Editorial

Citation

Parker, C., Roberts, G. and Byrom, J. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Place Management and Development, Vol. 3 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpmd.2010.35503aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Place Management and Development, Volume 3, Issue 1

Welcome to Volume 3 Issue 1 of the Journal of Place Management and Development. The journal is now entering its third year and, from the papers published so far, it is apparent that place management and development is attracting academic interest from a wide pool of researchers, interested in developing theory and understanding that helps makes places better. The interdisciplinary nature of place management and development continues to be well represented in this edition of the journal, with papers covering urban planning/economic development, the built environment/property development, tourism and regional development, and new forms of governance.

When we started the journal, over two years ago, we invited a number of academics and practitioners to join us, from a variety of discipline and professional areas and from many different countries. As we are now going into our third year, we would like to thank our Editorial Board, and all our ad hoc reviewers that have reviewed submissions outside the expertise of our existing editorial board.

Getting a new journal off the ground is never easy, but it is especially challenging when it charts new subject territory. The journal and the subject of place management has benefitted from the support of Emerald insight, our publishers, and we would also like to thank them for making much needed academic and professional links with the international property management industry. Obviously, with the worldwide financial slow-down, investment into many of our urban places has been cut-back. Nevertheless, despite a lack of large-scale investment, it does not mean to say that places need to go into decline. In times of economic hardship individuals need to “do more with less” and there is no reason why the same principle cannot be applied to places. Place management is not always about large-scale regeneration. It covers a multitude of smaller-scale practical actions as well.

E.J. Cilliers, E. Diemont, D.J. Stobbelaar and W. Timmermans’s paper, entitled “Sustainable green urban planning: the Green Credit Tool,” assesses Amersfoort (The Netherlands) Local Municipality’s “Green Credit Tool,” a method which has been developed to quantify the value of green-spaces and to determine how these green-space-values can be replaced or compensated for within urban spatial planning projects. Their findings suggest that the Green Credit Tool creates an integrated approach towards the planning of green-spaces, enhancing the value of green areas and thus ensuring qualitative urban planning and sustainable economic development.

Berndt A. Lundgren’s paper, “Measuring the perceived performance of a residential development,” adopts a more specific place focussed approach, taking a large-scale real-estate development as the subject to investigate whether potential buyers’ beliefs about the built environment in a specific place influences their willingness to buy. A new attitude scale is developed and tested which, as with Cilliers et al.’s paper, presents results which indicate that the research method employed could potentially have a wider impact on how our places are developed in the future.

Helena Maria Baptista Alves, Ana María Campón Cerro, and Ana Vanessa Ferreira Martins present a piece of research that looks at the impact of small events in rural areas. In particular, she develops a methodology to measure the social and economic impacts of a cherry festival in the Beira region of Portugal. During the three-day festival residents and cherry orchard owners open their houses to visitors to sample cherries and other local products. As we sit here writing this editorial, there has been snow on the ground here in Manchester for over a week, so the thought of eating cherries in Portugal is a very appealing one! On a more serious note, however, Helena Maria Baptista Alves, Ana María Campón Cerro, and Ana Vanessa Ferreira Martins’ paper offers a comprehensive review of the different social and economic impact measures that have been used by event organisers, and brings them together to demonstrate that small events not only have the potential to have a disproportionately high-regional economic impact but, are crucial in terms of building community pride and enhancing community image.

David Adams and Michael Hess’ paper, entitled “Operationalising place-based innovation in public administration”, looks at how place-based innovation has become central to meeting the complex demands on contemporary public administration in Australia. The findings of the paper indicate that among the difficulties in introducing new practices is the gap between political authorisation and administrative implementation. The paper uses the emergence of new forms of place-based public administration involved in the (re-)introduction of community-based ideas, practices and instruments into public administration to demonstrate how authorising and operationalising innovation can be addressed in practice.

Finally, Bastian Lange, Ares Kalandides, Inga Wellmann and Bernhard Krusche’s paper, entitled “New urban governance approaches for knowledge-based industries in multiplicities: comparing two cases of large inner-city developments in Graz and Berlin”, analyses two projects taking place at large empty inner-city spaces. The authors take the current difficulty cities like Graz and Berlin are having in attracting highly mobile creative as well as knowledge-based industries as their inspiration, analysing implications that can be derived from the two cases covered on the level of governance efforts seeking to overcome the organisational as well as the “governance paradox.” The paper presents new empirical as well as conceptual insights into how this paradox could be successfully dealt with in order to develop places for the creative/knowledge-based individuals/professionals in other European cities.

All of the papers included in this issue contain research and findings that have a genuine real-world value. Whether it be the development of new methods to aid the creation/preservation of green spaces in the planning process; gaining a greater understanding of what aspects of place/urban design inspire us to purchase new property; the positive effects even small public events can have in local economic/community development; how new community-based ideas, practices and instruments can be implemented into public administration to help foster place innovation; or how creative/knowledge-based professionals/industries can be encouraged to flourish in cities through new urban governance approaches. Each of these concepts can represent a real step forward in the development of our places.

Referring back to the inherent difficulties involved in launching a new journal – particularly in what is a relatively uncharted subject area – the presence, in this issue, of insights from Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Australia, Portugal, and Sweden demonstrates how far the Journal of Place Management and Development has come in a short space of time. We are now attracting papers from all over the world, which we are sure you will agree provide very interesting and informative reading.

The journal team would like to thank all our readers for your support over the past two years; here is to a prosperous and place-positive 2010.

Cathy Parker, Gareth Roberts, John Byrom