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a standout resume is vital.

“You need to separate yourself from the pack.”

Job hunters should also reach out to everyone they know—friends, former coworkers, old classmates, consultants, contractors.

spending up to 10 hours a day hunting for a position

The occasional job opening she does spot typically requires five-plus years of experience. “Getting a job is harder and harder,” she says. “There are fewer and fewer jobs.”

The results of this are people having the tendency to linger in a beautiful and comfortable environment, and businesses see the benefits of people staying longer which helps to sustain the local economy

Beautiful and meaningful places and spaces create an intransient value to the locality and a sense of pride to the community.

Place-making provides a way of seeing the world through a more sustainable filter, and provides a platform to make the necessary changes and move towards sustainable lifestyles and behaviours.

culture to one that nourishes life and nurtures communities

It is a return to the local and the re-localisation of our economies and communities. Our task is to build resilient places and communities that can easily adapt to the many challenges and imminent changes.

We all know and gravitate towards such places, and yet we keep building ‘empty’ places with little or no sense of ‘spirit of place’. Some would blame globalisation and consumerism on the demise of local communities

Enlightened developers and councils have utilised the new place-making tools to deliver such environments: Rouse Hill Town Centre in northwest Sydney, Flinders Lane (Degreaves/Centre Way) and Victoria Market in Melbourne epitomize the power of place-making.

Place Capital, which posits that the economic value of a robust, dynamic place is much more than the sum of its parts.

Great places are created through many “investments” in Place Capital–everything from individual actions that together build a welcoming sense of place, all the way up to major physical changes that make a space usable and accessible.

At its core, Place Capital is about re-connecting economy and community.

public space projects

tend to fall into one of four types of development

project-driven processes; top-down, bureaucratic leadership

Project-driven processes generally lead to places that follow a general protocol without any consideration for local needs or desires.

design-led process.

eliance on the singular vision of professional designers and other siloed disciplines can often make for spaces that are lovely as objects, but not terribly functional as public gathering places.

place-sensitive. Here, designers and architects are still leading the process, but there is concerted effort to gather community input and ensure that the final design responds to the community that lives, works, and plays around the space.

Finally, there are spaces that are created through a place-led approach, which relies not on community input, but on a unified focus on place outcomes built on community engagement. The people who participate in a place-led development process feel invested in the resulting public space, and are more likely to serve as stewards.

They are involved meaningfully throughout the process

turn proximity into purpose

concept of Place Capital is ideally-suited to guide the cooperation of so many individual movements that are looking for ways to work together to change the world for the better. Place Capital employs the Placemaking process to help us outline clear economic goals that re-frame the way that people think not only about public space but, by extension, about the public good in general.

surge of interest in Placemaking in the United States over the past few decades.

Partners are critical to the future success and image of a public space improvement project.

The best spaces experiment with short term improvements that can be tested and refined over many years! Elements such as seating, outdoor cafes, public art, striping of crosswalks and pedestrian havens, community gardens

The vision needs to come out of each individual community.

They can be local institutions, museums, schools and others.

encountering obstacles, because no one in either the public or private sectors has the job or responsibility to “create places.”

Starting with small scale community-nurturing improvements can demonstrate the importance of “places” and help to overcome obstacles.

Why we are failing to generate place capital

Along with the homogenizing forces of globalization, the increasingly placeless nature of our built environment tends toward homogeneity and is created with less participation and resources and less creative processes.

Placemaking for these purposes can be defined as the empowerment and engagement of the individuals in a community to participate in, understand and contribute to the evolution of the spaces that define that community. Placemaking however, is not a new profession, discipline or field of study, but a growing movement that is bringing out the best of professional knowledge and skills while supporting the communities in connecting to places and taking ownership over the planning process and the emerging results.

We are more discerningly and deliberately choosing to identify ourselves with places we feel express our identity, or to use places as a way to express our identity. Now, more than ever, we go were we like.

Seeing ourselves as co-creators of these places, through our relationships as participants, or as placemakers, elevates our role in society to builders of civilization.

The efforts people undertake to improve places that matter to them – Placemaking

We are left only to be passive consumers.

With the increasing importance of place comes the prioritization of happiness as a desired outcome and goal of human settlements. Experiencing a comfortable, engaging, sociable place is offering a compelling opportunity for happiness.

seeing a sense of place as an increasingly important -even vital- part of our lives.

But places are not just defining our communities; they are emerging as the leading factor in defining the global economy and human progress.

In light of this inevitable trend, communities need to define themselves as places to attract place building business and business models need be directly responsive to the places and communities they are meant to serve.

other local crowdfunding platforms, such as Lucky Ant

Our focus is really building a local ecosystem for finance

Structurally the platforms all look similar, the mechanics are often very similar, but our focus is really our mission

At its core the local movement is going to get a lot stronger