Place Economy
Understanding place as a strategic asset — shaped by local context, lived experience and long-term responsibility.
East Midland’s economic resilience depends on activating our diverse strengths and getting strategy right. At Roots and Futures, we ask: How can we co-create with local organisations to serve people, nature, and culture in the East Midlands? A prosperous region requires a strong mixed economy with competitive sectors, thriving communities of various scales and sizes and the capability to take advantage of devolving Whitehall powers.
We see a strategic opportunity to enhance the East Midlands' economic momentum by complementing ground-up methodologies with top-down development strategies with the organisations that have chosen to be here. Currently, resources often flow disproportionately to certain areas, leaving many of our industrial towns and rural shires as "stranded assets", as well as traditional suburbia ignored. By putting place as a core principle and reconnecting place to its leadership with the resource to pump prime government Missions, we can unlock the intrinsic assets - human creativity, cultural knowledge, and natural resources - that already exist here in the East Midlands.
Built on Three Core Principles:
Place is the Unit
of Change
Every community holds intrinsic assets — skills, knowledge, relationships and identity — that shape economic potential.
Developing Local Capacity
Sustainable economies are built by strengthening collaboration across business, government and community — supporting local agency over long-term decisions.
Regional
Renewal
Economic success is not about uniform growth, but about enabling places to thrive on their own terms within a global economy.
Photo by Robin Stott, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons
Photo by Brian Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph Britain and Ireland
Photo by Michael Patterson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons
Let’s Work Together
Interested in how place-led thinking could shape your work?