships.
António Azevedo, Maria João Custódio and Fernando Perna look at the importance of ensuring that places take into account their residents when implementing place marketing strategies. Their paper, entitled “‘Are you happy here?’: The relationship between quality of life and place attachment”, aims to develop a new resident-focused insight into the measurement of place attachment, self-esteem, self-efficacy and perceived happiness, in order to provide public policy makers with performance indicators for place marketing strategies. The authors conducted research in the form of a survey of 641 residents of Portimão, the second most populated city in the Algarve, south of Portugal, in order to assess the quality of life attributes and place attachment measures. The findings revealed that the city’s quality of life attributes (comprising six dimensions) influence place attachment which is significantly correlated with self-efficacy, perceived happiness and active citizenship behaviours. The paper discusses a new framework– that will be of value to policy makers and public decision makers– concerning the importance of systematic place marketing and monitoring.
In another paper from the Iberian Peninsula; Lucía Sáez, Iñaki Periáñez and Lucía Mediano’s “Building brand value in major Spanish cities: an analysis through municipal websites”, analyses the development of city branding through the market orientation of the capital cities of Spain’s regional autonomous communities – of which 18 are studied. The analysis employs a set of variables representing the different aspects which shape market orientation, as well as variables related to the development and implementation of city branding strategies. The authors perform a content analysis in order to draw out pertinent information from the respective cities’ official websites to discover the existence of four distinct groups of cities. These cities can be differentiated in terms of the importance that they allocate to the different areas of market orientation and their development of city branding strategies. The results of the paper are extremely interesting and will be of relevance to anyone with an interest in place marketing and branding. The authors intend to roll out the research to cities across Europe in order to further refine results, and we look forward with interest to seeing these future findings.
Our fourth paper, by Elizelle Cilliers and Wim Timmermans, “Approaching value added planning in the green environment”, is the final part of a three-part series of papers that have been published in this journal, focussing on more participatory, flexible and relevant approaches to planning. Focussing on an approach to quantify and qualify the value of green space the paper shows how this facilitates decision makers ability to prioritise and understand the present and future value of this space. Attaching value to space reduces the conflicts between pro-development and pro-environment approaches as there is a common unit of comparison. The proposed value added planning approach in the paper addresses the shortcomings of subjectivity in existing approaches and sets a framework in which different spaces can be evaluated.
Our “Place in Practice” paper is by Eziyi Ibem, Obioha Uwakonye and Egidario Aduwo is entitled “An appraisal of urban renewal in Nigeria: a case study of the Nigerian Army Shopping Arena, Oshodi-Lagos”. This study evaluated a model of public-private development (build-operate and transfer) in the creation of a sustainable shopping centre, finding that, on the whole, the project had delivered a favourable outcome to businesses and the public, except in the perception of green design and construction. The study concludes that this approach to financing urban renewal projects should be part of the urban development framework and embraced by cities in the developing countries. This finding is, of course, set against the context of past development strategies in Lagos, and demonstrates the continuing importance of understanding place management in context.
