The focus of this website, and of our professional work, is to help us all protect what we love most about the places where we live, work, and play, by doing a better job of planning, policy-making, economic development, and promotion of those places. To do that, we think, requires a different, holistic, experiential, systems-oriented kind of thinking about places. It requires that we add to our technical, quasi-scientific approach to places an approach which uses our intuitive knowledge, draws on our feelings and values—and uses our whole brain. It also requires that we understand more about how complex systems work—using insights that have been developed in the fields of scientific complexity theory and ecology, and which have been used productively in business management, military strategy, and education, but have not been adopted by those who work with places.
As citizen-activists, professionals in planning or economic development, tourism destination managers and marketers, Mayors or other government officials, you can make a real difference in your community—and we can help. To do that will require deeply understanding your place and what makes it distinctive. That comes first, and it can affect many things--local pride campaigns, place-branding initiatives, master plans or major changes in policy, big tourism promotions, or decisions to encourage or head off particular developments. It can put new life in historic preservation efforts, make a better place for arts and culture in our civic lives, and in the end it can make our communities more sustainable.
We have a particular expertise in place-based tourism, which can avert some of the negative consequences of tourism development and even enhance local quality of life.
The navigation line across the top of the page will take you through an overview of our thinking about places, while the links across the bottom of the page will give you a closer look at our take on tourism.