Value in Places and Places in Systems

In a context in which universities and creative practices are used as part of placemaking, this working paper looks at place-based approaches to evaluations which leads it to consider places as systems. Indeed, the key message is that capturing the value of place-based interventions is difficult, not just because of the ‘standard’ methodological issues arising for evaluation, but because places are both parts of systems and are systems themselves and it is not clear how their boundaries can be defined. This -the paper argues - has some interesting implications, including that ‘franchising’ of solutions across different places is not always possible because localities develop in a path-dependent way. Secondly, systems thinking - bringing to the fore the issues of frames, boundaries and stakeholders - makes visible ‘the orders of worth’ in evaluation practice. This means that a number of evaluative criteria co-exist for any given place at any given time and, rather than recording or representing, evaluating is about making choices about which frames, boundaries and stakeholder are documented and which are marginalised. This raises questions about the limits of the outcomes-based and objectives-driven evaluation approaches in relation to places, not just because cause-effect attribution is difficult in complex social environments but also because the value co-creation which underpins place-based projects cannot be ‘bounded’ in the way required by outcomes-based evaluation against fixed objectives. Equally importantly, the question ‘whose values and which stakeholders’ inevitably arises. This calls for supplementing those standard approaches with more open-ended forms of mapping, tracing and narrating. These considerations are presented in the paper against the backdrop of changing conceptions about the role of universities in place-making.