Areas of Practice
digital place strategy
We help clients develop holistic strategies that acknowledge how digital technologies and methods change the way places operate across many connected dimensions, instead of looking at just a single area. Such frameworks allow a diversity of stakeholders to assess how digital development (or re-development) is progressing in their locality, what assets there are, where and how existing activities should be supported, where the gaps and opportunities are, and, crucially, where there is the potential to connect agendas together in mutually reinforcing and innovative ways, especially across traditional boundaries.
Overarching all of this must be the safeguarding of the digital and data rights of citizens and visitors.
DIGITAL economic development
Many place strategies put an emphasis on the need to create prosperity, which is usually tied to job creation and retention, the need to attract people with high level skills, ‘inclusive growth’ initiatives, support and development of new economic clusters - particularly in high-value knowledge industries - and the need to introduce technology and innovation into legacy industries. In addition, policy makers need to engage with local innovators and specialist SMEs in order to create positive economic feedback loops between local institutions, research assets and industry. How this happens in practice, and how successfully, is often determined by how general principles are applied in the particular contexts presented by a place and its local ecosystems.
smart cities / smart societies
There are overlapping perspectives at the interface between technology and urbanism, particularly around ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’ cities, with ‘hard’ definitions that emphasise the application of technology to instrumental place-operations, such as creating sensor networks and building city observatories, and ‘softer’ definitions that include uses of technology more broadly than just in city operations and upkeep, such as citizen engagement, transparency, inclusion, public services, etc. The ‘smart societies’ concept places the focus firmly on citizens and their lived experience, and evaluates initiatives from this “freedom-maximising” perspective. We help policy makers and other place-based stakeholders to understand this landscape and navigate it.