When communities set out to improve themselves they often turn to one or both of two solutions: start a local pride campaign to build social capital and enlist citizen support; and/or undertake a “rebranding” campaign to change how the rest of the world sees their place.
But both of these approaches are likely to fall short of expectations, for a simple reason. They usually approach the question of how both locals and outsiders see a community based on an attempt to catalog assets and gather lists of “good things,” and they may well end up focused on relatively superficial things such as slogans and logos. Often such efforts fizzle out fairly quickly or fail to develop momentum and broad local support.
For a community the key questions are who are we, what is it that makes this place distinctive and desirable? And the answer to that question is to be found in the collective wisdom of the people who live in the place and love it. It is not a matter of just asking people, but using appropriate methods it is possible to get at what is special about a particular place—its deepest asset, the place itself. Local pride flows naturally from that understanding.
As people discover the real identity of their community they form deeper bonds to the place and with each other, and energy naturally springs up for many different ways to make things better. And creating a “place-brand” around the actual identity of a place is far more powerful than creating an arbitrarily-chosen image and trying to sell it. The benefits are more durable and have a remarkable capacity to leverage improvement.