There is a zeitgeist about "place” at the moment, made more meaningful by our shared experience of COVID and how that seems likely to create irreversible shifts in how we work as well as live. At the same time as we witness a worsening of economic and social inequalities impacting on the political as well as economic landscape, we are also experiencing a deepening of neighbourhood ties and sense of collective responsibility for our welfare. The Government has announced an intent to help places "level up”, which we hope is a renewed imperative to work with communities to unblock the systemic challenges that have held places back for decades. What we know from the body of collective research in the UK and internationally around place-based social change, is that changing the prospects of communities takes time, a special type of leadership and commitment from multiple organisations to follow the same path, in a collaborative way.

We undertook this research because we are practitioners of place-based change and we saw a need to build capacity for this work in the UK. We wanted to create a clearer narrative beyond our own experience around how to make this form of practice deliver impact at scale, so the research has reached out to projects and practitioners more widely in the UK and overseas.