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This paper aims to reflect upon a recent study trip to Berlin to offer some conclusions about similarities and differences in approaches to place management.

The authors start with a short overview of the visits made to City West (a shopping district), Bikini Berlin (a shopping centre), Visit Berlin (a destination management organisation), Leopoldplatz (a public square), Brunnenstrasse and Bayerischer Platz Quartier (both neighbourhoods), Markthalle IX (a covered market) and Prinzessinnengarten (an urban garden) before identifying some key lessons learnt.

The eight visits made as part of the study trip offered a brief but diverse insight into how different areas and functions of the city were managed, maintained, developed and promoted. Key lessons learnt and identified in the paper are as follows. Place management, as a practice, consists of people with passion working in partnership within the context of a place “patch”. Place management is practiced somewhere, and that somewhere has its own political, legal, economic, technological and social environment. People learn more about places in places. Place management is more akin to gardening than architecture.

The conclusions drawn in this paper are based, predominantly, upon the observations of the study trip facilitators, along with some comments and feedback from the delegates.

Place managers can and should learn from each other. Other places and people can be a source of inspiration – not necessarily providing a readily transferable solution (as the legal or political environments may not be conducive to carbon-copy interventions) – but offering alternative perspectives and approaches which can then be contextualised and adapted locally.

Enlarging the pool of information and evidence from which practitioners can draw from when solving place problems can ultimately lead to places that are more successful, liveable and equitable.

Many place managers are volunteers or may not have access to a professional development budget. The authors hope that this paper can help to share the reflections of one study tour with a much wider audience.

The purpose of this paper is to present the background to the development of the World Towns’ Framework, developed in June 2016 at the inaugural World Towns Leadership Summit in Scotland. The paper also provides an academic underpinning to the four pillars of the agreement; a unique sense of identity and place, economy, leadership and citizenship and environment. It ends with a call to action for practitioners, policymakers and organisations providing support to people in places who want to contribute to the development of the Framework and adopt it.

The paper is divided into four sections. The first section gives the background to the development of the World Towns Framework. The second section publishes the World Towns Framework in its entirety. The third section builds an evidence-base for the components or pillars of the World Towns Framework, based upon work undertaken by the think tanks and academic partners involved in its development. The final section sets out a call for action – explaining how the Framework can be further developed and utilised.

The paper contains three main contributions. It articulates a new narrative for towns, neighbourhoods and city districts in responding to contemporary urban challenges; it shapes a new urban agenda for these urban places and it asserts the need for new alliances and approaches essential for a strong competitive economy, which is more inclusive of towns and smaller places, combined with a fairer, more equal society.

The evidence base for the research is limited to the work that has been carried out by the academic institutions and think tanks that supported the development of the World Towns’ Framework.

The practical implication of the World Towns Framework are a shared understanding of how towns and smaller places can engage in management, development and marketing practices that will lead to a stronger economy and fairer society.

The focus upon place uniqueness and identity, a more equitable economy, a greener and cleaner environment and stronger place leadership and citizenship can lead to better, fairer and more liveable places.

This is the first attempt to develop a World Towns Framework to shape urban change outside of cities and metropoles.

This paper details work undertaken to identify and assess the skills needs of small, especially food‐related, independent retailers in the United Kingdom. The paper, part of a European Social Fund (ESF) assisted project: “Towards a healthy high street (II)”, considers the specific skills areas deemed to be lacking at present in the sector. From this, higher‐level learning materials will be developed which relate to the skills areas identified. The prime source of evidence for skills needs identification draws upon research undertaken as part of two previous ESF projects. The key aim of this paper is to combine and articulate the findings from this earlier ESF research with material published by practitioners, academics and government pertaining to the provision of training in this vital sector of the economy. Three key areas upon which to focus training in the sector are explored: “Building and sustaining competitive advantage”, “E‐commerce” and “Retail operations”.

The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability.

Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action.

Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples.

Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce engaged scholarship as a method for addressing the “wicked problem” of High Street change through successful collaboration and co-production of knowledge between academics, practitioners, citizens and other place stakeholders.

The first part of this paper introduces engaged scholarship as a participatory form of research and situates it within the context of the High Street. The second part presents the case of High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020) via Van de Ven’s diamond model of engaged scholarship as a guide.

Engaged scholarship’s focus on knowledge production and on collaboration between the research team and the community enabled us to improve the understanding of factors affecting High Streets amongst a diverse group of stakeholders and focus on what works for the towns. The ongoing impact of HSUK2020 on the project towns’ action plans and on this current research is testament to how engaged scholarship research can drive the agendas for both academics and communities.

The paper presents engaged scholarship as an alternative collaborative method of conducting research on the High Street, one that is more in line with the current trends in retailing and works as a motivating factor for community engagement.