Place brand management is the theme of an article in the current issue of Town and Country Planning, the excellent little magazine produced by the Town and Country Planning Association. Its authors, Sonya Hanna and Jennifer Rowley, stress the need to involve stakeholders in the process. This means not just local residents, but also visitors and businesses. They argue that branding is not only an exercise in marketing: rather the experience of the place is central to the process.

The fact that you are reading this blog suggests that you are used to getting information from the internet. In turn, I get a buzz from knowing that there are readers out there in, and maybe even beyond, “Innovation Circle Land”, who take the time to read what I write and, hopefully, get new ideas. Even a decade ago it was hard to imagine just how web 2.0 would grow into the multiplicity of global interactions that connect the planet today.

The Isle of Bute is situated off the west coast of Scotland. It is peripheral to the periphery, and has all the added problems that come with being an island. Unemployment is high, incomes are low, houses are small, people with higher education are few. It suffered as tourism changed. In the middle of the last century, the shipbuilders and steel workers from industrial Clydeside flocked to the island for their annual week’s holiday. Those days of full employment and local vacations are long gone.  However, Bute’s scenery and setting still offer qualities that are not readily available elsewhere and attract some to retire there.

Happy New Year - the Chinese Year of the Dragon! Every Chinese New Year 130 million people in the world’s most populous country head back home to their villages for family celebrations. It is the world’s largest human migration and the story is captured in the film “Last Train Home”. It focuses on one family spanning 3 generations and their annual get-togethers between 2006 and 2009. It combines documentary and drama to give a picture of how the different generations have become fragmented by China’s urban economic growth.

Helensburgh is a town of about 20,000 residents. Located on the Firth of Clyde it attracts day trip visitors as well as serving as a commuter settlement for Glasgow about 35 kms away. An innovative community-based design programme has been undertaken there that has similarities to work that partners in the Trans-in-Form project are doing.

Summer has been late arriving in Chicago this year, but Millennium Park draws crowds all the year round. It’s a public space right in the heart of the city that undoubtedly works. Chicago’s citizens seem to have forgiven the fact that it was millions of dollars over budget and not completed until 2004, after almost seven years of construction.