Best paper prize for PhD student

Cardiff Business School PhD student, Laura Reynolds, picked up the Best Academic Paper Prize at the Institute of Place Management (IPM) 4^th International Biennial Conference.

Laura presented the winning paper, Questioning the rhetoric of inclusivity in the co-creation of city brands through Bourdieu's field-capital lens, during one of the conference’s plenary sessions, and shared the Best Academic Paper prize with her PhD supervisor, Dr Nicole Koenig-Lewis, and Dr Heike Doering.

The paper looks at the role and ability of stakeholders to input into the creation of a meaningful identity for urban places.

Drawing on data from Bath and Bristol, the study examines how stakeholders from the visitor economy, business community, and local community seek to contribute to the place making and engagement activities occurring in city centres.

However, the research found that the ability to input in a meaningful way is restricted by a number of barriers, including the availability of money and funding, possession of desired skills and resources, access to networks and organisations, and education.

Input into the city’s identity

The study uses Bourdieu’s meta-theory as a lens to explain the variations in stakeholders, developing a new typology of stakeholders to extend previous work by clustering stakeholders based on their ability to input into the city’s identity.

By moving beyond a preoccupation with stakeholder categories, the research seeks to illuminate the underlying reasons restricting greater inclusion, and offers alternative suggestions for involving people in the places they live, work, and visit.

The IPM conference was held 7-8 September 2017 at Manchester Metropolitan University and addressed the theme of Inclusive Placemaking. The conference was attended by 140 international delegates and speakers from 15 countries comprising academics, practitioners and policy makers.

More than 40 presentations were delivered and two keynote speeches from Ethan Kent, from Project for Public Spaces, and Phil Prentice, from Scotland's Towns Partnership.