Correcting past injustices is critical to  a more positive and equitable future for all our citizens – and to lay the foundations for a more resilient future for our places. To address these challenges, we reached out to our panel of Experts to hear their top tips to ensure your strategies are driving equitable development...

As we recover from COVID, there will be lessons from this that continue to affect and shape longer-term strategies going forwards. But what does this mean for the KPIs that we use to measure success? We reached out to Kelly Brough, President & CEO at Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, to understand how they’re evolving KPIs to match new success-criteria and what this means for the future of economic development.

Restarting business events is critical to recovery for many places; they bring visitor spend to the city, facilitate trade deals, and attract media attention. However, we can’t simply hit re-start on the sector and expect it to resume in exactly the same manner. How can you evolve your value proposition to meet new behaviours and expectations?

Many economic development advertising campaigns follow the same predictable formula, serving up a laundry list of forgettable facts, features, and financial incentives. Find out how Mount Pearl broke away from the formula by creating an attention grabbing rap video to tell the city’s story in an irresistibly funny, but honest way.

Promoting a place is a hugely complex task, and collaborating with the other local players creates much firmer foundation for your place brand strategy. But what do you need to do to ensure that you’re collaborating effectively?

Over the years, we've been privileged to see some of the best and brightest of place branding and place marketing campaigns from around the world. As we gear up for the 2021 City Nation Place Awards, we wanted to revisit this list to share some of our personal favourites from the Awards archive and to update it with the campaigns from 2020 that we just can’t stop thinking about!

What learnings from the past year will continue to shape and evolve place branding and marketing strategies as we plan for the future? We reached out to our Expert partners to understand what they considered essential lessons for destination marketing and economic development teams around the world.

Whether this new visitor economy will be “better” – more resilient, more equitable and creating more value for communities - will depend on how we recover. Here are some of the common challenges facing destinations in recovery, and some of the opportunities it creates to build back better.

The smartest response isn’t to just recreate the same processes as we were used to pre-pandemic, but to understand how we can refine and improve our everyday ‘normal’. The pandemic has exposed our weaknesses and now we need to ensure that we address these in order to be more resilient against future shocks.

To many Londoners, Brent Cross is best known for its shopping centre. Now, though, there is an ambitious regeneration project underway. Nick Searl, Partner at Argent Related and the joint lead on the project, joined us for a conversation to share how the ambitious development will put the spotlight on sport, play, and community wellbeing.