Knowledge platform: Transforming places
Our research for the Institute of Place Management and others is helping create sustainable and thriving spaces, built around the needs of people who use them.
Summary
About our research
Manchester Met has a long tradition of place-related research, focusing on marketing and branding, management processes and the developing role of the UK high street.
Since the 1980s our researchers have produced over 300 academic articles, making us one of the leading place-making research groups.
Researchers in our Transforming Places knowledge platform mainly work on projects within the Institute of Place Management (IPM), the professional body formed by Manchester Met and the Association of Town Centre Management.
They complete research contracts for private, public and third sector clients, drawing together multi-disciplinary expertise and collaborating with external partners to understand what makes better places.
Thanks to their breadth of expertise and close links with practitioners, they can tackle persistent economic and social problems, not least helping high street retailers adapt to the boom in online sales.
Our research has influenced national policy on retail competition, planning, town and city centres, and more.
IPM researchers ran the High Street Britain 2015 inquiry on behalf of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Small Shops Group. And in 2019 the IPM was awarded £8.6 million to lead the government’s High Streets Task Force.
Our research themes
Our research feeds into the four clusters under which the IPM groups its approaches and outputs:
-
places — studying the range, scale and type of locations to discover similarities, differences and factors which determine their vitality and viability
-
co-creating places — examining the role different groups play in shaping an area and how those involved can influence the presentation of a place
-
experiencing places — investigating how visitors move through an area and experience it with all their senses, and how these experiences can be managed
-
time and place — looking at the impact of history and heritage, including often overlooked places, and the rhythms of people and prospects that inevitably occur
Selected projects
Publications
-
Key publications
Institute of Place Management (2020) Coronavirus (COVID-19): Helping the High Street recover from the pandemic.
Cheetham, F, McEachern, MG and Warnaby, G (2018) A kaleidoscopic view of the territorialized consumption of place. Marketing Theory, 18(4), 473-492.
Hanna, S, Rowley, J and Keegan, B (2020). Place and Destination Branding: A Review and Conceptual Mapping of the Domain. European Management Review. The Journal of the European Academy of Management
Henshaw, V, Medway, D, Warnaby, G and Perkins, C (2016) Marketing the ‘city of smells’. Marketing Theory, 16(2), 153-170.
Kavaratzis, M and Kalandides, A (2015). Rethinking the place brand: the interactive formation of place brands and the role of participatory place branding. Environment and Planning A, 47(6), 1368-1382.
Lyon, A, Hunter-Jones, P and Warnaby, G (2017) Are we any closer to sustainable development? Listening to active stakeholder discourses of tourism development in the Waterberg Biosphere Reserve, South Africa. Tourism Management, 61, 234-247
Medway, D and Warnaby, G (2014) What’s in a Name? Place Branding and Toponymic Commodification, Environment and Planning A 46(1), 153-167
Medway, D, Parker, C, and Roper, S (2016) Litter, gender and brand: The anticipation of incivilities and perceptions of crime prevalence. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, 135-144.
Ntounis, N and Kanellopoulou, E (2017) Normalising jurisdictional heterotopias through place branding: The cases of Christiania and Metelkova. Environment and Planning A, 49(10), 2223-2240.
Palmer, M, Medway, D and Warnaby, G (2017) Theorizing temporary spatial clusters and institutional boundary-work in industrial marketing. Industrial Marketing Management, 61, 104-113.
Parker, C, Ntounis, N, Millington, S, Quin, S and Castillo-Villar, FR (2017) Improving the vitality and viability of the UK High Street by 2020: Identifying priorities and a framework for action. Journal of Place Management and Development, 10(4), 310-348
Kuznetsov, A and Kuznetsova, O (2014) Building Professional Discourse in Emerging Markets: Language, Context and the Challenge of Sensemaking. Journal of International Business Studies, 45 (5): 583-599
Partners
In partnership with
High Streets Task Force
Institute of Place Management
Contacts
Contact us
You can contact individual members of the team through their staff profiles.
If you have questions about the Transforming Places knowledge platform and its research, you can contact Dr Steve Millington.
To commission research, please contact the IPM.